Go figure. It's amazing what some actual reporting -- and a withdrawal from a presidential election -- can shake loose, no?

Just four short years ago, we were all assured by the Protection Racket Media that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, and that allegations of influence-peddling by the Bidens were just political dirty tricks, right? Right? Wrong. The New York Times' Ken Vogel reports that Hunter's efforts to sell influence within the administration were well known during Joe Biden's term as Vice President. It's even about Burisma, the company that we were told paid Hunter a lot of money for his energy-industry expertise.

Oh, and the records of it got "withheld" by the Biden administration for "years," too:

Hunter Biden sought assistance from the U.S. government for a potentially lucrative energy project in Italy while his father was vice president, according to newly released records and interviews.

The records, which the Biden administration had withheld for years, indicate that Hunter Biden wrote at least one letter to the U.S. ambassador to Italy in 2016 seeking assistance for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where he was a board member.

Well, we did have records in October 2020. Hunter Biden kept records of these dealings on his laptop, which he abandoned in a repair shop. When the New York Post reported on the contents of the laptop, including a number of emails that made clear he leveraged his fathers office to sell influence at Burisma and elsewhere, the media ignored it -- even though one of Hunter's partners (Tony Bobulinski) publicly authenticated the messages when asked. 

Nearly four years later, the NYT gets around to the truth. And if you're questioning the timing, you have good company, because Vogel appears to be somewhat curious about it as well:

The department’s release of documents to The New York Times came shortly after President Biden dropped out of the presidential race, and as his son prepares to stand trial next month on charges of evading taxes on millions of dollars in income from Burisma and other foreign businesses.

Go figure again! It's as if the cover-up extended as long as Joe Biden had electoral interests to protect. Now that Biden has pulled out of the race, there's no need to keep covering up for Biden Inc. We'll get back to timing in a moment, which I'mm sure that's just a coincidence. Right? Er ... 

[Are you tired of media gaslighting? Join us in the fight. Become a HotAir VIP member today and use promo code FAKENEWS to receive a 50% discount on your membership.]

This is still curious as well, though:

Hunter Biden has not been charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, which requires people to disclose when they lobby the U.S. government on behalf of foreign interests.

In a court filing last week, in what was perceived as a pressure move, prosecutors indicated that they did not intend to add a FARA charge, but noted that they had evidence that Mr. Biden had reached out to the State Department on behalf of a different foreign client, a real estate magnate facing corruption charges in Romania. Mr. Biden did not register under FARA as a lobbyist for the Romanian developer or Burisma.

His outreach to the U.S. Embassy in Rome on behalf of Burisma, which has not been previously reported, echoes other episodes for which he has been criticized for implicitly leveraging his father’s political clout to try to advance his foreign business.

Why isn't Hunter getting prosecuted for FARA violations? The Department of Justice got very enthusiastic about pursuing such cases in 2017-2019, as we all can recall now. This is precisely the kind of corrupt activity that FARA is designed to prevent, and that the DoJ is supposed to pursue. Could it be that prosecuting these cases could reveal more corruption in Biden Inc ... perhaps leading to the White House?

We'll probably never see a smoking gun, but it's clear that these Biden Inc schemes only work if Joe Biden is actively engaged in them. That's why the Biden family used almost two dozen LLCs to filter income and payments from their various enterprises, none of which actually produced an independent service or product. 

Back to the timing, Vogel tries to cast a little cold water on the connection between the release of these materials and the withdrawal of Joe Biden from the race:

The department’s productions are overseen by a growing team of career public servants, not political appointees. All of that makes it unlikely that the department could have timed the release of potentially damaging records to President Biden’s decision to drop out of the race, since that news was closely held until the last minute.

Still, the records are likely to fuel suspicion among Republicans, who had spent years spotlighting the younger Mr. Biden’s foreign business as a blotch on his father’s political career.

That's a valid observation. However, one has to wonder if it worked the other direction. Did word get to Joe Biden that the State Department was ready to release this material between July 17 and 21? Could that have been the leverage that shifted Biden from 'only the Lord Almighty can convince me to quit' to 'all hail Kamala Harris'? Because that sequence has never been adequately explained, or really explained at all. 

Besides, the timing of this matters less than the cover-up. The State Department kept these records from being produced either through FOIA demands dating back three years or to the House committee investigating the Biden influence-peddling racket. Rather than worry about Republican pouncing, why not focus on the reasons that the records were buried in the first place?

Scott Johnson at Power Line expresses his amusement at the NYT's scoop:

Vogel fails to mention the the work of 51 former intelligence officials to protect the exposure of the Biden family business and to denigrate the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 election. Rather, in the quoted paragraph Hunter Biden’s laptop makes a cameo appearance in Vogel’s story. The New York Post’s Miranda Devine could tell him all abut it.

The more apt headline for Vogel’s story in the Times would be Now it can be told! I would like to say that Miranda Devine apparently could not be reached by Vogel for comment. On X, Devine drily observes of Vogel’s story “[t]his might all come as a surprise to @nytimes readers but @nypost readers have known the score for four years.”

So did we all, despite the efforts of the 51 corruptocrats and the Protection Racket Media's gaslighting on "Russian disinformation." Vogel did good work at pushing for the actual records for the last three years, but we might have had them a lot sooner had the NYT and the rest of the American media industry didn't take part in the cover-up themselves.