Wednesday Ed wrote about the shocking revelation (that's sarcasm, folks) about Hunter Biden's influence-peddling business while his father was Vice President. As Ed pointed out, the whole story very much feels like a revelation timed to the fact that Joe Biden is no longer a candidate for President. Put another way, had he not stepped back and handed the race to VP Harris, would this article or the information underlying it have appeared in public? I think we all know the answer to that one.

In any case, it's a bit jarring to have gone from nearly four years of Hunter denialism to suddenly seeing opinion pieces in the NY Times like this one calling for Hunter Biden to be prosecuted for FARA violations. It's titled "The Brazen Evasions of Hunter Biden." Here's the opening paragraph.

With this month’s revelations that Hunter Biden directly contacted American officials for the benefit of foreign clients in Ukraine and allegedly Romania, and with Mr. Biden facing a new trial next month stemming from charges of tax evasion for the millions he received from foreign sources, the time has come to finally charge him as an unregistered foreign agent.

Given that the media spent years downplaying or ignoring this story, there has to be a paragraph like this one absolving them for any past failures.

Mr. Biden’s highly questionable foreign dealings have for years appeared more smoke than fire; there was previously no evidence that he illicitly lobbied any American officials. Compared to figures such as the former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, who was caught out as an illegal foreign lobbyist (among plenty of other crimes), Mr. Biden’s alleged foreign lobbying misdeeds appeared to fall short of crossing the line into criminality. They may have put a lie to President Biden’s claimed concerns about foreign influence campaigns, but they were never worthy of formal charges. With the new details, though, that has changed, giving prosecutors the opening to pursue the president’s son as one of the most prominent foreign lobbyists the United States has ever seen.

Personally, I believe the release of this was a coincidence just as much as I believe Hunter Biden was innocent of influence peddling, which is to say not at all. It's much more likely that people at State knew about these records and buried them until they didn't matter anymore. But as with everything else connected to this story, the media seems willing to go along with whatever they are being told. That Biden's entire team have been lying about this for years still hasn't really led to much skepticism about the latest explanation.

Even today, it's too much for the author of the piece to just admit Republicans were right about Hunter. That can never be.

the Justice Department, which oversees cases related to foreign lobbying, should finally, formally accuse Mr. Biden of skirting these lobbying laws. They shouldn’t do so simply to string him up on one more charge, or because Republicans have been caterwauling about Mr. Biden’s foreign shenanigans for years. Instead, they should do it because, in addition to the new evidence of Mr. Biden’s work on behalf of Burisma and the alleged nature of his work for the Romanian businessman Gabriel Popoviciu, such charges will send a signal to family members and hangers-on of future American administrations that the practice of hiring children, siblings and cousins of those at the highest rungs of American power — all on behalf of foreign regimes and foreign interests — cannot, and will not, stand.

Foreign shenanigans? This is such a twisted, partisan way to frame this. "Foreign shenanigans" is exactly the kind of elite media dismissal we've been getting about the Hunter Biden story for nearly four years. But the whole point of this article is that these weren't shenanigans, they were crimes. Indeed, they were crimes all along, we just couldn't prove it because the State Dept. was sitting on the evidence.

What the author and many, many others need to do is rewind this story and admit that Hunter Biden has been an influence peddling criminal, tax cheat, drug addict and liar since before Joe Biden became president. Everyone who said he was some or all of those things was correct about him. Everyone who said he wasn't some or all of those things was wrong or just plain lying. Yes, it matters that we have the evidence, but the evidence has been there all along, it has just been hidden from us, intentionally by the looks of it.