As mounting evidence surfaces regarding President Joe Biden’s apparent role in his son’s shady international business dealings, mainstream media figures struggle to downplay or ignore the facts.
That trend was on full display during a recent podcast appearance by Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, who has covered the Hunter Biden saga in a number of columns over the past few years.
Host Noam Dworman confronted his guest about text messages and other indicators that the president has profited off of the corruption of his immediate family.
He asked: “What do you take from his text to his adult daughter, Hunter texted her, ‘I had to give 50% of my income to pop’?”
Bump did his best to downplay the significance of the message, insisting that he has “no idea what that means” and dismissing it as “circumstantial evidence.”
Dworman pushed for a more direct answer, but his questioning only resulted in more obfuscation.
“Like I just said, I don’t know and I don’t know what to make of it, so I have nothing to say about it,” Bump reiterated. “What do you want me to say?”
To his credit, the host would not let his guest off the hook and used the Hunter Biden text to contradict Bump’s talking points.
“Yeah, but you say there’s no evidence, there’s no evidence, but then there is a text message where [Hunter Biden] says, ‘I give pop 50% of my money’ — that’s evidence,” Dworman said.
A clearly frustrated Bump reluctantly admitted that “it’s evidence” as he abruptly left the interview.
“I appreciate you having me on,” he said, adding: “I feel like you want me to leave, like, just walk out in the middle of this.”
His final words were unintelligible and prompted Dworman to criticize both Bump and his employer.
“Is this the standard, really?” the host asked. “This is the way that The Washington Post handles people that disagree with them?”
Bump previously faced criticism for defending the Post’s reluctance to cover evidence found on a laptop computer abandoned by Hunter Biden. Last year, he claimed that the outlet did not report on the bombshell story because it did not have direct access to the computer.
This is also a major reason why other outlets didn’t match the NY Post’s original laptop story: they weren’t given access to the laptop data! https://t.co/EwAbda5ouE
— Philip Bump (@pbump) December 5, 2022
Incredulous responses poured in, including from Townhall columnist Brad Slager, who wrote: “Phil, if you did not report it because you had no access then why did you push the Russian disinformation angle on the story, when there was ZERO evidence of that? You had no access to proof that does not exist.”
