By early October, even people inside the White House believed President Donald Trump's reelection campaign needed a desperate rescue mission. So three men allied with the president gathered at a house in McLean, Virginia, to launch one.The host was Arthur Schwartz, a New York public relations man close to Trump's eldest son, Donald Jr. The guests were a White House lawyer, Eric Herschmann, and a former deputy White House counsel, Stefan Passantino, according to two people familiar with the meeting.Herschmann knew the subject matter they were there to discuss. He had represented Trump during the impeachment trial early this year, and he tried to deflect allegations against the president in part by pointing to Hunter Biden's work in Ukraine. More recently, he has been working on the White House payroll with a hazy portfolio, listed as "a senior adviser to the president," and remains close to Jared Kushner.The three had pinned their hopes for reelecting the president on a fourth guest, a straight-shooting Wall Street Journal White House reporter named Michael Bender. They delivered the goods to him there: a cache of emails detailing Hunter Biden's business activities, and, on speaker phone, a former business partner of Hunter Biden's named Tony Bobulinski. Bobulinski was willing to go on the record in The Journal with an explosive claim: that Joe Biden, the former vice president, had been aware of, and profited from, his son's activities. The Trump team left believing that The Journal would blow the thing open and their excitement was conveyed to the president.The Journal had seemed to be the perfect outlet for a story the Trump advisers believed could sink Biden's candidacy. Its small-c conservatism in reporting means the work of its news pages carries credibility across the industry. And its readership leans further right than other big news outlets. Its Washington bureau chief, Paul Beckett, recently remarked at a virtual gathering of Journal reporters and editors that while he knows that the paper often delivers unwelcome news to the many Trump supporters who read it, The Journal should protect its unique position of being trusted across the political spectrum, two people familiar with the remarks said.As the Trump team waited with excited anticipation for a Journal expose, the newspaper did its due diligence: Bender and Beckett handed the story off to a well-regarded China correspondent, James Areddy, and a Capitol Hill reporter who had followed the Hunter Biden story, Andrew Duehren. Areddy interviewed Bobulinski. They began drafting an article.Then things got messy. Without warning his notional allies, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and now a lawyer for Trump, burst onto the scene with the tabloid version of the McLean crew's carefully laid plot. Giuliani delivered a cache of documents of questionable provenance -- but containing some of the same emails -- to The New York Post, a sister publication to The Journal in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Giuliani had been working with the former Trump aide Steve Bannon, who also began leaking some of the emails to favored right-wing outlets. Giuliani's complicated claim that the emails came from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned, and his refusal to let some reporters examine the laptop, cast a pall over the story -- as did The Post's reporting, which alleged but could not prove that Joe Biden had been involved in his son's activities.While the Trump team was clearly jumpy, editors in The Journal's Washington bureau were wrestling with a central question: Could the documents, or Bobulinski, prove that Joe Biden was involved in his son's lobbying? Or was this yet another story of the younger Biden trading on his family's name -- a perfectly good theme, but not a new one or one that needed urgently to be revealed before the election.Trump and his allies expected the Journal story to appear Monday, Oct. 19, according to Bannon. That would be late in the campaign, but not too late -- and could shape that week's news cycle heading into the crucial final debate last Thursday. An "important piece" in The Journal would be coming soon, Trump told aides on a conference call that day.His comment was not appreciated inside The Journal."The editors didn't like Trump's insinuation that we were being teed up to do this hit job," a Journal reporter who wasn't directly involved in the story told me. But the reporters continued to work on the draft as the Thursday debate approached, indifferent to the White House's frantic timeline.Finally, Bobulinski got tired of waiting."He got spooked about whether they were going to do it or not," Bannon said.At 7:35 Wednesday evening, Bobulinski emailed an on-the-record, 684-word statement making his case to a range of news outlets. Breitbart News published it in full. He appeared the next day in Nashville, Tennessee, to attend the debate as Trump's surprise guest, and less than two hours before the debate was to begin, he read a six-minute statement to the press, detailing his allegations that the former vice president had involvement in his son's business dealings.When Trump stepped on stage, the president acted as though the details of the emails and the allegations were common knowledge. "You're the big man, I think. I don't know, maybe you're not," he told Biden at some point, a reference to an ambiguous sentence from the documents.As the debate ended, The Wall Street Journal published a brief item, just the stub of Areddy and Duehren's reporting. The core of it was that Bobulinski had failed to prove the central claim. "Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden," The Journal reported.Asked about The Journal's handling of the story, the editor-in-chief, Matt Murray, said the paper did not discuss its newsgathering. "Our rigorous and trusted journalism speaks for itself," Murray said in an emailed statement.And if you'd been watching the debate, but hadn't been obsessively watching Fox News or reading Breitbart, you would have had no idea what Trump was talking about. The story the Trump team hoped would upend the campaign was fading fast.The Gatekeepers ReturnThe McLean group's failed attempt to sway the election is partly just another story revealing the chaotic, threadbare quality of the Trump operation -- a far cry from the coordinated "disinformation" machinery feared by liberals.But it's also about a larger shift in the American media, one in which the gatekeepers appear to have returned after a long absence.It has been a disorienting couple of decades, after all. It all began when The Drudge Report, Gawker and the blogs started telling you what stodgy old newspapers