Fox Nation: Who Is Hunter Biden? Part 3 - Episode 1
Unpacking more of the crazy nonsense your Fox-loving uncle mutters about Hunter Biden.
This article is part of a series.
“Fox Nation: Who is Hunter Biden Part 1 episodes 1-2” can be found here.
“Fox Nation: Who is Hunter Biden Part 1 episodes 3-5” can be found here.
“Fox Nation: Who is Hunter Biden Part 2 episodes 1-5,” can be found here.
I assumed the third installment of this series would be similar to the first two. In many Part Three is the same as Parts One and Two as the production value is terrible, and the so called experts on Hunter Biden are all right-wing politicians, pundits or propagandists. Judge Jeanine Pirro continues to narrate the whole mess.
Part three is a bit different than its predecessors in that it opens a whole new trove of absolute nonsense - The Twitter Files.
The Twitter Files was touted as a huge revelation into the inner workings at Twitter that was supposed to prove the social media platform was really part of a federal government censorship campaign.
Instead, The Twitter Files was a bunch of hack journalists and a few opinion writers who tried to make fairly innocuous inner-office correspondence into some sort of scandal of the century.
The Twitter Files are not what your right-wing Fox loving friends claim they are.
Normally an investigative journalist is in an adversarial role towards the company they’re researching. In most cases a reporter finds a source within a company who acts as a whistleblower. Sometimes it’s a former employee or someone with knowledge and proof of malfeasance.
In the case of the Twitter Files, Elon Musk, the CEO and owner of Twitter, handpicked likeminded journalists who were given cherry-picked emails and Slack conversations designed to support his outlandish theories.
The whole mess is a lot to unpack so instead of cramming all three episodes into one article I’m going to focus on the first episode of “Who is Hunter Biden? Part 3”
Episode 1 - Shut Down - Aired 1/30/23
The filmmakers took a while to get to the point as the first half the episode is largely a rehashing of information anyone who watched the first two installments of this series would already know.
Fox News Experts
Miranda Devine - NY Post - Columnist and writer. The NY Post is owned by the same parent company that owns Fox News. She is also the author of “Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide,” Devine is originally from Australia and has always approached stories with a strong conservative bias.
She’s been criticized for having anti-LGBTQ, anti-environmental and racist views. The Guardian accused her of promoting the white genocide conspiracy theory.
Devine was sued for defamation after she claimed, in a series of tweets, that Quaden Bayles, an Indigenous boy with achondroplasia dwarfism, was actually an adult actor pretending to be an abused child. In the video Bayles is crying after being bullied at school. Devine alleged the video was faked as some type of scam. Quaden’s mother, Yarraka sued Devine and was ultimately awarded close to $200,000 in a settlement. Devine apologized publicly to the family in a Tweet on her personal account.
Josh Boshwell - Dailymail - A British journalist based in Los Angeles. He’s a frequent guest on Fox News.
Kellyanne Conway - Fox News contributor, formerly Senior Counselor to President Trump. Conway is a political consultant and pollster. She was the first woman to run a successful presidential campaign.
She’s probably best known for the use of the phrase “alternative facts,” to describe completely fabricated numbers for the audience at Trump’s inauguration ceremony. She also spoke about the “Bowling Green Massacre,” which is an event involving Islamic terrorism that pulled completely from her imagination.
Members of Congress from both parties called for an investigation into ethics violations after Conway publicly endorsed Ivanka Trump’s clothing and jewelry line, even jokingly calling it a commercial for the brand. In June 2019, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel recommended that Conway be fired for "unprecedented" multiple violations of the Hatch Act of 1939.
Since 2022 she’s been a Fox News contributor and often co-hosts “Outnumbered,” as well as “The Five.”
Bryon York - Washington Examiner - York is a highly partisan journalist who has worked for a number of conservative publications. He’s best known for his book about George W. Bush, The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President—and Why They'll Try Even Harder Next Time.
John Paul Mac Isaac - Owner of The MacShop the computer repair shop where Hunter Biden allegedly dropped off his laptop for repair and never returned to retrieve it. Mac Isaac ended up giving the laptop to the FBI and then a copy of its contents to Robert Costello, Rudy Giuliani’s personal lawyer.
Mac Isaac is legally blind due to albinism. He is known for wearing a green balmoral cap,
K. Gus Dimitrelos - former Secret Service agent and cyber forensics expert. Certified in US Federal Court as a Digital Evidence Forensic Expert, Dimitrelos has assisted the FBI, ATF, DEA, ICE and the U.S. Secret Service with digital investigations, conducting computer / cellular forensics and reconstructing historical cellular data. He is probably the most qualified person I’ve seen on anything on Fox News regarding Hunter Biden.
