Bestselling author and journalist Vicky Ward has spent years covering Jared Kushner. Mediaite spoke to Ward a few weeks after she published her first investigative report on Hunter Biden, and the veteran investigative reporter said there’s a drastic difference in how reporting on both figures is treated by the mainstream media.

The name Hunter Biden has become synonymous with corruption in right-wing spaces like Fox News prime time, but the president’s son is rarely treated to a non-partisan investigation.

Ward told Mediaite that her April 27 article, Exclusive: Oligarch with Hunter Biden Connection Avoids Sanction List, received little attention in the mainstream media, a major dynamic shift from the treatment of her coverage of Kushner.

On the other side of the aisle: Ward wrote a 2019 bestseller on Kushner and has since detailed his recent business dealings with Saudi Arabia, reporting she notes was largely ignored by the conservative media, despite being widely reported on elsewhere.

Having now covered both figures, Ward spoke to Mediaite about how to understand the various scandals surrounding each presidential family member and the different treatment Hunter and Kushner receive in the media. Ward argues against comparing the two, and previews her interview with former George W. Bush ethics chief Richard Painter who also notes that “Kushner shouldn’t be the yardstick by which we measure Hunter Biden.”

Ward concluded that, despite much of the mainstream media (outside of Fox News) not picking up her reporting on Hunter Biden, she will “continue on, because I don’t think investigative reporters should be partisan. The stories may be different – but they are both stories worthy of investigation.”

Read the full Q&A with Vicky Ward below:

Mediaite: To lay the background on your reporting on Jared Kushner and Hunter Biden, how would you describe the media narratives, what is newsworthy, surrounding each figure?

Vicky Ward: The narrative with Kushner begs the huge question: did he, whilst in office in the White House, do a self-interested financial transactional quid pro quo (or quid pro quos) at the risk of national security in order to benefit himself financially? That is the question that the narrative of the investment of $2 billion by the Saudi Investment Fund in Kushner’s fund begs, especially given that we know that the advisors to the Saudi Crown Prince advised he not invest with Kushner, because Kushner had no investing experience.

This question is incredibly difficult to answer unless there is documentation somewhere proving that a deal was done while Kushner was in office. But the optics of such an enormous deal so soon after the presidency are deeply troubling.

If such a transaction did happen, then that would be a breach of the Emoluments Clause and effectively be not just bribery, but possibly treason. Further, my book, Kushner, Inc. poses the question: Was there a quid pro quo—first with the Saudis and against the Qataris and later the other way round—to benefit the Kushner real estate business which was in trouble and the clock was ticking?

Again, I lay out the evidence that suggests there is at least the appearance of the possibility of impropriety (the Kushners always said either nothing or denied this) – but, for example, one has to ask why deal that bailed out the Kushner real estate business in New York appeared, at least, to be un-economic. (Again, the people involved in the deal have denied this). So I don’t really understand why Congress hasn’t asked or is not asking about this or the Saudi investment in Kushner’s fund. Congress has the authority to investigate.

With Hunter Biden, it’s different. First off, unlike Kushner—who is a smooth, polished operator who many people at times thought was probably more in charge of policy than his father-in-law, the actual president—Hunter Biden is, by his own admission, a rather tragic figure who has struggled with addiction and all sorts of other problems.

The corruption he’s perceived to be involved in is more of the classic grift by hapless relatives of presidents who are desperate to make a buck off of their connectivity to the main person because they might not make a dime otherwise. In this case, it seems as though Hunter tried to make money off of his father when his father was VP, in foreign countries like Ukraine and Kazakhstan and Russia and China – all of whom were anxious to get access to the VP.

Hunter was not guiding policy himself – although the question my last story raises is: Why is the oligarch Vladimir Yevtushenkov—who is undeniably close to Putin, has been very involved in the Russian arms business, and has not gainsaid the war—not sanctioned by the Biden presidency? That last part IS troubling, because it gets closer to the idea of a quid pro quo going on in real-time from THIS White House.