and television networks wouldn't. Then social media brought floods of content pouring over the old barricades.By 2015, the old gatekeepers had entered a kind of crisis of confidence, believing they couldn't control the online news cycle any better than King Canute could control the tides. Television networks all but let Donald Trump take over as executive producer that summer and fall. In October 2016, Julian Assange and James Comey seemed to drive the news cycle more than the major news organizations. Many figures in old media and new bought into the idea that in the new world, readers would find the information they wanted to read -- and therefore, decisions by editors and producers, about whether to cover something and how much attention to give it, didn't mean much.But the past two weeks have proved the opposite: that the old gatekeepers, like The Journal, can still control the agenda. It turns out there is a big difference between WikiLeaks and establishment media coverage of WikiLeaks, a difference between a Trump tweet and an article about it, even between an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal suggesting Joe Biden had done bad things, and a news article that didn't reach that conclusion.Perhaps the most influential media document of the past four years is a chart by a co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, Yochai Benkler. The study showed that a dense new right-wing media sphere had emerged -- and that the mainstream news "revolved around the agenda that the right-wing media sphere set."Bannon had known this, too. He described his strategy as "anchor left, pivot right," and even as he ran Breitbart News, he worked to place attacks on Hillary Clinton in mainstream outlets. The validating power of those outlets was clear when The New York Times and Washington Post were given early access in the spring of 2015 to the book "Clinton Cash," an investigation of the Clinton family's blurring of business, philanthropic and political interests by writer Peter Schweizer.Schweizer is still around this cycle. But you won't find his work in mainstream outlets. He's over on Breitbart, with a couple of Hunter Biden stories this month.And the fact that Bobulinski emerged not in the pages of the widely respected Journal but in a statement to Breitbart was essentially Bannon's nightmare, and Benkler's fondest wish. And a broad array of mainstream outlets, unpersuaded that Hunter Biden's doings tie directly to the former vice president, have largely kept the story off their front pages, and confined to skeptical explanations of what Trump and his allies are claiming about his opponent."SO USA TODAY DIDN'T WANT TO RUN MY HUNTER BIDEN COLUMN THIS WEEK," conservative writer Glenn Reynolds complained Oct. 20, posting the article instead to his blog. Trump himself hit a wall when he tried to push the Hunter Biden narrative onto CBS News."This is '60 Minutes,' and we can't put on things we can't verify," Lesley Stahl told him. Trump then did more or less the same thing as Reynolds, posting a video of his side of the interview to his own blog, Facebook.The media's control over information, of course, is not as total as it used to be. The people who own printing presses and broadcast towers can't actually stop you from reading leaked emails or unproven theories about Joe Biden's knowledge of his son's business. But what Benkler's research showed was that the elite outlets' ability to set the agenda endured in spite of social media.We should have known it, of course. Many of our readers, screaming about headlines on Twitter, did. And Trump knew it all along -- one way to read his endless attacks on the establishment media is as an expression of obsession, a form of love. This week, you can hear howls of betrayal from people who have for years said the legacy media was both utterly biased and totally irrelevant."For years, we've respected and even revered the sanctified position of the free press," wrote Dana Loesch, a right-wing commentator not particularly known for her reverence of legacy media, expressing frustration that the Biden story was not getting attention. "Now that free press points its digital pen at your throat when you question their preferences."On the Other Side of the GateThere's something amusing -- even a bit flattering -- in such earnest protestations from a right-wing movement rooted in efforts to discredit the independent media. And this reassertion of control over information is what you've seen many journalists call for in recent years. At its best, it can also close the political landscape to a trendy new form of dirty tricks, as in France in 2017, where the media largely ignored a last-minute dump of hacked emails from President Emmanuel Macron's campaign just before a legally mandated blackout period.But I admit that I feel deep ambivalence about this revenge of the gatekeepers. I spent my career, before arriving at The Times in March, on the other side of the gate, lobbing information past it to a very online audience who I presumed had already seen the leak or the rumor, and seeing my job as helping to guide that audience through the thicket, not to close their eyes to it. "The media's new and unfamiliar job is to provide a framework for understanding the wild, unvetted, and incredibly intoxicating information that its audience will inevitably see -- not to ignore it," my colleague John Herrman (also now at The Times) and I wrote in 2013. In 2017, I made the decision to publish the unverified "Steele dossier," in part on the grounds that gatekeepers were looking at it and influenced by it, but keeping it from their audience.This fall, top media and tech executives were bracing to refight the last war -- a foreign-backed hack-and-leak operation like WikiLeaks seeking to influence the election's outcome. It was that hyper-vigilance that led Twitter to block links to The New York Post's article about Hunter Biden -- a frighteningly disproportionate response to a story that other news organizations were handling with care. The schemes of Herschmann, Passantino and Schwartz weren't exactly WikiLeaks. But the special nervousness that many outlets, including this one, feel about the provenance of the Hunter Biden emails is, in many ways, the legacy of the WikiLeaks experience.I'd prefer to put my faith in Murray and careful, professional journalists like him than in the social platforms' product managers and executives. And I hope Americans relieved that the gatekeepers are reasserting themselves will also pay attention to who gets that power, and how centralized it is, and root for new voices to correct and challenge them.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

