The Biden campaign is understandably scrambling for the correct spin after a bombshell report from the New York Post on Wednesday that the Democratic nominee for president has been lying about his knowledge of and involvement with a Ukrainian energy firm.
Understandably, Team Biden does not want this news to hang on the front pages as they charge into the final days before the presidential election, but thus far, their excuses and denials have been baffling, weak, and insincere.
The New York Post alleged that although Biden has repeatedly, and with prejudice, told reporters that he had no knowledge of how his unqualified and drug-addicted son Hunter wound up being compensated millions of dollars as a board member of Burisma Holdings, he met with a top executive from the firm in 2015.
At first, the Biden campaign said that this was a lie based on their evidence that no such meeting existed on Biden's official vice-presidential calendar at the time. After criticism from those pointing out that such a meeting would be highly unlikely to be entered into such a record, the campaign said they could not prove that an "informal meeting" never took place between the VP and Vadym Pozharskyi.
Pozharskyi's name was also seen in email correspondence to Hunter following the meeting, thanking him for making it possible. Other correspondence found on a laptop reportedly abandoned by Hunter showed him leveraging money and position with Burisma in exchange for access to his father, who they hoped to influence for political reasons.
Other emails seemed to show that Hunter referred to his father as "the big guy" and leveraged access to the vice president in exchange for millions of dollars.
Both Twitter and Facebook have actively suppressed the stories by the New York Post by blocking their distribution and locking accounts that have shared links to the reporting.
Now the Joe Biden campaign is citing the suppression and censoring by Twitter as proof positive that the reports about Biden and his son are demonstrably false. In a Thursday morning interview with Cheddar, Biden's campaign press secretary Jamal Brown said "Twitter's response," was enough evidence to move on from the story.
"Twitter’s response to the actual article itself makes clear that these purported allegations are false and are not true," Brown said. He also thanked them for their fight against "misinformation."
NEW — the @JoeBiden campaign responds to the @nypost story and @Twitter fallout on @cheddar:
— j.d. durkin (@jiveDurkey) October 15, 2020
“Twitter’s response to the actual article itself makes clear that these purported allegations are false and are not true.” @JTOBrown pic.twitter.com/rwSH8RiNYo
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said on Wednesday night that the website's initial response to the New York Post story was "unacceptable," but only because it lacked clarity. As users are still unable to share the story on Twitter, the site's "safety" account now claims the block is because the information in the story was obtained through hacking, not because they didn't find it credible.
Twitter also placed a trending topic on Thursday morning circling back to a "fact-check" on a peripherally related story from the Washington Post about Biden's insistence on firing a corrupt Ukraine prosecutor. That fact check was published in September of 2019 and offered no link to the story published by the New York Post.