One of the common criticisms of political coverage in The New York Times is that it often reads like a gossip rag. The newspaper’s current star political reporter, Peter Baker, leans into that charge with yet another “some say but we’re not saying who” piece recycling Republican talking points about who else but Hunter Biden.
"Hunter Biden Isn’t Hiding. Even Some Democrats Are Uncomfortable," according to the headline. But the headline offers about as much evidence that “some Democrats are uncomfortable” as the entire article does. Baker’s basic premise here is that it is worthy of comment and even a possible topic of scandal that President Joe Biden has not shunned his son in the wake of Hunter’s deal to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax charges.
Of course, if the president had shunned his oldest surviving child, that too would have been the subject of frowning analysis, the occasion to spread Republican rumors that maybe something worse was coming.
Here’s the offense worthy of around 1,500 words of Times real estate: Hunter attended last week’s state dinner at the White House (which was “the buzz of the evening”), as he attended at least one previous state dinner. He went to Camp David for the weekend with his father, as he has done in the past, and “it did not go unnoticed.”
According to Baker, “some Democrats, including current and former Biden administration officials, privately saw it as an unnecessary poke-the-bear gesture.” That’s probably even true! But Baker doesn’t actually offer evidence for it. Here’s the quote immediately following that characterization:
“He knew exactly what he was doing, and he was willing to sustain the appearance issues to send a message to his son that he loves him,” said Norman Eisen, who was the ethics czar in President Barack Obama’s White House when Mr. Biden was vice president.
Had he been advising Mr. Biden, Mr. Eisen said, he would have warned him about “the flak they were going to take” but added that it would be a matter of optics, rather than rules. “That’s probably more of a question for an etiquette czar than an ethics czar,” he said. “Certainly, there’s no violation of any ethics rule as long as they didn’t talk about the case.”
If that’s the best Baker’s got on the record to sustain the claim that some Democrats were upset about it, he’s got nothing. An ethics expert saying there’s nothing unethical about the president having his troubled son attend an event is not a condemnation of the decision, and Eisen is clear that the president “knew exactly what he was doing” and made the decision to put family above optics. I guess that’s why the word “privately” appears in the “some Democrats” sentence. No one was willing to give Baker even an anonymous quote.
But maybe Baker has something else. He’s not a great writer, so maybe the decision to put that Eisen quote there was just a mistake, and later on he’s got the goods. Hmmm …
While Democrats scorn the conspiratorial fixation of the hard right on Hunter’s troubles, some of the president’s allies privately complain that, however understandably, he has a blind eye when it comes to his son. They lament that he did not step in more assertively to stop the younger man from trading on the family name in business dealings.
Again with the “privately.” Again with no direct quotes from anyone at all. Baker does have quotes from two more Democrats. Former top Obama adviser David Axelrod said, “That may cause him problems, but it also reinforces a truth about a guy who has suffered great loss in his life and loves his kids.” Former George W. Bush ethics lawyer and subsequent Democratic congressional candidate Richard Painter sounded a similar note. “These are the political calls that are made by the president,” according to Painter. “He wants to protect his political position running for re-election. He also wants to be a good father. That was his decision. You’re going to get heat. But I understand why he made the decision.”
What else does Baker have? He has some mind-reading about how Attorney General Merrick Garland may have felt to find himself in attendance at the same event as Hunter Biden. He has a couple of Republican House members tweeting about Hunter and Garland being at the same event, one of them falsely claiming that the two men were seated at the same table when in fact no reporter saw them anywhere near each other. He has a list of people Hunter did speak to at the state dinner.
Baker acknowledges that “no matter what the [Biden] family does, Hunter will be a target for the next 16 months”—without acknowledging that he’s dutifully playing his role in making that happen—and notes briefly that the U.S. attorney who investigated and ultimately made a deal with the younger Biden was a Trump appointee who was kept in place to do his worst. He puts a glancing reference to Hunter’s immediate predecessors into the mouths of Democrats:
Still, even Democrats who would have preferred that Mr. Biden had not made such a public display of his son in the immediate aftermath of the plea deal bristle at criticism from Republicans who have shown little interest in nepotism involving Mr. Trump, who put his daughter and son-in-law on the White House staff and whose children have profited off his name for years.
As a Democrat, albeit not the kind who gets New York Times reporters to talk about my feelings, let me say that I don’t just bristle at Republicans who have shown little interest in the Trump family’s corruption, I personally bristle at seeing the same reporter who helped Jared Kushner distance himself from his father-in-law now laundering Republican attacks on the Bidens.
Peter Baker would be an ongoing embarrassment to a New York Times that cared about serious political coverage rather than cloaking Republican attacks in gossipy “analysis.” And if the Times couldn’t get Democrats on the record to say they were uncomfortable about the president refusing to shun his son, the newspaper shouldn’t have run with a headline claiming that was the case.