OPINION:
The top of Wednesday’s page A9 really caught my attention with a story that bore this headline: “Ex-Trump adviser targeted in plot to push pro-China policies” (July 12).
Were I just a headline reader, as so many people are, I might well have concluded that if an “ex-Trump adviser” was engaged in a plot to push pro-China policies, then by extension, so was former President Donald Trump.
The 786-word story under the headline was also lacking highly important information and context for the reader. Gal Luft is not just a “critic of President Biden,” nor is he just “a figure in the controversy surrounding President Biden’s son Hunter Biden.”
He is in fact the highly publicized “missing witness” in the ongoing congressional investigation of the Biden family’s apparent multimillion-dollar business of selling then-Vice President Joe Biden’s influence to foreign countries (China and Ukraine in particular).
Last week, Mr. Luft released a 14-minute video detailing how he made serious efforts to alert the U.S. government to Mr. Biden’s “influence peddling business,” including a meeting in Belgium in March 2019 with two Justice Department lawyers and four FBI agents.
The meeting’s purpose, according to Mr. Luft, was to alert the Justice Department because Mr. Biden appeared ready to run for president. Those six people apparently did nothing regarding the damaging information Mr. Luft provided them.
Now, three years later, one of those lawyers has obtained the indictment reported in this story.
The whole process smacks of yet another abuse of the Justice Department by now-President Biden to attack and destroy his political enemies. That, and not the indictment itself, is the key point in Mr. Luft’s indictment.
Finally, putting Mr. Trump’s name in the headline as written effectively includes Mr. Trump in “pushing pro-China policies.” The entire report is sloppy at best, intentionally misleading at worst and something I expect to find in The Washington Post, not The Washington Times.
BOB SEGAL
Burke, Virginia
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