The Patriot Post® · 'Fact-Checkers' Defend Biden's China Oil Outrage

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre may be all thumbs when it comes to her job, but at least the Biden administration has prominent American news media outlets to pick up the slack and keep the propaganda machine humming along.

For example, observe how The Washington Post has dutifully reached out to protect the Biden administration from backlash over its sales from our nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to China.

First a little background: Last week, we wrote that the administration released five million barrels from the SPR to Europe and Asia. One-fifth of that went to Unipec, the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation, the Chinese state energy company commonly known as Sinopec.

With Americans paying $5 a gallon at the pump and dealing with crippling inflation because of high gas prices, the public was rightly rankled to hear that we were selling our stockpiled oil to the Chinese. After all, it’s not as if they’re releasing this oil into the open market to ease demand. China continues to hoard its own reserves against Biden’s naive hope that it’ll also release oil to put downward pressure on prices.

But it gets worse. The Washington Free Beacon reports that in 2015, BHR Partners, a private equity firm co-founded by none other than Hunter Biden, bought a $1.7 billion stake in Sinopec — yes, that Sinopec, the same one that just got a million barrels of our reserves from the Biden administration.

None of this did Biden’s already crumbling popularity any favors. Social media lit up over Junior’s potential involvement and the sale of our oil to China. Republicans have been calling for an investigation into Hunter’s business dealings and how it may connect to the White House.

Enter Glenn Kessler and the faux checkers at the Washington Compost. Kessler came to the Bidens’ rescue by claiming that outrage over sales of scarce oil to China and over Hunter Biden’s connection to it all was misplaced. Kessler also reassured us that it’s perfectly legal for oil from the SPR to be sold to international firms. The White House Washington Post analyst also reminded us that Hunter Biden’s lawyer stated in 2021 that Biden no longer had any direct or indirect interest in BHR.

According to the Washington Examiner, Chinese records didn’t show any change in status as of March, indicating that Biden may still be tied to BHR. But this didn’t stop Kessler from awarding three Pinocchios to anyone who “suggests the Biden administration is doing something wrong here.” In other words, it’s not some misstatement of facts that called down the wrath of the faux checkers; it’s our lack of faith in the forthrightness of the Biden Crime Family.

There are a couple of problems with Kessler’s fact-checking — the first being that it’s not fact-checking at all but rather a partisan response to uncomfortable facts. The Washington Free Beacon issued an appropriate response the next day: “When they’re ‘fact-checking’ us, we know we must be doing something right.” Indeed, when you’re taking flak, it usually means you’re over the target.

Another hole in Kessler’s logic is that just because an action is legal doesn’t mean it’s decent. The optics of this sale are horrible no matter how the Leftmedia tries to slice it. The SPR is supposed to protect American petroleum stores in case of a national emergency. Abysmal presidential poll numbers are not a national emergency. That’s why here in our humble shop we like to refer to it as the Strategic Polling Reserve. After all, American presidents — and generally Democrat ones — love to tap into the SPR whenever they’re in a price pinch, even though it rarely has any appreciable impact on gas prices or the oil market in general.

Selling off a few million barrels from the SPR is but a drop in the world’s petroleum bucket. But selling it to the Chinese, who will use it to boost their own emergency supply, is either stupid or treasonous. In any case, it stirs up some familiar questions: Why does Joe Biden continually suck up to the Chinese government? Why does his wastrel son’s name keep coming up? When will we get some answers? And why on earth hasn’t Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel yet?