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Last week, the New York Times reported that it had obtained “a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.” New York Times
The New York Post first reported on the emails in October 2020. At the time, both Twitter and Facebook took action to limit distribution of the story. New York Post, NPR
Here’s our coverage at the time. The Flip Side
The right criticizes both mainstream news organizations and social media for attempting to suppress the story.
“[The New York Post’s] scoops on Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 were labeled ‘Russian misinformation’ (Politico), a ‘hoax’ (Steven Brill of ‘fact-check’ site NewsGuard), discredited by ‘many, many red flags’ (NPR) and a ‘hack and leak’ operation that had to be throttled (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg)…
“It was infamously snuffed out on Twitter, as was The Post’s Twitter account, because of a policy about hacked materials that only seemed to apply to this one case. Twitter didn’t bar the New York Times’s stories about Donald Trump’s tax returns, which could have come from hacked materials for all we know, and almost certainly were the product of a criminal act (leaking tax returns is against the law), but the Times never even told us how it got the returns, so we don’t know…
“Moreover, nobody on Team Biden denied The Post’s report, because they knew or suspected it was true. Every news outlet in the country should have fronted the story at that point: ‘Biden team refuses to deny Hunter Biden laptop story.’ A few months later, Hunter himself said the laptop ‘certainly’ could be his, and the media shrugged instead of apologizing… The Times and other major papers simply ignored the substance of The Post’s scoop, and now their readers know, or rather have just been re-re-re-reminded, that they’re Democratic Party cheerleaders.”
Kyle Smith, New York Post
“[The mainstream] press spent four years repeating, sharing, ‘elevating’ (and believing) the most preposterous things about Donald Trump — and doing so without the slightest hint of skepticism ‘about the story’s origins.’ Buzzfeed happily published an obviously fake ‘dossier,’ with the justification that it was out there, and that ‘Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect.’ In response, Twitter and Facebook did nothing…
“New York magazine published a ridiculous fantasy about Donald Trump having been a Russian asset since 1987. In response, Twitter and Facebook did nothing… But when the New York Post published a story that Hunter Biden himself declined to deny . . . well, suddenly, all hands were on deck.”
Charles C.W. Cooke, National Review
“Rather than attempt to confirm the emails, nearly all of the media at the time ignored the story or ‘fact-checked’ it as false. This in-kind contribution to candidate Joe Biden was all the more egregious given other evidence supporting the Post’s scoop. Neither Hunter Biden nor the Biden campaign denied that the laptop was Hunter’s. And Hunter’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, went public with documents backing up some of the laptop’s contents…
“The emails make clear that Hunter was cashing in on the Biden name, including as a board member of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company. That influence-peddling was a potential political liability for Mr. Biden, which was why the facts deserved an airing before the election. They are still relevant, especially with U.S.-China relations so fraught. The Times won a Pulitzer prize for pushing the Russia collusion narrative, which proved to be much ado about nothing. The New York Post deserves a Pulitzer, but it will probably have to settle for well-earned vindication.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
The left generally argues that it was reasonable to be skeptical of the story when it was first reported.
The left generally argues that it was reasonable to be skeptical of the story when it was first reported.
In October 2020, “Rudy Giuliani had been openly looking for dirt on Hunter Biden for over a year. Then, voila!, three weeks before the election he pops up to say that he miraculously found a hard drive with a bunch of compromising Biden emails on it. His rousing tale about how he came across the hard drive was bizarre to say the least…
“Reporters spent the next couple of weeks desperately trying to confirm Giuliani's story. They begged him for access to the drive so they could see all the emails and have it forensically analyzed. Giuliani refused. In the end, that's why the press mostly refused to go down the rabbit hole of the Biden laptop. The story sounded preposterous. Giuliani was a massively unreliable source. They couldn't verify any of it… Whatever we know now, the media did the right thing in October 2020 based on what they knew then.”
Kevin Drum, Jabberwocking
“After the story [was] published [on] Oct. 14, media outlets tried to assess its credibility, without luck. Mac Isaac gave a lengthy, odd interview to reporters that same afternoon in which he repeatedly gave evasive answers and appeared to change his explanations for how he knew whose laptop it was and how it got to the FBI…
“Fox News had already passed on [the story], apparently in part because of the questions about provenance. A number of [New York] Post employees questioned whether the paper had done enough to vet the material. Speaking to the Times, Giuliani insisted that this was exactly why the Post was given all of it: ‘either nobody else would take it,’ he said, ‘or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.’ After the story came out, the Post didn’t share the material with other outlets for them to do their own investigations. In other words, coverage necessarily depended on taking the Post’s word for things.”
Philip Bump, Washington Post
Some argue, “The disinformation campaign against [the] reporting was led by the CIA's all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared under this headline: ‘Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.’ These ‘former intel officials’ did not actually say that the ‘Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo.’ Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this ‘suspicion’ based on their experience…
“What this means is that, in the crucial days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, most of the corporate media spread an absolute lie about The New York Post's reporting in order to mislead and manipulate the American electorate.”
Glenn Greenwald, Substack
“Hunter Biden’s scummy business dealings shouldn’t be swept under the rug any more than anyone else’s… Some of Hunter’s behavior was obviously unseemly in the extreme. Any new evidence needs to be carefully examined to see if Hunter’s behavior ever went past that into actual criminality — did he claim, for instance, that he could deliver favors from the government because he was Joe Biden’s son? So far, I haven’t seen it, but whenever Hunter’s name comes up, I do find myself holding my breath.”Gail Collins, New York Times
