’Tis the Season to Debunk Your Family’s Hunter Biden Conspiracy Theories – By Molly Olmstead (Slate) / Dec 21, 2022
At least, if “no politics at the dinner table” doesn’t cut it.
Seven years have passed since Donald Trump began his presidential campaign, so Slate readers have likely figured out their own methods of avoiding, deflecting, or gently participating in Trump-related political “discussions” with their families at the holidays.
The Hunter Biden situation, though, presents a new challenge, simply because of the sheer breadth and complexity of the naughty behavior (Santa Claus reference!) that the president’s black-sheep son has been accused of being involved in (or has thoroughly been proven to be involved in). Below, a guide to addressing and understanding conservative relatives’ Hunter-related concerns.
I’ve really been tuning this out—what’s the gist of the Hunter Biden chatter?
OK, so, there are a few things going on. To take a step back, in 2019, the Trump campaign and prominent conservative figures began arguing that Joe Biden, while he was vice president under Obama, offered Ukraine $1 billion in aid in a quid pro quo deal—or, alternately, that Biden had pressured the country to remove its top prosecutor from office—in order to protect the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma from domestic investigation.
