The corporate legacy media partners of the Democratic Party are caught in a trap over their determination to ignore the Hunter Biden scandal in October 2020. This trap is one they willingly walked into, and the trap was laid by Joe Biden himself.
This trap could, and should, lead to the impeachment of President Biden.
In October 2020, when the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story, the one narrative that was repeated over and over by Democratic politicians and their willing propagandists in the corporate, legacy media was that the story was an obvious piece of disinformation planted by Vladamir Putin and the Russian government.
The epitome of the "Russian Disinformation" campaign is exemplified in a Politico article from October 19 referencing 51 former Intelligence Community "experts" who testify that the story has all the hallmarks of Putin's propaganda machine:
More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
The letter, signed on Monday, centers around a batch of documents released by the New York Post last week that purport to tie the Democratic nominee to his son Hunter’s business dealings...
While the letter’s signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case” and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin’s hand at work.
Now that The New York Times, Washington Post, and CBS News have reluctantly conceded that the original New York Post reporting was, in fact, accurate and (they won't admit this, but I'll say it) worthy of a Pulitzer Prize, it's important and instructive to look at the very real trap these Democrats and their media partners have set for themselves.
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Joe Biden dismissed the laptop story as Russian disinformation. He did so at the most crucial and highest-profile moment of his campaign, at the second presidential debate on October 22, 2020.
When President Donald Trump raised the issue of Biden's son's illegal activities, as documented by the New York Post from the laptop evidence, Biden retaliated by accusing Trump of spreading Russian disinformation.
"There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he's accusing me of is a Russian plant," Biden asserted. The media echoed the claim and used the "Russian garbage" accusation as the rationale to ignore the Post's investigation and even suppress and censor the facts of the Post's reporting through their ideological partners in social media.
Now, the trap is set. The Hunter Biden laptop story – as Joe Biden, the media, social media platforms, and over 50 intelligence officials claim – is Russian disinformation. Putin and his cronies have injected this atrocious and damaging lie to thwart Biden's chances and help his pal, Trump. That's their theory.
The only way the Russian Disinformation theory works is if you accept that the laptop story is so damaging, so atrocious, such a death blow, that if it were allowed to be reported and disseminated, Biden would be basically disqualified from the presidency.
That sort of makes sense, doesn't it? I mean, why would Putin and the Russians waste their time spreading a bunch of outrageous lies about Hunter Biden if those lies don't deliver the "kill shot" to Biden's campaign?
Biden's behavior in demanding that the media silence and censor the story actually props up this narrative. If the story wasn't so incredibly damaging and disqualifying, why would Biden, the Democrats, and their media partners insist on the extraordinary and unprecedented call for outright censorship of the investigative report?
Clearly, the takeaway was that Putin wanted to stop Biden at all costs, so he invented the most horrific and campaign-destroying piece of propaganda that would surely end Biden's hopes in the final weeks of the 2020 election.
The only rationale for Biden demanding the laptop story be censored is that he and his campaign and his media pals recognized just how bad the story was and that if the story were to be disseminated, the election would be lost, and Trump would be re-elected.
So, here's the thing... the story is true. It isn't Russian disinformation. It isn't an invented piece of propaganda meant to kill Biden's campaign.
Now, they are trapped.
They can't "circle back" and suggest that the story isn't really a big deal. Or that it's only a personal matter for the president's son to deal with but doesn't involve the president. Or that crimes may have been committed, but nothing so serious as to jeopardize Biden's presidency.
Nope. No way.
They can't have it both ways.
Their extraordinary and outrageous behavior when the story first broke has now become their own impeachment trap that they can't get out of. Putin would not have invented propaganda that wasn't damaging or consequential. Why would he bother?
No, if the Russians were going to invent disinformation and attempt to infiltrate the American news cycle with it, they were going to make sure that for their troubles, they'd get a pretty effective result from it.
The media's embrace of censorship under the guise of "Russian Disinformation" reinforces the severity and the power of the laptop story when they thought it was dirty political fiction.
Now that the story is understood to be true, the severity and power of the story are not diminished. If anything, it is amplified.
If in 2020, the story was so horrible and damaging that it would have ended Biden's chances of winning the election, then logically, it is so damaging today that it should end his presidency in impeachment.
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