Fox Business anchor Maria Bartoromo — who was one of the most fervent participants in Fox’s effort to turn Hunter Biden’s business interests into a corruption scandal for his father, President Joe Biden — congratulated President Donald Trump’s son Eric on air on Thursday after his company landed a robotics contract from the Pentagon.

Bartiromo devoted more than 10 minutes of her program to a fawning joint interview with Foundation Future Industries CEO Sankaet Pathak and Eric Trump, the company’s “chief strategy adviser.”

After Bartiromo congratulated the pair on winning a $24 million Defense Department contract to test its “Phantom” robot for military applications, she gave them a platform to talk up their product, as well as what Bartiromo described as “these incredible goals that you've got,” including to “build life-sustaining technology on Earth and beyond.”

Bartiromo did not quiz Eric Trump on the obvious ethical problems involved in the Pentagon directing a contract to the president’s son’s company. Instead, she asked him the following questions:

• “Eric, I know this is a lot about national security, but [Pathak’s] talking to us about other use cases. Tell us about that and how did you get involved — what attracted you to this company?”
• “Eric, you're a master at hospitality. Tell us how you could see these uses play out with robots. I know that there are robots used right now, for example, in hospitals, but this is something that you — the robot goes to the dock, picks up medical equipment, puts it in a basket, and delivers it where it needs to go.”

Eric Trump and other members of the president’s family have apparently adopted Fox’s “Biden Crime Family” conspiracy theory as their business plan, as I detailed for MSNOW earlier this month:

Many of the network’s highest-rated hosts carried out a yearslong obsession with what Fox host Sean Hannity described as the “Biden Crime Family,” mentioning Biden’s son at least 13,440 times over a period of less than 16 months of Biden’s presidency. Their feverish conspiracy theory postulated that Hunter Biden had served as a “bag man” for his father, soaking up money funneled from foreign entities and kicking a share back to Joe Biden, who would then use his elected office to help his son’s business partners.
No substantive evidence ever emerged that Joe Biden profited from Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. The dealings in question largely occurred when Joe Biden was a private citizen, and the primary instance the conspiracy theorists have cited as evidence of him taking state action on behalf of one of his son’s clients — that he, as vice president, pushed for the removal of Ukraine’s top prosecutor in order to benefit one of his son’s clients — was manifestly bogus.
But Trump and his family members appear to have adopted influence-dealing on a dramatically larger scale than the Biden family was ever accused of. And the Trumps’ sprawling set of business deals with Gulf state royals and the sovereign wealth funds they control cannot be disentangled from the president’s decision-making in launching and continuing a war of choice against Iran.

Bartiromo was a key player in Fox’s fixation on Hunter Biden, regularly hosting Republican members of Congress like House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) to promote their overwrought investigations. The sum total of the money Comer tracked from international business sources to “the Bidens and their associates” — itself an inflated figure that includes money going to non-family members — was $20 million, less than the single Pentagon contract Eric’s company received.

Fox hosts who tore their garments over the Bidens typically just ignore the historic effort by President Trump and his family members to cash in on his second term in office. But Bartiromo is taking it one step further by openly celebrating Eric Trump’s business.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters