Thread by @davidfrum

I got overnight via email a query from @briansflood at Fox News, the principal part of which I reproduce below. I answered by email too. I'll append that reply in the next threaded tweet:

@briansflood My reply:

Hunter Biden's dubious business activities have been reported for years. Here for example is @TheAtlantic in September 2019, year *before* @nypost theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

That emails attributed to Hunter Biden were circulating was also known well before the NYPost story in October. Here's TIME magazine time.com/5902557/hunter…

What @NYPost added to the work earlier done by others was a new *origin* story for the materials that circulated in Ukraine in 2019. When other media organizations attempted to corroborate that story, hijinx ensued. thedailybeast.com/man-who-report… @thedailybeast account

I doubt that anybody at any responsible media organization holds any particular brief for Hunter Biden. I sure don't. If he did wrong, he should face the consequences. But Hunter Biden's legal situation was not what was at issue with the NY Post report.

What was at issue in the NYPost story were these two questions: "Is this material about Hunter Biden being promoted by Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani genuine? If yes, where does this material come from?"

In November 2019, Russian spy agencies hacked servers at Burisma, the Ukrainian company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. The NYTimes reported in January 2020: nytimes.com/2020/01/13/us/…

When the Trump White House shopped purported Hunter Biden materials to reputable news organizations like the Wall Street Journal, reporters went to work verifying authenticity and sourcing. That process unnerved the Trump White House and its allies. nytimes.com/2020/10/25/bus…

The Trump White House and its allies wanted their purported Hunter Biden materials to be published with no uncomfortable questions asked about its authenticity and its origins. For that, they turned to the New York Post. nytimes.com/2020/10/25/bus…

Even after the NYPost published, the Trump team still refused other media organizations the information they needed to verify the NYPost story. This behavior - plus the selective leaking to pro-Trump outlets that didn't bother with verification - naturally sowed suspicion.

Now there's a new report on DoJ investigation of Hunter Biden's activities. That report is of course something every media organization will want to dig deeper into. politico.com/news/2020/12/0…

But those latest stories, properly sourced, do not confer retrospective rehabilitation on what the NY Post was doing in October - or on the Trump White House officials doing Trump campaign work at taxpayer expense.

Last point. It very often happens that presidents must deal with family members who try to trade on their relationship to power: James Roosevelt, Donald Nixon, Billy Carter, Hugh Rodham - it's a recurring problem.

I've suggested from time to time that one way to deal with that problem is to require publication of tax returns by any member of the First or Second family who accepts Secret Service protection.

But even that answer - tax returns for Secret Service - only carries us so far. In the end, there's probably no once-and-for-all legal remedy to the problem of relatives trading on power. The ultimate guarantor of ethical standards must be vigilant media and a concerned public.

At the same time, it's essential to keep a sense of proportion. For the past four years, the US government has been led by the most corrupt president in history. Trump's children and their spouses eagerly grabbed their pieces of the action too, again on a scale never before seen.

It may turn out that Hunter Biden is our next generation Jimmy Roosevelt or Donald Nixon. It's right to expose that, and to demand that the Biden administration distance from him.

But when the Trump family tries to excuse its massive depredations by invoking Hunter Biden's activities - we have left earth's orbit.

When Donald Trump Jr. asks, "Can you imagine if I did ... " the right answer is : Junior, you did that -and worse- just before breakfast today

So there's my answer to the @briansflood query - and to the pro-Trump trolls who have been frolicking in my Twitter timeline over the past 24 hours. I'll put it here, where they live - aware that the truth may not matter much to them, but confident it matters to everybody else.