What was the impact of your extensive reporting on Kushner? How did it penetrate the mainstream media?

My book Kushner, Inc. generated headlines in the New York Times and Washington Post and mainstream TV because it broke news that their beat reporters had not broken. Since then, when I’ve broken stories on Kushner, they’ve mostly been disseminated on cable news or the internet, on MSNBC.

Print media can be slow to follow. I think that the Washington and political reporters are quick to close ranks around each other to protect their turf, and there is an unspoken unwillingness to give outsiders credit for political stories they couldn’t get themselves. Yet, beat reporters are constrained by their reliance on “access”—not just for themselves but their colleagues—that outsiders, especially individuals who are not part of a political reporting team, are not.

Conservative media was not interested in my reporting on Kushner, which I thought was interesting, because a lot of conservative politicians in DC told me they couldn’t wait to be rid of Kushner because they didn’t really believe he was one of them. I guess, again, the conservative media was so reliant on keeping its access to President Trump, they couldn’t afford to irritate him.

Similarly, what do you think was the impact of your latest exclusive on Hunter Biden? How was the impact different?

The impact was completely different in that the msm did not pick it up but the conservatives press – and the tabloids – went big on it. It appeared on Tucker Carlson twice; I did Newsmax and the NY Post and the Mail did big pieces. So, the silos in the media were very, very apparent to me.

How would you compare the scope and content of your different reports on both Kushner and Biden?

I’ve spent years on Kushner at this point. I understand not only what happened in DC but also in his real estate business (I published a book about real estate in New York in 2014) and I’ve met him and Ivanka – and Donald Trump – several times before they went into office.

I looked at their years in Washington as an extension of their business practices, and I think that made me a different sort of reporter on them than the classic DC reporters, whose expertise is in politics but not necessarily New York real estate. I also got to know a lot of people in the Middle East and around it who dealt with Kushner and President Trump, so that gave me an insight your traditional White House correspondent would perhaps not have. I also have a toe in the Kushner world because it overlapped with mine while they lived in New York. And I know people who see them now in Miami, so I feel this is a story I have huge authority on. Unique authority, in fact.

By contrast, I’ve never met Hunter Biden, though I did meet Beau many years ago. And I’ve only done one piece of reporting which was what appeared last week. I sense I am at the tip of the iceberg – but I will continue on, because I don’t think investigative reporters should be partisan. The stories may be different – but they are both stories worthy of investigation.

Given that Kushner was an official in the White House and Hunter Biden was not, do you believe they deserve to be treated with a different level of scrutiny by the media? Are there any other arguments for differentiating media coverage between the two that you consider valid or worth consideration for a newsroom?

Absolutely. They are completely different. I’m not sure you can even compare them, really, given that Kushner was operating in the White House—very influential on foreign policy and much else—and so any benefits he’s had do come FROM that time period and experience, while, as far as we know, Hunter Biden has been kept far away from his father’s White House – with the exception of the art-dealer who exhibited Hunter’s work and with whom the White House negotiated a secrecy deal.

But in my latest Substack, I put up Monday, Bush Ethics Czar Richard Painter points out that Kushner shouldn’t be the yardstick by which we measure Hunter Biden. What Hunter Biden appears to have done is questionable and should be examined in depth.

Painter also points out that if the Republicans win the Senate and the House, they’ll go full bore on Hunter Biden. Plus they’ll focus on the controversy around the appointment of former Penn University President Amy Gutmann as the ambassador to Germany, after Penn had paid Joe Biden almost $1 million to teach at Penn, which houses the Biden Center, during a time period he certainly could not have taught full time – and then received an extraordinary sum of donations from China.

Read Ward’s full interview with Richard Painter here

The post Vicky Ward Calls Out Partisan Media Response to Her Scoops on Jared Kushner and Hunter Biden first appeared on Mediaite.

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