Nancy Pelosi may be the most powerful congressional leader in modern U.S. history.

In the 22 months since she’s returned to the speaker’s chair — an enormous achievement in itself — Pelosi has centralized power in an unprecedented way. It’s due not just to her own maneuvering, but to a variety of circumstances: a chaotic president, a paralyzed Senate, and a national health emergency that’s spurred the most serious economic crisis in decades.

For many Democrats, Pelosi is the face of the resistance to President Donald Trump. From clashes over government shutdowns to impeachment to yelling matches in the White House and publicly tearing up a copy of his State of the Union address, Pelosi has been Trump’s chief antagonist. There have been acrimonious relationships between presidents and House speakers before, but never one so public or so bitter. It’s been over a year since the two have spoken.

“My experience with the president is that he has, really, almost a historic lack of knowledge about the issues and the legislative process,” Pelosi told POLITICO in an interview on Friday. “He has no relationship, no affiliation with fact, data, truth or evidence. And he has a very small view of the future.”

Pelosi will no longer be the party’s leader if Biden wins the White House on Nov. 3, but her influence may only grow. If Democrats also win the Senate, the incoming president is expected to rely heavily on the Democratic agenda passed by the House that’s been blocked by Trump and Mitch McConnell during the last two years. On everything from health care to climate change to money in politics, the markers laid down by House Democrats may prove every bit as important as the policy goals Biden laid out during the campaign.

Yet Pelosi also faces questions about her own future. In order to win over a handful of skittish Democrats following the party’s landslide victory in the 2018 midterms, Pelosi committed to serving only two more terms as speaker. That would make the next Congress her last after 20 years in power, and this upcoming election her final appearance on the ballot, unless she goes back on her commitment.

“No, I don’t,” Pelosi said after a long pause, when asked if she wants to talk about her future beyond the next Congress or how long she wants to remain as speaker.

“Right now, it’s serving past the next couple of days,” added Pelosi, the first woman speaker. “Let’s see what happens in the election. I feel quite certain today, as I said earlier, that we’d win it all. But it isn’t today.”

During a CNN interview on Sunday, the California Democrat again affirmed her intentions to stay on as speaker: "Yes, I am. But let me also say we have to win the Senate."

Pelosi, 80, is expected to easily secure another term as speaker in January — very likely without even a challenge, according to interviews with a dozen House Democrats.

“I’ve been around a while, I don’t think anybody in our caucus, even in a drunken stupor, is thinking they could run against Nancy Pelosi and win the speakership,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.).

“Any departure by Nancy Pelosi will be because she wants to depart,” he added. “She is riding in that parade at the front. And the rest of the parade is following joyfully.”

