As evidence of the president’s lies about his family’s influence-peddling business mounted, “fact-checkers” and the media began struggling to calibrate their defenses to correspond with the fresh information. While at first there had been “no evidence” that Biden knew anything — to say differently, was to peddle misinformation — suddenly there was “no evidence” that Biden had personally benefited from Hunter’s scheming (as if enriching your entire family wasn’t personal).

And this is when the partisan defenses of Joe began to see a dramatic decline in quality. One of my favorites was The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, who was not alone, arguing: “We know how important family is to the president. So, do you hang up on your son?”

It was probably familial love that induced James Biden to write brother Joe a personal check for $200,000, that — by complete happenstance – was the exact amount James had received from the failed Americore family venture on that very same day. Talk about crazy coincidences.

It was around this time, as well, that White House language began subtly shifting from blanket denials to finely tuned Clintonesque turns of phrase about Joe never being “in business with his son.”

[Biden has always lied and demagogued his way through Washington DC. That’s not new. What is only a little more novel is the extent to which the mainstream media keeps circling wagons around the Bidens as though they were the Kennedys rather than the Menendezes. (And they circled the wagons around the Kennedys too, for that matter.) — Ed]