“Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has speculated for the last month about alleged corruption surrounding the overseas business dealings of Hunter Biden, insisted on Thursday evening that he didn’t want to be involved in “pounding on a man, jumping on and piling on when he’s already down.” This change in Carlson’s rhetoric comes after the conservative pundit claimed on Wednesday that Fox News had acquired a number of “damning” documents about Joe Biden’s son from a source, only to have the material allegedly disappear when it was shipped cross-country. UPS announced one day later that the flash drive containing the documents had come out of its packaging, was located by a staffer and eventually turned over to a superior, who arranged for it to be sent to Fox. Carlson was full of questions regarding this explanation and continued to hint at a conspiracy. He contended that “someone, for some reason, opened our package and removed a flash drive containing documents that were damaging to the Biden family.” “We’d love to know who would do that and why,” said Carlson. “It would be helpful to see the envelope itself. But UPS says we can’t see it because they threw it away. So here we are. We got our flash drive back, and that’s great. What we’d really like are some answers.” Following this statement, the Fox host switched gears and began talking about the substance of the documents themselves, saying that the network was still “assessing” them but that much of the material would not be revealed. “There are a lot of documents about Hunter Biden’s personal life that we haven’t brought you and that we’re not going to bring you, and we should tell you why,” Carlson said. “One is the obvious answer: He’s not running for president. Hunter Biden is a fallen man at this point. I should also say that I knew Hunter Biden fairly well. We lived near each other in Washington for quite some time. I knew his wife, who’s an absolutely outstanding person, a good person.” Carlson continued with this line of reasoning, insisting that he was taking the high road and “never thought Hunter Biden was a bad person” ― despite having devoted Tuesday night to an interview with Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s who offered up unverified claims that Joe Biden had been involved in his son’s Chinese business dealings. “I thought he had demons, though in the time I knew him, he kept them mostly under control,” Carlson said of Hunter Biden. “At some point, he lost control of those demons, and the world knows that now. He’s now humiliated and alone. It’s probably too strong to say we feel sorry for Hunter Biden. But the point is that pounding on a man and piling on him when he’s already down is something that we don’t want to be involved in.” President Donald Trump and other right-wing politicians and pundits have repeatedly accused Joe Biden of receiving money from his son’s overseas business dealings, including an alleged $3.5 million from Russia. There has been no evidence to substantiate these claims. On the same day as Carlson’s broadcast, NBC News reported that the supposed author of an intelligence document purportedly highlighting the younger Biden’s illicit business dealings was a false persona. That document, which NBC said appeared to come from a fake intelligence firm, “helped lay the groundwork among right-wing media for what would become a failed October surprise: a viral pile-on of conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.” Watch Tucker Carlson’s segment on Hunter Biden below.
