In a two page letter to NY Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet, Biden Campaign Comms Director Kate Bedingfield slammed the paper for amplifying Don the Con’s phony controversy against Joe Biden Op-Ed by running an Op-ed written by "discredited right-wing polemicist" Peter Schweizer, who pushed the now debunked Uranium One “scandal” against Hillary Clinton in the Times in 2015 and later published the Clinton Cash smear-job book.
She also took them to task for Ken Vogel’s story in May propping up drumpf’s lies about Biden
“In a Wednesday evening letter addressed to Dean Baquet, the Biden campaign excoriated The New York Times for its recent coverage of Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, and Ukraine. The letter was written by deputy campaign manager and comms director Kate Bedingfield. She expressed extreme displeasure with how The Times has covered the debunked notion Biden abused his office to benefit his son….
...In Bedingfield's words, "What was especially troubling about the Times's active participation in this smear campaign is that prior to its reporting on the subject by Ken Vogel, this conspiracy had been relegated to the likes of Breitbart, Russian propaganda, and another conspiracy theorist, regular Hannity guest John Solomon."
The letter came after The Times on Wednesday published an op-ed from Peter Schweizer, who the Biden campaign referred to as a "discredited right-wing polemicist." Schweizer, an author, has been one of the top people pushing the claim that Biden abused his office. Previously, Schweizer pushed the debunked Hillary Clinton / Uranium One scandal, which was given life in a now-infamous 2015 story in The Times.
In Wednesday's op-ed Schweizer, whose representative did not immediately reply to a request for comment, conceded Hunter Biden's business dealings were legal, but suggested they shouldn't have been. The Biden campaign said in its letter that publishing the op-ed shows "how little" The Times "has internalized the sobering lessons of 2016."
"Despite voluminous work done by the independent press and fact-checkers -- including some by The Times -- to refute the heinous conspiracy theory that Donald Trump attempted to bully Ukraine into propping-up for him, the paper ran an op-ed by none other than Peter Schweizer, making more malicious claims about the Biden family," Bedingfield wrote. "This leaves us with a critical question: are you truly blind to what you got wrong in 2016, or are you deliberately continuing policies that distort reality for the sake of controversy and the clicks that accompany it?"
You can read the full letter here.
Perhaps what is most disturbing about Schweizer’s Op-Ed is the suggestion that while Hunter Biden’s action were not illegal but “they should have been.”
This puts me in mind of drumpf’s actions in the State Dept., retroactively classifying e-mails sent by State Dept. staffers under HRC many years ago so they can gin up another phony controversy about her private server.
Um, guys, we do not prosecute or smear people for actions taken that are not crimes at the time they were undertaken.
We have enough to do trying to keep up with the myriad acts of honest to God lawbreaking being committed by the Law-Breaker-In-Chief every damned day.