The Associated Press stealthily edited an article on Sunday that defended Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, from attacks leveled against them from President Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr.
“You know what the difference between the Bidens and us are?” Trump Jr. said last week on Fox News. “We were international business people before politics and we gave up doing all new deals going forward. We didn’t become, magically, international business people because of our political position. We put that all aside. For years –”
The Associated Press highlighted other criticisms that Trump Jr. has launched against Biden and his son before writing:
Trump Jr. has pushed back, suggesting that his criticism of Hunter Biden was not for having a famous father, but rather for trading access to his father’s office to enrich himself. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden.
A short time later, the Associated Press edited the report, without adding an update or correction on the article, writing [emphasis added]:
Trump Jr. has pushed back, suggesting that his criticism of Hunter Biden was not for having a famous father, but rather for trading access to his father’s office to enrich himself. Neither Biden has been charged with wrongdoing.
Biden’s presidential campaign has been on a downward trend over the past couple of months as questions about his fitness for office have increased and as Trump has rapidly escalated attacks on him over allegations of corruption surrounding his involvement with a Ukrainian gas company that employed his son, Hunter.
In 2018, “with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin,” The Hill reported. “The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member.”
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours,” Biden recalled telling Poroshenko. “I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’”
“Well, son of a bitch, he got fired,” Biden continued.
Hunter Biden admitted during an interview last week that he has benefited from his father being vice president.
“If your last name wasn’t Biden, do you think you would’ve been asked to be on the board of Burisma?” Hunter Biden was asked during an interview with ABC News.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Probably not,” he said. “I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden.”
“It is impossible for me to be on any boards without saying that I’m the son of the vice president of the United States — lots of things would not happen in my life if my name wasn’t Biden,” Hunter Biden added.