CBS News reporter John Dickerson said Friday that despite President Donald Trump’s efforts in Thursday night’s presidential debate, it is unlikely that the Hunter Biden email story will impact the looming election because the “news cycle” will ignore the story.
“Joe Biden has an ally in the news cycle,” Dickerson told “CBS This Morning,” adding that “if President Trump tries to shift the turf under the Biden family for the purposes of muddying Joe Biden, the news cycle keeps returning to the central piece of this campaign which is coronavirus and the president’s response to it, and the country has a very negative view of that.”
The New York Post first reported that an email recovered from a laptop left at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 showed that both Hunter Biden and then-Vice President Joe Biden met with a top executive of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas company where Hunter Biden eventually landed a seat on the board of directors.(RELATED: Trump Tells Nevada Rally That The Biden Family Is ‘A Criminal Enterprise,’ Crowd Chants ‘Lock Him Up’)
The Biden campaign has denied that any meeting took place. Hunter Biden has not denied leaving his laptop with the computer repair shop. The Daily Caller has not independently confirmed the veracity of the email.
Dickerson said Friday that he doesn’t believe the story “matters a great deal with voters” and suggested “it’s obviously risky for the president who has, if you use the standard he is using with the Biden family to look at, his own conflicts between his personal business dealings.”
The “60 Minutes” correspondent said Trump has the issue of “debts he still owes to foreign entities” to deal with and so “you would think this would be ground he would stay off of.”
Dickerson suggested Trump would have a difficult time framing Biden and his political career as corrupt. (RELATED: Biden Campaign Cites Twitter Censorship As Evidence NY Post Story Is False)
Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden answers a question as President Donald Trump listens during the second and final presidential debate at Belmont University on Oct. 22, 2020 in Nashville, Tennessee. This is the last debate between the two candidates before the election on Nov. 3. (Morry Gash-Pool/Getty Images)
But Trump repeatedly raised the flag of corruption during the presidential debate, directly asked Biden about allegations that he was essentially influence peddling.
Despite former Hunter Biden business associate Tony Bobulinksi holding a news conference prior to the debate to verify the claims, the media has continued to largely ignore the story.