In the last six months alone, Pelosi has almost single-handedly negotiated more than $3 trillion in pandemic aid bills on behalf of House Democrats, while many of her members aren’t even in Washington. Those bills have all passed through the chamber without hearings, and some even without roll call votes.

Lately, Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have spent months trying to hammer out another $1 trillion-dollar-plus stimulus package, with everyone else in Washington on the outside looking in. It’s an extraordinary position for any party leader and harkens back to Pelosi’s work with the Bush administration to rescue financial markets in 2008.

Pelosi has operated as the Democrats' lead spokesperson as well. Since late March, she has done nearly 160 TV interviews, plus another 20 appearances on Sunday talk shows. This doesn’t include print interviews, or the stakeouts she and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer held.

Pelosi also continues to be a fundraising juggernaut, having raised more money than any non-presidential candidate ever. Pelosi raised more than $193 million for the House Democratic campaign arm alone this cycle. Since 2002, Pelosi has raked in a stunning $961 million for Democrats, according to her office.

“I would agree with you that she is most certainly the strongest [speaker] in modern times, and could very well be ever,” said Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.). “I would say that I do think she’s the most consequential speaker ever.”

Pelosi’s rise to the speakership came at a time when the role of the office changed and became much more visible nationally. Sam Rayburn, the legendary Texas Democrat, was speaker for far longer, but he worked more in the background than Pelosi does. Tip O'Neill, the iconic Massachusetts Democrat, clashed furiously with President Ronald Reagan, although he also had to contend with powerful committee chairs. In the Pelosi era — thanks in part to changes instituted under Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) — there is no other power base within the body.

As for how long Pelosi should serve, Clyburn — the No. 3 Democrat and a fellow octogenarian — believes the California Democrat can stay put as long as she wants. Pelosi, Clyburn and the 81-year-old House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer have held the top three spots in the Democratic Caucus for the last 14 years, to some frustration among the next generation of ambitious lawmakers.

“I hope it’s not her last [term],” Clyburn said. “But if it were up to me, I think Biden is going to need her. … My preference is keep the team together.”

For Republicans, Pelosi is the epitome of a powerful leader run amok. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other GOP lawmakers sued after Pelosi instituted proxy voting on the House floor earlier this year in response to the pandemic, calling it a "brazen violation of the Constitution," although a federal judge later threw the case out.

“Time and again during this crisis, the Speaker has overplayed her hand and wasted precious time to help Americans," McCarthy said in a statement. "This failure isn’t a new paradigm. Her career is marked by absolutism. If the media ever questions it, she lashes out. If she senses a threat from her own members, she keeps them home. The Speaker is consumed by internal power plays at the expense of getting things done."

Even with all of her success, some Democrats have quietly begun considering a post-Pelosi era. It’s a topic that no lawmaker will discuss publicly for fear of backlash from the speaker — the oldest person to hold the office — though such discussions continue quietly inside a caucus where roughly 80 percent of Democrats have only served under Pelosi’s leadership.

Nearly a dozen Democrats are clamoring for one of their caucus’ few open leadership posts in January, a perch that many hope could position them for bigger roles in case of a potential exodus by the troika of Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn in the next cycle.

“I think people are starting to think what’s the team going to look like two or four years from now,” said Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who is running to be assistant speaker, the No. 4 spot in leadership.

“I think people are beginning to think who will be the next generation of leaders in the Democratic Caucus,” he said. “I think that’s kind of natural.”

There are still Pelosi critics, including roughly a dozen Democrats who opposed her second tour as speaker in 2018. But it’s not even clear how many would vote against her now.

“In the last go around, there was some opposition,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), a longtime Pelosi friend. “There was a lot of talking, but there wasn’t any candidate.”

Eshoo said it’s possible that some of the incoming Democrats from swing districts may stage some sort of opposition to Pelosi next Congress. But Eshoo said it would not weaken her ability to govern.

“Every single one of them will have received her considerable support, monetarily and otherwise,” Eshoo said. “She always says, ‘Just win.’”

“Our confidence in the speaker is high,” added Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), another member of Pelosi’s leadership team seeking a higher post next year.

While Pelosi is firmly ensconced in the speaker's chair, there is speculation about possible successors whenever she does leave. The list includes Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), the Democratic Caucus chair; Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a major player in Trump's impeachment; and Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), whose national profile rose during the police reform debate, among others.

