NYT ‘Sugarcoats’ on Hunter Biden as New Secret Service Gun FOIA Comes Up Empty

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “The Gray Lady’s Hunter whitewash: How the New York Times sugarcoated the Bidens’ dodgy business deals, shared bank accounts and whistleblowers in its 5,300-word ‘investigation’ into the troubled First Son,” a Friday Daily Mail headline reads. “We examine what the ‘paper of record’ got wrong, the shady dealings it minimized and things it missed completely.”

The Times “missing” anything is giving it the benefit of a doubt it hardly deserves after decades of subversion. Most notably exemplified by its promulgation of Walter Duranty, “Stalin’s apologist,” who did his own “sugarcoating” of Soviet-engineered famine in Ukraine and Great Purge show trials, the propaganda giant has been a consistent omitter of inconvenient truths, a cheerleader for communism, and a huge demander of citizen disarmament.

That makes the apologia on guns proffered by The Times in its Hunter Biden puff piece all the more hypocritical, especially when considering the implications.

“[Biden’s] exposure to the tax and gun charges traces back to that October afternoon and to his intensifying problems with addiction and his loss of relationships with three of the people closest to him: a longtime colleague, his wife, and his brother,” The Times sympathetically relates. “Hunter later told friends that he believed he was sober that day, though his behavior remained erratic. He recounted going into the gun store on a whim and buying the .38 because he thought spending time at a shooting range would help him avoid a relapse.”

In one fell swoop, The Times has reversed its position not just on “background checks,” but if you think about it, on “red flag laws,” too. It’s evidently OK, if you’re the Democrat president’s son, to commit a felony and lie on the federal form because most of the time nobody gets prosecuted for it. And when you’re distraught to the point that those closest to you feel compelled to throw your gun away because you might kill yourself, nothing says “therapy” like buying a gun and going to the range!

You have to wonder what excuses The Times would strain to come up with if it was discovered Hunter owned “assault weapons.”

“He is sober now and no longer entangled in foreign business deals,” we are assured. “He is a visible presence in his father’s life — his oldest daughter was married at the White House in November, and he attended a state dinner last month.”

“Sober” implies that someone who “believed he was sober” the day he bought the gun is through the woods, even though the current official understanding says addictions can be treated but not cured. And funny they don’t mention his youngest daughter—the one he denied was his, the one he has reportedly never seen, and even now is legally opposing her use of the Biden name.

But everything is OK now. Anyone who says further investigations are needed is just a Republican trying to score partisan points.

And speaking of investigations, due to my own legal case, the United States Attorney has provided attorney Stephen Stamboulieh with a copy of the Secret Service’s response to a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act request concerning its involvement in investigating the Hunter Biden gun incident.  Regular readers will recall the department recently admitted to having “located over 100 records totaling over 400 pages that could be responsive.”

Did that mean they perjured themselves when they signed an affidavit saying they had no such records in order to get me to drop my complaint?

No. Those records, embedded below, are merely reproductions of news reports and internal correspondences repeated ad nauseam regarding those reports. There are no new admissions or leads. Does that mean there’s no more to this aspect of the story?

Maybe, if you’re The New York Times, and are bent on either ignoring it or misrepresenting the facts. And while it doesn’t look like any independent journalist is going to be able to make much headway without a credible whistleblower coming forward, the fact remains reports by Politico, as well as Hunter Biden’s laptop entries, place the Secret Service at the scene of the gun investigation.

The question that then becomes paramount is: Who were those guys?

Are the reports wrong about Secret Service being on-scene? Did someone make it up? Did someone misunderstand? Was the day he wrote it down one of those days Hunter Biden wasn’t sober? Were they Secret Service personnel working “off the books,” meaning not under the direction of their managers, leaving no internal trail of authorizations to follow? Were there operatives with some other agency posing as Secret Service agents?

At this point, everything is speculation and that’s by mandate.

As long as ATF is allowed by a supportive judge to continue denying there was even an investigation by citing Biden’s “privacy interests” as the priority, we’ll never know unless House Republicans make good on their promise to leave no stone unturned.

About David Codrea:

David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.