“We have a president of the United States who was potentially involved in all of those entanglements with foreign entities,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, “which could lead to complications or compromise as the president now.”
Hegeth’s comment serves as a searing indictment of his current boss, President Donald Trump, whose “entanglements with foreign entities" deepen with each new investigative report on his family’s sprawling business interests and attempts to cash in on the presidency.
But of course, Hegseth wasn’t talking about the recent Wall Street Journal investigation revealing an apparent quid pro quo in which a Trump family company received a half-billion dollar investment from an Emirati prince days before the president took office, then the Trump administration funneled AI chips to the prince’s firm. The quote is actually from July 2023, and it shows Hegseth using his prior role as Fox News host to denounce then-President Joe Biden.
It is not an overstatement to say that arguing against foreign money influence on the White House was a defining principle for right-wing media during the Biden years. But their arguments were based in fantasy, and the Trump family’s corruption is both much more straightforward and involves sums of money that are larger by orders of magnitude.
Thanks to Trump’s propensity to hire the people he saw on his television, many of those who loudly complained about the purported corruption of the Biden family — and even called for the criminal prosecution of President Biden — are now working within the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the Fox smear machine that once went into overdrive promoting conspiracy theories about presidential corruption has gone quiet.
The Trump family’s corruption is orders of magnitude worse than the Biden allegations
Fox’s effort to turn Hunter Biden’s foreign business interests into a political liability for his father dates to Trump’s first administration, but became an obsession once Joe Biden took office in 2021. While the network’s narratives were never credible — and some even appeared to be the result of a Russian disinformation campaign — the pressure of its all-consuming coverage and its media power within the GOP eventually goaded congressional Republicans into an ill-fated impeachment effort, at which point the whole edifice collapsed.
But the Fox conspiracy-mongering takes on a new light given that some of the people who pushed it now work for a president who embarked on self-enrichment schemes of staggering scale and eye-popping corruption in his first year back in office.
While feverish claims of a “Biden Crime Family” involved a total of less than $7.5 million paid to Biden family members over the years — and nothing to Joe Biden — Trump had already “used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion,” the editorial board of The New York Times reported on the anniversary of his second inauguration.
Trump and his adult children oversee a sprawling business empire that has grown dramatically since he launched his reelection campaign and includes international real estate deals through the Trump Organization; his social media company and its parent, “which trades like a meme stock”; immense holdings in cryptocurrency; and an array of consulting and venture capital positions held by his sons that have the aroma of influence peddling. These businesses benefit from Trump’s presidency even as they frequently conflict with U.S. policy (by contrast, the right’s core allegation of Joe Biden aiding his son’s foreign business interests involved him carrying out U.S. policy as vice president).
Reporters and researchers who examine the various Trump tentacles are constantly uncovering new scandals and conflicts of interest. But perhaps the most nakedly corrupt involve the Trump family’s crypto company, World Liberty Financial, which was founded shortly before his 2024 election and has since driven a huge increase in his personal wealth. The Wall Street Journal reported last month:
- Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, an Abu Dhabi prince known as the “spy sheikh” for his leadership of the United Arab Emirates’ intelligence service, secretly agreed to purchase 49% of WLF just days before Trump’s January 2025 inauguration for $500 million, in a “hugely profitable” deal for its founders.
- In May, WLF’s CEO “announced that the sheikh’s investment firm, MGX, would use World Liberty’s stablecoin, USD1, to complete its $2 billion investment in [the crypto exchange] Binance,” a move that “rocketed USD1 up the rankings of largest stablecoins, enhancing its financial credibility.”
- Weeks later, the Trump administration approved sales of “around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year” to the UAE, one-fifth of which would go to Tahnoon’s company. Such sales had been sought by Tahnoon but blocked by the Biden administration out of concern that China might acquire the chips, with Tahnoon’s company “of particular concern” due to its “close ties to the sanctioned tech giant Huawei and other Chinese firms.”
- Trump also pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of Binance, following “months of efforts by Zhao to boost” WLF. (Trump has denied even knowing who Zhao is.)
- Tying it all together, Zhao is an Emirati citizen who is “close” to Tahnoon, Binance is based in the UAE and counts Tahnoon as a major investor, and “people close to the royal family urged the Trump administration to pardon Zhao.”
Fox contributor Andrew McCarthy, while accusing the Bidens of “corruptly profiteering off Joe Biden’s political power and influence,” nonetheless noted that the Trumps’ actions were worse by orders of magnitude.
“You know what the difference is between the Biden family business and the Trump family business?” he asked in a Saturday piece for National Review. “You’d have to add two digits to the sum of Biden abuses of power, foreign entanglements, and corruption alleged in the report to get near what Trump has raked in just from the UAE.”
Fox News rants about the “Biden crime family” perfectly describe Trumpian corruption
Hegseth is just one of several top Trump administration officials who participated in Fox’s yearslong campaign to turn conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings into a political corruption scandal for his father.
