This post is a footnote to the adjacent post on Daniel Schmidt’s close encounter with Anne Applebaum last week. Reading Anne Applebaum’s 2020 Atlantic essay on the Hunter Biden controversy, I infer that the “reporter” whom Schmidt credits with breaking the “Hunter Biden Files” is Matthew Tyrmand. Applebaum links to Laura Ingraham tweets touting Tyrmand at the top of her essay.
I called author and Biden family business expert Peter Schweizer for help in understanding Applebaum’s essay. Tyrmand had received a set of 26,000 emails from Bevan Cooney, an imprisoned former associate of Hunter Biden. Applebaum proceeds to trash Tyrmand.
Peter was also given access to Bevan Cooney’s gmail account — the same 26,000 emails — around the same time. Applebaum describes Peter as Tyrmand’s “collaborator.” She doesn’t appear to know who Peter is, but she does her best to trash him as well.
Applebaum describes Peter as having followed “the well-trod path by which acolytes of Reaganism become accessories to [political sabotage and dirty tricks]….He co-edited a book, published in 1988, called Grinning With the Gipper: The Wit, Wisdom, and Wisecracks of Ronald Reagan; later, he wrote a book with former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. Now he is focused on Cooney, Archer, and the other characters in the Foxworld universe.” This is pathetic.
Speaking with Peter today I was given to understand that Peter and Tyrmand were each separately given access to Cooney’s gmail account. You would never know from reading Appleabaum’s essay, but Peter has been on the case of the Biden family business since his 2018 book Secret Empires and his early 2020 book Profiles in Corruption. She somehow omits any mention of those books in her essay.
Peter drew on the Cooney emails for his October 2020 Breitbart column “‘This is China, Inc.’: Emails Reveal Hunter Biden’s Associates Helped Communist-Aligned Chinese Elites Secure White House Meetings.” Peter mentions the Cooney emails in his October 2020 New York Post column on the Biden family business:
We gain further insight into the operations of Biden Inc. in emails provided to us by Bevan Cooney, a former business associate of Hunter Biden. Cooney, who is currently in prison for his role in the Indian Bond Scheme that is sending Hunter Biden business partner Devon Archer also to jail, shared 26,000 emails that show what Hunter’s role was in their business ventures. The Biden name was considered “currency” for their foreign business ventures, and was a “direct … pipeline” to the Obama-Biden administration. Deals involving Hunter benefited from the “Biden lift,” the help that the name would provide in overseas dealings.
Peter’s New York Post column is accessible here.
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