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Why Did Tucker Carlson Mail Hunter Biden Documents on a Flash Drive?

Photo: Fox News

On Wednesday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson went on air with the latest twist in the conservative saga to connect the rote corruption of Hunter Biden to his father, despite there being no proof of Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s business dealings — and quite a bit of documentation detailing how the White House shopped around for reporters willing to publish an October surprise that had reportedly been circulating among Ukrainian oligarchs looking to resolve a “potential legal jam” since the spring of 2019.

Carlson originally presented a classic dog-ate-my-homework scenario for why he could not deliver the purported evidence that would finally make the claim stick. UPS had lost the package a producer mailed to him and Carlson made no mention of making a copy, suggesting it was the only one. The Fox News host’s framing — describing an extensive search of the “entire cavernous sorting facility” for the parcel taken out of its envelope — suggested that it was stolen. But the morning after Carlson described the dilemma, Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer contacted UPS, who said they had found the package. It was not in the hands of the Biden campaign or in the custody of deep-state operatives, but in a UPS facility.

In the follow-up segment on Thursday, Carlson revealed that he and his producers had mailed a flash drive and that he had in fact made copies of the documents before placing them in the mail. Rightfully, he posed several questions about the affair, with most of them boiling down to the following concern: “How did our flash drive get separated from the package that we sent it in?”

Those aren’t the only questions at stake here. Why would professional TV producers working on a tight deadline send digital copies of key documents through the mail rather than upload them and email them on a secure connection? If the thumb drive was important for some reason, why wasn’t it sent via a courier, a service Fox News could certainly afford? Why didn’t they mention that copies were made in the original segment? And if digital copies were made and they never had the originals in the first place, why mention the exchange at all? The answer to the first query is unknowable, though the answer to the last one can be deduced pretty easily — just another fourth-quarter distraction surrounding the Democratic candidate’s troubled son.

Why Would Tucker Carlson Mail Hunter Docs on a Flash Drive?