“The real story here though is all of the nasty work that he [Hunter Biden] has done across the world, how much money he has made, and the fact that he was able to make, what, $80,000 a month from Burisma in Ukraine because his dad was the vice president — it calls into question Joe Biden's motives,” Treasury Secretary Sean Duffy said back in 2022, when he was a Fox Business host. “Is Joe Biden looking out for the American people or is Joe Biden looking out for Hunter Biden's interests?”
As a Fox host, Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro railed against “the corruption that was going on in the Biden crime family” and Joe Biden’s purported efforts to “enrich his family.” And when she was asked about whether there was any “comparison” between what the Bidens did and Donald Trump’s businesses receiving millions of dollars from China while he was serving as president, Pirro stressed that there was not.
“Donald Trump wasn't involved in the business once he became president,” she explained. “The bottom line is he had properties. He was entitled to have someone else monitor those properties and make money from those properties.”
For then-Fox contributor Leo Terrell, now a top Justice Department official, Joe Biden was “the meal ticket for the family” who “makes the money for the Biden family,” and the lack of DOJ attention to Hunter Biden’s purported crimes indicated “favorable treatment because his father is in the White House.”
And when Pam Bondi was merely a lawyer and lobbyist who frequently appeared on Fox instead of an attorney general who frequently appeared on Fox, she argued that the foreign business dealings of the president’s son were “a matter of national security” that was “so important” that it required the appointment of a special prosecutor to ensure the Justice Department acted properly in the case.
They called for Biden’s prosecution; now they run the DOJ under Trump
Several Fox pundits who joined the Trump administration — including some who now serve in senior Justice Department posts — even argued at the time that Joe Biden’s actions warranted a criminal probe.
Fox host Sean Hannity asked Bondi — then a frequent Fox guest and now Trump’s attorney general — during an August 2023 segment whether anything would “ultimately happen to Joe and Hunter Biden.” Bondi replied that “when we have a new administration, absolutely Sean, it has to,” adding that a criminal investigation “must be opened” and that the Bidens would be “prosecuted” under a future Trump presidency.
Bondi also stressed in 2022 that if Trump had been president under the same circumstances, he would have “right away, recused himself” and had “a special prosecutor take over.”
Duffy argued that the FBI and Justice Department should be investigating the “shady” dealings to determine whether Joe Biden is “corrupt” and has “made money off of this.” But he claimed that “they won't do a forensic audit because they know that the money goes from foreign countries to Hunter Biden into Joe Biden's pocket.”
“There was a major scandal with this administration and it starts of course with Joe Biden and his involvement with Hunter,” Pirro said in 2023. Citing what she claimed was a ream of evidence that “just goes on and on,” she concluded, “You don't need any more than what we have now to convict them.”
And Terrell claimed in 2023 that an aspect of the pseudo-scandal was “sinister and criminal,” adding that the “totality of all the evidence” showed that “the walls have fallen on Joe Biden.” He added that prosecutors were ignoring Hunter Biden’s crimes because if “you prosecute Hunter Biden, you prosecute Joe Biden,” and “everyone knows that the Department of Justice, the FBI is in bed with the Democratic Party and they have weaponized the departments.”
When media ignoring alleged presidential corruption was a sign of “propaganda”
In his piece for National Review, McCarthy wrote, “Now that self-dealing has achieved heights so astronomical that $27 million would barely be a rounding error, Republicans have lost interest.” The same is true of his colleagues at Fox, who barely discussed Trump pardoning Zhao and still have yet to provide substantive coverage of the UAE’s “spy sheikh” purchasing a huge stake in the president’s company.
Why might that be? Hannity asked Pirro a similar question about coverage of the Bidens back in 2023. After she claimed that the Bidens were running an “organized criminal enterprise” in which “Joe Biden is the front man, Hunter Biden is the bag man,” he asked her why “the media” wouldn’t follow up on the story.
“Because they are Democrats,” she replied at the time. “We are now living in a country that is changed. These are crimes not just by the Bidens, these are crimes against America. This is what is going on in this country — and the truth is that they don't care anymore.”
Pirro is now the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
Some of her colleagues in the Trump administration offered similar critiques of coverage of the Biden family back when they worked at Fox.
“When will the media ramp up their scrutiny of Joe, of Hunter, of these payments, of these associations, of the whistleblowers, of the 1023s, of the WhatsApp messages, of the bank exchanges?” Hegseth asked in 2023. “We only know of this because of the House Republicans for a year and a half. What if the media actually examined it, too?”
The Bidens, Hegseth told Hannity, “are counting on a complicit press, which we’ve almost seen universal besides your show and this channel and a few others willing to dig into all the smoke that’s there.”
That purported lack of coverage, Duffy claimed, ensures that “people don’t look to mainstream media as a news source — they’re a propaganda source.”
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
