When it comes to news that’s deleterious to the Democrats’ cause, NBC News and the other mainstream media organs are what we might call lagging indicators. Woefully lagging indicators. By the time they report it, the rest of us have already known about it for years.

Take Spygate, for example, which all sentient beings have known to be a hoax and a dirty trick since early 2017, when then-House Intel Committee Chairman Devin Nunes alerted President Donald Trump that the Obama administration had been spying on him.

Or take the incriminating contents of Hunter Biden’s MacBook Pro, which the New York Post made available to the world (which includes the mainstream media) in mid-October of 2020, but which Twitter and Facebook decided to censor and suppress as a decisive in-kind contribution to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, and which NBC News and the rest of the mainstream media reflexively dismissed as “Russian disinformation.”

Which brings us to yesterday, a mere 582 days after the Post broke the story about Hunter’s influence peddling with the Communist Chinese to feed Joe Biden’s ChiCom bucks bonanza. Yesterday, we learned the following from a team of crack journalists at NBC News:

From 2013 through 2018 Hunter Biden and his company brought in about $11 million via his roles as an attorney and a board member with a Ukrainian firm accused of bribery and his work with a Chinese businessman now accused of fraud, according to an NBC News analysis of a copy of Biden’s hard drive and iCloud account and documents released by Republicans on two Senate committees. The documents and the analysis, which don’t show what he did to earn millions from his Chinese partners, raise questions about national security, business ethics and potential legal exposure. … Expenditures compiled on his hard drive show he spent more than $200,000 per month from October 2017 through February 2018 on luxury hotel rooms, Porsche payments, dental work and cash withdrawals.

B-b-b-b-b-b-b-but wait. Wasn’t that all just Russian disinformation?

Eleven million bucks is a lot of money, and here Fox News analyst Buck Sexton notes that any company hiring Hunter Biden based on his credentials defies common sense, suggesting there was more at play here than his skill set. “Who pays a drug addict and — let’s be honest — an irresponsible imbecile, a crack-using, stripper-impregnating guy $11 million dollars for his advice?” he rhetorically asked.

The report also noted this: “The Republicans on the Senate Finance and Homeland Security committees, then chaired by Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, respectively, issued their first report on Biden’s business dealings in September 2020.” Thus, we were told about Hunter Biden’s influence peddling while his dad was vice president even before the Post’s bombshell.

But from NBC and its MSM fellow travelers? Crickets. Tumbleweeds. Bupkis.

Here it would help to recall the words of Joe Biden, who during a 2019 campaign event in Iowa told Fox News’s Peter Doocy “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”

“Never,” as we’ve noted before, is an easy word to fact-check, and we now know for a fact that Joe Biden was lying when he said that. Unless his handlers want to claim he was non compos mentis when he said it, which we suppose is plausible, given his addled state. But barring that, we know of at least a dozen times when Joe Biden was directly involved in his son’s overseas business dealings.

Then there was the lie “Mr. 81 Million Votes” told to debate moderator Kristen Welker and the rest of the world on October 22, 2020, just days before the presidential election, when he said:

My son has not made money in terms of this thing about, what are you talking about, China. The only guy who made money from China is this guy [pointing to Donald Trump]. He’s the only one. Nobody else has made money from China.

Joe Biden: “My son has not made money in terms of this thing about, what are you talking? China.” pic.twitter.com/F91CRMX3kl

— The Hill (@thehill) October 23, 2020

So, why now? Why is NBC coming clean only now? Perhaps to manage the timing of this damaging news, perhaps to get it out of the way ahead of time and thereby shield the president and his party as much as possible ahead of the 2022 midterms.

As for Hunter Biden, we should note that he’s “cooperating completely” with a federal investigation in Delaware that has been probing his business dealings. “And,” he says, “I’m absolutely certain, 100 percent certain that at the end of the investigation, I will be cleared of any wrongdoing.”

“One hundred percent certain”? What does Hunter Biden know that we don’t?