Ted Cruz Smears Joe Biden By Suggesting a Non-Denial of Hunter Biden Laptop Story is Evidence of Corruption

During a Wednesday morning appearance on Fox News, Senator Ted Cruz lent his credibility to unverified accusations of corruption surrounding Hunter Biden and his father, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, contributing to what can only be called a smear campaign.

The Hunter Biden story, peddled to the New York Post by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, is highly controversial and complex. It involves a curiously sourced laptop alleged to belong to Hunter, containing emails that are being used to suggest corruption on the part of former Vice President Joe Biden. The alleged laptop also contains — as Giuliani has breathlessly exclaimed — salacious images of Hunter Biden, a recovering drug addict, using drugs.

Most have ignored the shameful side of Giuliani’s crusade and have instead focused on the allegations of corruption. The problem with those claims, however, is that it does not appear that any of the alleged emails reveal anything illegal or corrupt.

The Ukraine side of Hunter Biden’s dealings is well-worn territory, having been scrutinized during the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. That scandal was borne out of Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine into investigating Biden, his political rival.

The side that is facing renewed scrutiny involves Hunter Biden’s business in China.

One email in the file dump that was confirmed by Fox News appears to show Hunter Biden negotiating equity in a Chinese energy startup. That email is alleged to show 10% ownership allocated to former Vice President Biden. The Wall Street Journal editorial board focused on that email in a call for Biden to answer questions.

But the email is dated 2017, when Joe Biden was out of office and a private citizen. Tax returns filed by the former Vice President reveal no such benefit suggested by this email or any other deal.

The lack of provable evidence hasn’t kept President Trump and his media supporters from insisting that Joe Biden is somehow the boss of a crime syndicate, an accusation that the currently known facts do not support, but also, based on recent polling numbers, has not been effective.

The most reliable attack launched by Biden’s critics is that he has not yet denied the accusations. This “non-denial means your guilty” gambit was in evidence during Cruz’s appearance.

“One of the most striking things is what Joe Biden isn’t saying,” Cruz noted. “Joe Biden has not denied that this is, in fact, his son, Hunter Biden’s laptop. He has not denied that these emails are real. Joe Biden has not denied that he personally met with the Ukrainian oligarch he had sworn up and done he never met with. Joe Biden has not denied to communist China offered him millions of dollars to do business with them.”

While Biden has opted to criticize those who dare to ask him about the Hunter Biden story, it’s worth noting that the former vice president has dismissed these accusations twice in recent days: once over the weekend to a CBS News reporter and again Tuesday to a local news interviewer.

So why isn’t Biden more forcefully denying the questions? One answer could be that the allegation of corruption is remarkably broad, and denying the entirety of the story when some emails are accurate opens him and his campaign up to an unneeded distraction when he is up roughly 10 points in national polls.

The other big reason is: Why would he want to give this story any oxygen? MSNBC host Chris Hayes recently reminded his Twitter followers of a passage in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in which Lyndon B. Johnson pushes his people to accuse a political opponent of being a “pigfucker.” When told by his surrogates that they can’t because the accusation is untrue, LBJ says: “I just want to see the sonofabitch deny it…”

The safest thing to say about the Hunter Biden laptop story is that far fewer facts surrounding it remain unconfirmed than confirmed. The news division at Fox News passed on the story, and the New York Post reporter who wrote it apparently refused to use his byline. Giuliani has been identified by both U.S. Treasury and Fox News as an unreliable source of disinformation, and even he admitted that there is a 50/50 chance that his pal Andrii Derkach could be a Russian agent.

After spending minutes suggesting Biden is corrupt, Cruz conceded that much of what has been discussed has not yet been verified.

“If the emails aren’t true—which the Biden campaign has not alleged they’re fake—let someone put out the evidence. We want to know if there is fake,” he said. It is nearly impossible to prove a negative, or that something isn’t real.

“This whole issue is not about Hunter Biden,” he continued “This whole inquiry is about Joe Biden who wants to be president of the United States and about whether Joe Biden was personally corrupt.”

“The China emails are offering to pay over a million dollars to the big guy, to Joe Biden himself, cash in his bank account,” Cruz concluded.

Again, there is no evidence in Biden’s tax returns that he received such largesse, and the email was sent when Biden was a private citizen. The alleged smoking gun of Cruz’s insinuation that Biden abused his power is from a time when Biden was no longer in power.

Fox News anchor Sandra Smith did NOT ask Cruz, it should be noted, about a previously unreported Chinese bank account held by the Trump Organization and the nearly $200,000 in taxes paid to China by a private company held by the sitting U.S. president.

Watch above via Fox News.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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