Some long-serving Democrats say Pelosi’s second run as speaker has been markedly different than her first, when Pelosi and former President Barack Obama muscled through massive legislation — from Obamacare to a cap-and-trade climate bill — that some believe spurred the tea party backlash and cost them the House in 2010.

Long-time moderate Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) recalls delivering a message to a Pelosi staffer shortly after Democrats recaptured the House in 2006. “We gotta be careful that we don't overreach,” he remembers saying. Four years later, Republicans won back the chamber.

Cuellar thinks that lesson will carry over to a potential Biden administration.

“[Pelosi] is going to try to get as much done as she can, but I think she understands the factor of overreach. I think she learned that in her first term.”

Pelosi argues it wasn’t her agenda that cost Democrats in the 2010 midterms, noting that her party suffered much the same way Republicans did in 2006 and 2018 under a president of the same party.

“That is just how it has gone. Doesn’t mean it will continue to go that way,” Pelosi said, dismissing concerns that an ambitious Democratic program could, once again, fuel a GOP wave that costs them the House in two years.

Pelosi added that she is already looking to cushion any potential blowback in the midterms by bolstering Democratic ranks now, though she wouldn’t divulge how many seats she expects to pick up next week.

“I’m already getting ready for that election,” Pelosi said of the 2022 midterms, just days before the 2020 race. “My goal this year was to win two elections in one day.”

