After spending more than a year claiming that the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was a “Russian conspiracy” and not worth covering, The...
After spending more than a year claiming that the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was a “Russian conspiracy” and not worth covering, The New York Times now acknowledges the laptop is legitimate and really did belong to the president’s troubled son.
After more than a year of ignoring the salacious story about the laptop that Hunter left with a computer repairman in Delaware and then never reclaimed, in an article published on Wednesday, the “newspaper of record” slipped a line into its coverage offering an important little tidbit about the infamous laptop and the information.
It involved Hunter Biden, his former business partner, Devon Archer, and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings that once employed them both.
“People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity,” the Times wrote.
“Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from 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.”
That’s right, America, you read that correctly. The Times is now saying that the emails found on the laptop have been authenticated as factual, real, and true.
This newest story proves the lie to the Times’ own past coverage of the saga. In an Oct. 22, 2020, report, for instance, the newspaper strongly suggested that there was no reason to believe a New York Post article from a week earlier that reported that in 2015, then-Vice President Joe Biden had been personally introduced to a Burisma executive in Washington, D.C., by Hunter Biden.
That Times article even quoted a Biden source who said, “Mr. Biden’s official schedules did not show a meeting between the two men.”
Now, the Times’ new story confirms that Joe Biden “did make an appearance” at a restaurant where Hunter was to be entertaining foreign business associates, including a Burisma executive. But, in what looks like a move to save face, claimed that “it was not clear whether the Burisma executive attended the dinner.”
(Tellingly, the Times report omits the fact that the New York Post story included a note recovered from the laptop in which the executive, Burisma board adviser Vadym Pozharskyi, thanked Hunter Biden for “inviting me to D.C. and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent (sic) some time together.”)
And naturally, the Times buried that particular nugget of information deep, deep into a story headlined “Hunter Biden Paid Tax Bill, but Broad Federal Investigation Continues.”
But conservatives noticed.
In an editorial published Thursday, the New York Post slammed the Times, pointing out that the Times had floated story after story that cast the laptop story as a fraud.
“In the heat of the presidential race of 2020, the Times never missed a chance to cast doubt on the laptop, saying the information was ‘purported’ and quoting a letter from former Democratic officials who claimed — with no evidence — that it was Russian disinformation. As recently as September 2021, the Times called the laptop ‘unsubstantiated’ in a news story,” the Post editorial declared.
The Post further blasted the Times, saying, “Why was it unsubstantiated? Because of willful ignorance and the Times’ curious lack of curiosity.”
Liberal independent journalist Glenn Greenwald went even farther in a substack post published Thursday, calling the left-wing media’s attacks on the laptop story “one of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern American electoral history.”
Greenwald wrote that the news of Hunter Biden’s laptop led to “suppression of the story by U.S. corporate media outlets and censorship of the story by leading Silicon Valley monopolies.” He noted that the media glommed onto the false claim by biased Politico reporter Natasha Bertrand whose leading story early in the reporting of the laptop was headlined “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”
Greenwald went on to charge the mainstream media with purposefully misreporting the Hunter laptop story as a means to “manipulate” the 2020 election against then-President Donald Trump.
“But a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump’s defeat had no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former officials actually said or whether it was in fact true. They had an election to manipulate,” Greenwald wrote.
“As a result, that these emails were ‘Russian disinformation’ — meaning that they were fake and that Russia manufactured them — became an article of faith among the U.S.’s justifiably despised class of media employees.”
Worse, the sold-out media’s lies about the laptop were then used by social media giants and other moguls of Big Tech to censor conservatives online in what Greenwald described as “the most severe case of pre-election censorship in modern American political history.”
“Twitter locked The New York Post’s Twitter account for close to two weeks due to its refusal to obey Twitter’s orders to delete any reference to its reporting. The social media site also blocked any and all references to the reporting by all users; Twitter users were barred even from linking to the story in private chats with one another,” Greenwald wrote.
“Facebook, through its spokesman, the life-long DNC operative Andy Stone, announced that they would algorithmically suppress discussion of the reporting to ensure it did not spread, pending a ‘fact check[] by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners’ which, needless to say, never came — precisely because the archive was indisputably authentic.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki also grabbed onto the “Russian disinformation” lie about Hunter’s laptop and repeatedly insisted that the story was fake news — even though it was all true from the beginning.
For instance, last September, Psaki used the “Russian disinformation” accusation to ward off questions about Hunter’s laptop.
“I think it’s broadly known and widely known that there was a broad range of Russian disinformation back in 2020,” she said during a White House press conference.
DOOCY TIME, part 2: Biden “has said and you have tweeted that allegations of wrongdoing based on files from Hunter Biden laptop are Russian disinformation. There is a new book…that finds some of the files…are genuine. Is the [WH] still going with Russian disinformation?” pic.twitter.com/zRKOzh9gJ1
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) September 24, 2021
Psaki also floated this lie during the 2020 election — when she was a commentator for CNN — as she shared Bertrand’s false Politico story on Twitter.
Also, during the 2020 campaign for president, Biden himself used the false reports to counter Trump’s use of Hunter’s laptop as a political issue.
“There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant,” Biden said during the third presidential debate.
“[F]ive former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage,” Biden falsely exclaimed.
The media’s false stories are one thing, but Biden clearly lied when he said that during the debate. After all, he would have known by then for a fact that the laptop was real.
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