The president of the United States denies that he ever had anything to do with his son’s efforts to sell access to him. The denials crumble, one after one, bringing the story ever closer to home.

Multiple members of the president’s family receive millions from shady foreign interests through shell entities. Multiple figures in the story have been convicted of crimes — including official bribery conducted through family businesses of foreign leaders.

The influence-peddling saga covers America’s number one enemy (China) and the country the president is now backing with tens of billions of taxpayer dollars (Ukraine) — the very place where his predecessor got impeached for digging into what he’d been doing there.

The son’s sweetheart plea deal with prosecutors who ultimately answer to his father collapses in open court. The prosecutors admit that there’s no precedent for the deal they cut, and it only falls apart after the judge catches wind of parts of the deal they tried to hide from her view.

Law enforcement whistleblowers testify that they were thwarted by Washington from following the investigation of the son as far as it would lead.

Sounds like quite a story, don’t you think? And that’s without mentioning the sex, the drugs, the missing gun, the tax evasion, the diamond ring, the spy chiefs, and the official plot to stop the presses before an election.

Once upon a time, a generation of political reporters raised on Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing Woodward and Bernstein would have had no higher aspiration than to sink their teeth into a story like this.

They would not have let go until they had a “-gate,” some scalps, a Pulitzer, a book deal, and maybe their own deal with Hollywood.

That’s not the press corps we have anymore. They’re on a team, and that team is the defense for Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and the rest of the Biden clan that is neck-deep in dirty foreign money.

George Orwell once wrote about how propaganda works: a “mass” of “words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.” 

USA Today may deserve the whitewashing prize for tweeting that “Hunter Biden’s foibles provide ammunition for Republicans who want to inflict harm on Joe Biden ahead of 2024 presidential campaign.”

More specific media efforts at spin have been — as the Nixon White House would say — rendered inoperative.

Back in 2020, CNN said that this paper’s reports on Hunter’s laptop “overlap with Russia’s known disinformation efforts against Biden,” and the New York Times openly doubted the credibility of reports about the laptop.

Those outlets have long since had to admit that the laptop is genuine, and are reduced to excusing the evidence they once cast as fraudulent.

Consider Washington Post “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler and his account of a 2015 dinner at Café Milano in Washington.

This newspaper reported (from Hunter’s laptop) that Hunter had arranged the dinner between Joe (then in charge of Obama Administration Ukraine policy) and Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive with Ukrainian gas company Burisma — the same company that gave Hunter a lucrative board seat.

In 2020 and 2021, Kessler reported denials from a Biden campaign spokesman and other Biden staffers after “a comprehensive review.” He even mocked a New York Post tweet criticizing his reporting.

After Hunter associate Devon Archer talked to federal investigators, Kessler had to “update” his report to admit that there were two Café Milano dinners with Hunter’s foreign business associates, and that Archer testified that Pozharskyi was at one of them.

Just this week, Kessler finally gave “Four Pinocchios” to Biden’s claim during a 2020 debate that his son made no money from China. Lightning speed on that one.

Defenses of Joe Biden’s contacts with the people who paid Hunter for access have now morphed into “it was just hello” or “they never talked business.”

CNN’s headline? “Devon Archer says Joe Biden discussed ‘nothing’ important with Hunter Biden business associates, transcript shows.”

We now learn that Joe Biden “had coffee” with Jonathan Li, the incoming CEO of a Chinese state-backed investment fund in which Hunter held a stake. Archer also noted that Hunter put Joe Biden on the phone at least two dozen times with Hunter’s business associates.

Archer says they just talked about “the weather.” The White House, which once said that Biden never talked with Hunter’s associates, now retreats to the line that he “was never in business with his son.”

NBC’s headline? “Hunter Biden business associate testifies he has no knowledge of wrongdoing by Joe Biden.”

I used to work as a lawyer. There’s a lot more money in defending criminals in the law than there is doing the same as a reporter. The whole point of becoming a journalist is to dig fearlessly for the facts.

Whatever our national political press corps is doing, that isn’t it.