Now that we’re within a couple of days of the election and a huge chunk of the country has already voted anyway, some of the mainstream media outlets who blacked out the Hunter Biden laptop story apparently feel it’s safe to come out of the closet and mention it. Among these is NBC News. Mind you, they’re still not going cover the actual story. They’re going to “explain” why they refused to cover the story. But even when offering that tiny admission that the story exists, they don’t get to their reasoning for refusing to cover it without first making outlandish claims about how there is no basis for these stories to begin with.

But the Wall Street Journal and Fox News — among the only news organizations that have been given access to key documents — found that the emails and other records don’t make that case. Leaving aside the many questions about their provenance, the materials offered no evidence that Joe Biden played any role in his son’s dealings in China, let alone profited from them, both news organizations concluded.

This is utter horse hockey. The emails regarding Hunter’s China deals may not have copied Joe Biden or included a response from him, but they certainly discussed his involvement. There may not have been a smoking gun with Uncle Joe’s fingerprints on it, but the discussions were between a Biden family member and his business associates, including the CEO of his company, who has since gone on record in multiple interviews. That entire paragraph is malarkey, as Joe himself would say.

Next, they attempt to shoot down the Ukraine/Burisma storyline.

As to Ukraine, a single email published by the New York Post suggests Joe Biden may have had a meeting with a representative of a Ukrainian company that employed his son. Trump and his allies alleged that means Joe Biden has lied when he said he never discussed his son’s business roles. The Biden campaign denies the meeting happened.

That’s another blatant falsehood in the final sentence. When asked originally about the report, the Biden campaign didn’t say the meeting never happened. They said they checked and there was no such meeting on the schedule. And let’s be honest… if you were going to take a meeting like that, would you put it on your official schedule? Much better to simply make sure it was an “accidental” encounter where they just happened to run into each other. Such incidents don’t have to be on the schedule since they weren’t “technically scheduled.”

Finally, after throwing out that massive smokescreen, NBC gets down to explaining why they didn’t run any stories about it. Some mean person apparently didn’t give them access to the documents.

Most mainstream news organizations, including NBC News, have not been granted access to the documents. NBC News asked by email, text, phone call and certified mail, and was ultimately denied.

And, although no evidence has emerged that the documents are the product of Russian disinformation, as some experts initially suggested, many questions remain about how the materials got into the hands of Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who has met with Russian agents in his effort to dig dirt on the Bidens.

I don’t know why any of the relevant material wasn’t provided to some outlets when it was to others, but that’s still not the point here. NBC already admitted in this same article that both the Wall Street Journal and Fox News had obtained access to them and reported on them. You’re telling me that the Wall Street Journal isn’t credible enough to take as a starting point on the story? Further, splashing Rudy Giuliani’s name around is only another way to attempt to undermine the credibility of the underlying material.

A news organization that was willing to run with every single story that threw mud at Donald Trump, even if the only source was someone only known as “anonymous,” (and a story that recently fell apart) somehow didn’t find a story based on material from a confirmed, extant laptop harddrive to be enough backdrop to start digging? And even if they didn’t manage to view the original emails themselves, did it ever cross the minds of the powers that be at NBC to perhaps go talk to Tony Bobulinski? You know… the guy who said he had three different meetings with Joe Biden personally to discuss the China deals? Tony’s been out there giving interviews to anyone who asks. Did they even drop him a note? He’s not hard to find.

Honestly, NBC News would have been better off saying nothing and continuing with the wall of silence than publishing this pile of claptrap. They’ve run with many, many stories critical of conservatives based on far less meat than has been found at the heart of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. And if they’d had any interest in actually covering the news in an honest fashion they could have cracked this particular nut without much effort. But that might have been damaging to Joe Biden and/or helpful to Donald Trump. And we couldn’t have that now, could we? Perish the thought.