The anchors on PBS and NPR share the robotic talking point that there's "no evidence" that Joe or Hunter Biden "did anything wrong" in Ukraine. On Wednesday night, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo patiently answered fairly pointed questions from PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff, but he couldn't abide the Biden talking point, telling Woodruff she sounded like the Democratic National Committee.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, just finally, you know that there's been no proof any misdoing on the part of Vice President Biden.
MIKE POMPEO: You all keep repeating that line, as if you're working for the DNC.
WOODRUFF: I'm definitely not working for the DNC. I'm an independent journalist.
But they're — the European Union, the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, the International Monetary Fund, and other international organizations felt that that prosecutor was corrupt and thought he should be removed. There's no evidence that what Vice President Biden was doing was corrupt in some way.
Woodruff's an "independent journalist"...who happened to donate to the Clinton Foundation. That's actual money, in addition to the usual servile Clinton Global Initiative interviews.
In a much softer and sympathetic interview with Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, Woodruff and Hillary shared the Biden spin:
WOODRUFF: Former Vice President Joe Biden, clearly a part of this, his name came up during that call. Whether he did or didn't do anything wrong — and there's no proof that he did — President Trump keeps bringing that up — is there an optical problem for Joe Biden, because his son was in a position to be making a lot of money from a company in — that was in a foreign country?
CLINTON: You know, Judy, this is the goal of the Trump strategy. It is to raise questions. There is no evidence that either one of them did anything wrong. Could there be a question of judgment about his son? Well, that's fair game.
But there is absolutely no evidence, and there will not be any evidence, that Joe Biden did anything wrong. Enough with these wild, unfounded conspiracy theories, using the help of foreign governments to interfere in our elections and to undermine people who have been in the public eye for a long time. And I hope that the American public rejects this, as they should.
Some of us recall that when Matt Lauer interviewed Hillary Clinton at the outbreak of the Lewinsky scandal in 1998, she used similar language about whether it would turn out that Bill Clinton had an affair with Lewinsky and covered it up. She said "If all that were proven true, that would be a very serious offense. That is not going to be proven true."
An anchor at NPR's All Things Considered also had the DNC echo on Tuesday night in an interview with Julia Ioffe of GQ magazine:
MARY LOUISE KELLY: I want to point out that some of the names we've referenced have not been convicted of doing anything wrong. No evidence has emerged against Joe Biden or his son Hunter Biden of any wrongdoing, for example. But I'll close by asking if you were counseling an American contemplating doing business in Ukraine, should they proceed with caution?