SEOUL—Now the battle rages for “the Republic of Samsung.”The death Sunday of Samsung boss Lee Kun-hee, probably Korea’s most admired, if hated, man, leaves his son, Lee Jae-yong, battling the authorities and a legion of lawyers for control of the empire that controls 20 percent of the Korean economy. The world’s biggest smartphone manufacturer has a turnover that exceeds many republics.Lee Jae-yong, or Jay Lee, was in Vietnam where Samsung Electronics produces the majority of its smartphones, when he got word that his father was on the verge of death.Jay Lee, who is 52, made it to his father’s bedside in a Samsung hospital here in Seoul before he breathed his last. His father, 78, had been bed-ridden and mostly in a coma since suffering a heart attack six years ago.While in Vietnam, Jay Lee had managed to avoid the opening of the latest trial by prosecutors who are out to get him on charges of manipulating share prices in two Samsung companies in a bid to guarantee his inheritance.Having already spent a year in jail while on trial on charges of bribing the ousted Korean president Park Geun-hye, Lee now faces more jail time if prosecutors can pin another conviction on him—this time for lowering the share price of one company to merge it with another. By pulling off that merger—Hey Presto!—Lee hoped to have enough shares in the combined companies to hold a controlling stake in Samsung Electronics, the crown jewel of an empire whose 80 or so enterprises range from ship-building to insurance to construction to an amusement park rivaling any Disneyland.Jay Lee is an engaging figure unlike his stern father, who took over the group from his own father, the Samsung founder Lee Byung-chull, more than 30 years ago. And, just to show he means well, he formally apologized for his rule-bending efforts to secure what he sees as his dynastic right.“I and Samsung have been reprimanded for the succession issue,” he said, looking suitably penitent when promising to “try to not have additional controversy regarding the management succession.”Those nice words are scorned by reform-minded authorities, however, and it’s the matter of succession that’s sure to consume his energies once he’s gone through an elaborate funeral. His father was the country’s richest man, whose net worth of nearly $21 billion made him the world’s 67th richest person, according to Forbes.Jay Lee, already Korea’s second richest man with a net worth of $6.4 billion, has perfected the art of displays of humility in the face of powers-that-be. But Korean president Moon Jae-In wants to reform the country’s traditional dynastic conglomerate system, known as chaebol, which keeps huge businesses in the hands of a few rich families and effectively controls the entire economy. The current system has led to wild disparities between rich and poor—brilliantly captured by the Oscar-winning movie Parasite.Geoffrey Cain, author of the newly published Samsung Rising, the Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech, sees the HBO series Succession as an even more suitable artistic representation. Scene after scene captures the battle to secure a family enterprise making it “an apt show for understanding the Lees,” said Cain.It’s not as though Jay Lee’s two sisters, who stand to inherit lesser shares of the empire, are fighting him for a bigger slice of the inheritance, but the machinations to seize and hang on against enemies do bear distinct similarities.“The biggest question is how Jay Lee will cement shareholding control when he might not have enough shares to control the company,” Cain told The Daily Beast. One huge problem: “He might have to sell shares to pay his colossal inheritance tax estimated at $6 billion divided between him and his sisters.”He also faces a maternal problem. His mother, Hong Ra-hee, “gets a sizable share of the chairman’s assets that could hamper Jay Lee’s quest to control the company,” said Cain. “Jay Lee’s succession is not guaranteed.”One reason prosecutors are reportedly so eager to punish Jay Lee—as seen in his current trial—is resentment over the breaks that Lee Kun-hee got from conservative presidents over the years before the Candlelight Revolution of 2016 ousted Park Geun-hye.Jay Lee’s father was forgiven in 1997, when the conservative Kim Young-sam exonerated him after he and others had been convicted of bribery charges, and again 10 years later when he was convicted of evading massive taxes, among other things. Forced to resign as chairman of Samsung Electronics, he got totally off the hook when Lee Myung-bak, the conservative businessman who was then president, gave him a complete pardon in 2009.Jay Lee, however, does have plenty of sympathizers. One advocate, Tara Oh, a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, who founded and now serves as president of the East Asia Research Center in Washington, accuses the government of “aggressive and unreasonable investigations against the company” and denounces the charges against him as “frivolous, without merit and unjust.”In a lengthy study of the whole case against Samsung, Oh claims that Jay Lee was “convicted of a crime without evidence” simply as justification for the impeachment of Park Geun-hye, who was convicted of corruption and influence-peddling and sentenced to 25 years in prison. It was Samsung’s gift of two horses for the equestrian daughter of a confidante of Park that triggered a series of events that precipitated Park’s downfall. “My Kingdom for a Horse,” was the headline over a Wall Street Journal story at the time.“The Moon administration appears to be interested in taking over control of Samsung,” Oh wrote. “Globally, the actions of the Moon administration threaten the future of 5G technology developments as well as the global supply chain for critical life-saving biopharmaceuticals and COVID-19 treatments.”Jay Lee himself avoids what might appear as incendiary statements. In meetings with executives as well as occasional sessions with lower-level staffers, he appears almost soft-spoken and modest, quite the opposite of his late father.Lee Kun-hee, who set Samsung Electronics on its trajectory as the world’s leading smartphone manufacturer and also the producer of almost half the world’s memory chips, is remembered for berating those around and below him, haranguing them in 10-hour meetings and once simply destroying Samsung products that he said were inferior to those of rivals.Appropriately, he is most quoted for shouting “Change everything but your wives and children!” at executives during a meeting in Frankfurt in 1993.After presiding over Samsung’s rise from an also-ran competitor to global dominance, Lee Kun-hee’s final years were marked by debilitating illness. Long before suffering his heart attack in 2014, he had been treated for cancer and lung disease and got about in a wheelchair.The bombastic formal statement issued by Samsung after his death did not overstate his success: “Chairman Lee was a true visionary who transformed Samsung into the world-leading innovator and industrial powerhouse from a local business.”That much was true, but the final line of the statement is still up for grabs. “His legacy will be everlasting,” it read. If prosecutors get their way at the latest trial of his son, the Lee legacy may not last forever after all.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is “lying to the American people” about his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, claimed Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) on Saturday.The House Intelligence Committee member's comments came during an appearance on Fox & Friends Weekend, in which she accused the former vice president of lying when he issued his denial of wrongdoing during Thursday night’s presidential debate. Stefanik detailed her experience asking each witness in President Trump’s impeachment hearings whether there was a conflict of interest, or an appearance of one, created by Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Ukrainian natural-gas firm Burisma Holdings during Joe Biden’s time as vice president. All of the witnesses said yes, she recalled.She said the Obama administration “proactively brought this up as a conflict of interest” while preparing former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch for her Senate nomination. “This is Joe Biden running from his record and trying to wipe away this very clear conflict of interest,” Stefanik said."This is not just a Hunter Biden scandal. This is a Joe Biden scandal, and it's not just Burisma. It's also now the Chinese Communist government and the Chinese Communist Party," she added, referring to allegations of a business arrangement between a Chinese company and the Biden family.During Thursday’s debate, the former vice president claimed there was “nothing unethical” about Hunter Biden’s involvement in Burisma.He said though questions had arisen over whether he had done something wrong in respect to Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Burisma that, “every single solitary person, when [Trump] was going through his impeachment, testifying under oath, who worked for him said I did my job impeccably, I carried out U.S. policy, not one single, solitary thing was out of line.”