Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald pointed out Monday it’s been nearly a week since Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger confirmed the authenticity of emails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, emails that were suppressed by the paper itself, in collusion with Twitter and Facebook, at the height of the 2020 presidential campaign.
Not a single outlet, however, that perpetuated the claim the hard drive’s contents were Russian disinformation has yet to acknowledge Politico’s late scoop debunking the false narrative adopted by then-candidate Joe Biden at the third presidential debate.
That means that CNN, NBC News, MSNBC, PBS, @HuffPost, @TheIntercept and so many others spent weeks before the 2020 election spreading what they know is a lie from CIA.
And now that there's new proof from a mainstream reporter that they lied, they won't even mention that.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 27, 2021
“Giuliani,” Biden said, in reference to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who discovered the abandoned laptop at a Delaware computer repair shop, “is being used as a Russian pawn– he is being fed information that is not true.” The former vice president was merely regurgitating an argument the media, Politico in particular, helped Democrats craft and amplify.
“Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” blared a Politico headline on Oct. 19, less than a week after The New York Post published emails showing Joe Biden lied repeatedly when he denied ever discussing business with his son, and stood to rake in thousands from Hunter’s international “business” ventures.
For the rest of the campaign, other outlets were quick to pile on, while Silicon Valley tech giants suppressed the paper’s reporting online now published freely by Politico 11 months later.
En-fucking-raging.
In case you forgot, for reporting just this, The New York Post, founded by Hamilton,
was suspended from Twitter;
accused by of peddling Kremlin disinfo;
had its circulation reduced by Facebook;
and its readers prevented from sharing the story on Twitter. https://t.co/TYfHKRo5u6— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) September 21, 2021
The laptop, CBS’s Lesley Stahl said in a “60 Minutes” interview leading up to Nov. 3, had been “investigated and discredited.”
“It can’t be verified,” she asserted to an understandably frustrated President Trump. “It can’t be verified.”
The day after the interview, however, Fox News reported the laptop was seized by the FBI as part of a federal money-laundering investigation and its contents were “verified by multiple federal law enforcement officials who reviewed them.”
By election day, the Post’s report had been supported by forensic analyses, corroborating reports, the rare reveal of an active FBI investigation, an on-the-record witness, and on-the-record statements debunking the idea of a Russian disinformation campaign from the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Department of National Intelligence, and the Department of State.
But, according to Stahl, none of its contents could be “verified.”
The usual culprits, CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, etc., engaged in the media smear campaign against The New York Post, attempting to discredit the game-changing scoops. To its credit, The New York Times acknowledged Politico’s new evidence Saturday, albeit in an op-ed published by its lone remaining right-leaning writer, Ross Douthat.
@MSNBC went all in on this. They had a member of Congress, @CongressmanRaja, on to spread misinformation about it being a “Russian influence operation.”@JoyAnnReid called it a “Russian hatchet-job”@kylegriffin1 said it “appears to contain disinformation”
All lies. pic.twitter.com/S8ZIX4aKJE
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) September 21, 2021
In December, as even more evidence surfaced to corroborate the legitimacy of the laptop embarrassing those who sought to discredit its authenticity, some such as Washington Post columnist Michael McFaul actually attempted to whitewash their own election interference. Now, with the election in the rearview mirror, Politico stands out as the lone outlet to report what everyone had already known, free of censorship:
A person who had independent access to Hunter Biden’s emails confirmed he did receive a 2015 email from a Ukrainian businessman thanking him for the change to meet Joe Biden. The same goes for a 2017 emails in which a proposed equity breakdown of a venture with Chinese energy executives includes the line, ’10 held H for the big guy?’ (This person recalled seeing both emails, but was not in a position to compare the leaked emails word-for-word to the originals.)
Not only does the Hunter Biden saga highlight the bias of the corporate press, it illustrates the dangers of the disinformation police and how a monopoly on truth is forfeited to corrupt elites.
A study commissioned by the Media Research Center weeks after the election surveyed Biden voters across eight swing states and examined their knowledge of several news stories the group felt the media had not fairly or adequately covered, including the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
Of the 1,750 surveyed, 17 percent said they would not have voted for Biden had they known just one of eight stories presented. Biden narrowly carried seven of the eight states polled, including Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Trump would still be in office had the incumbent just captured 45,000 more votes across those three tipping-point states — well within the margin of those who said learning about the Hunter laptop would have shifted their votes.