Jerry Dunleavy - Washington Examiner - Justice Department reporter. Before working for the Washington Examiner, Dunleavy worked for Judicial Watch a right-wing conservative activism group that targets Democrats. Judicial Watch has made a number of false claims involving voter fraud and other conspiracy theories. The organization has also been linked to the Oath Keepers, one of the militia groups whose leaders were found guilty of seditious conspiracy for their role on the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
Dunleavy was also a volunteer and state coordinator for Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign. He has a BA in Psychology, Political Science and Security and Intelligence.
Rep. James Comer (R-KY) - Chair of the House Oversight Committee. Comer has stopped investigations into former President Donald J. Trump and his family while aggressively investigating the Biden family.
When classified documents were found at one of President Biden’s homes, Comer demanded a visitor log for the residence. When classified documents were found at Mar-a-Lago during an FBI search, Comer had no interest in seeking visitor logs to the publicly accessible club.
In March 2023, Comer confirmed that he had ended a House investigation into Trump's financial dealings. Trump's former accounting company, Mazars USA, had been turning over documents as part of a court-supervised settlement. The investigation was to see how Trump may have profited from his role as president.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), also a member of the Oversight Committee, accused Comer of working with Trump’s lawyers to kill the investigation. Comer said he "didn’t even know who or what Mazars was" and that he was instead investigating "money the Bidens received from China.
Shut Down - The Introduction
Dressed in an all-white suit, Judge Jeanine Pirro stands before a giant screen of an image of President Joe Biden in his signature aviator sunglass with the title of the show to the left of his face. In the reflection of one of the lenses is a smiling photo of his son Hunter.
“If you watch the first two installments of this series, you know much of the sordid story, the crack, the booze, the prostitutes, the homemade porn, the sexual relationships with in-laws, and the shady business deals. But new revelations keep coming. We begin with what some believe may be the lowest thing. Hunter has ever done. And that's saying something,” said Pirro.
Pirro is referring to Hunter’s four-year-old child, Navy Joan Roberts.
The Little Girl the Biden Family Won’t Claim
The fact that Hunter Biden had a child out of wedlock is not new information. He wrote about his child and the paternity battle in his memoir. It’s also been widely reported on and was included in “Who is Hunter Biden? Part 1 and Part 2.”
The only new development is that at the time this series was made, Hunter Biden went to court to try to stop Lunden Roberts, the mother of his daughter Navy, from using the Biden surname.
Hunter Biden has said that he doesn’t want his daughter to face the scrutiny and media attention that plagues him and the rest of his family.
The filmmakers never bring up the obvious fact that Navy could legally change her name once she becomes an adult. A person can change their name to just about anything they want.
President Joe Biden is also criticized harshly for not acknowledging Hunter’s daughter as a member of the Biden family.
In order to get the maximum emotional impact, the filmmakers fill the screen with images of the small child, her face obscured, in idyllic scenes with her mother.
It’s unfortunate that the Biden family hasn’t welcomed young Navy as one of their own but it’s also difficult to what’s going on with both families. Joe and Jill Biden might be hesitant to push a relationship with Navy and her mother due to the fragility of Hunter’s sobriety or emotional state.
Recovering addicts relapse often. It’s extremely difficult to assume anything about a situation like this, especially given Hunter Biden’s extremely self-destructive history.
One detail that the filmmakers left out is that Lunden Roberts hired Clint Lancaster as her attorney. Lancaster worked for the Trump campaign in a failed attempt to challenge the election results in Wisconsin.
More Recycled Material
Just as in the two other installments of this series a lot of information is repeated.
The filmmakers go back to Joe Biden’s second attempt at a presidential run and rehash how Barack Obama picked him as his running mate.
Biden considered running for president in 2016 but decided against it since he was still mourning the then recent death of his son Beau.
February, 2019 - Hunter Biden sent his father an angry text message about an
op-ed article in The NY Times by Maureen Dowd.
The laptop - the filmmakers fill the screen with a mosaic of images of homemade porn from the hard drive. If a viewer has watched Part 1 and Part 2 of this series they would have seen all of this before.
More images of partial emails are shown on the screen. The viewer can’t tell what’s going on as they flash by fairly quickly. Even when I stopped the images to take a closer look they were cropped in such a way that there was no way I glean any context.
In this instance the filmmakers highlighted the word “influence” as if it was proof of some grand illegal scheme. The partial correspondence doesn’t show much of anything. Who sent the email? What are they talking about? Who was the audience for the email? When was it sent? Is it a memo or an email? Was it sent to multiple people? Without further context it’s largely meaningless.
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