A follow-up to last week's post on this subject, which highlighted a Politico journalist's discoveries that corroborated the authenticity of a number of emails discovered on Hunter Biden's laptop. The New York Post reported last fall on these subjects, stories that were infamously censored and delegitimized by a colluding alliance of the Democratic Party, news media, and Big Tech. The Biden campaign simply declared it "Russian disinformation," without evidence, and the Team Blue triumvirate sprang into action to actively and aggressively suppress it.
CBS News' online streaming venture interviewed Ben Schreckinger about his findings, clipped and amplified by the GOP:
Politico reporter confirms the Hunter Biden laptop story.
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 25, 2021
“He did receive an email from a Burisma representative thanking Hunter for the opportunity to meet his father...He did receive an email, including a proposed equity breakdown for a venture with Chinese energy executives” pic.twitter.com/JoWk2m5kgI
"There is at least some authentic material [on the laptop]," he said, also noting that there is a pattern of ethically questionable dealings stretching back decades:
Politico’s Ben Schreckinger on the Biden family’s shady business dealings.
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 25, 2021
“I found a number of incidents in which there were scandals, questions of favorable treatment surrounding some of their business dealings going all the way back to the 1970s.” pic.twitter.com/WViCSZduvf
Some of this had been examined in the past, but even some mainstream media figures are more or less admitting that the press had fallen down on the job. Here's The New York Times' Ken Vogel:
It does not reflect well on us in the media that stories like this were not covered while they were occurring during the Obama administration. https://t.co/ZIfnOlNRw6
— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) September 24, 2021
Of course, this should have been covered during the Obama years, but the press treated that White House with kid gloves, and the media's protection of a president the adored benefited his number two as well. Reporters could have made up for that dereliction by leaning into this sort of scrutiny during the campaign – yet newsrooms' most significant action on this subject matter was to guarantee that it was off-limits and did not impact the election. That's the opposite of truth-to-power journalism. It's rapid-response partisan hackery, executed under the guise of combatting "misinformation." Alas, our arbiters of "misinformation" often misjudge their assessments, accidentally or otherwise, destroying their credibility in making such judgments. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial explaining why the Post has been vindicated:
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The New York Post is claiming vindication over its scoop in October 2020 about Hunter Biden’s emails, and deservedly so. But that shouldn’t be the end of the story for everyone who attacked the Post or ignored the story to cover for Joe Biden. A writer for Politico has published a book about President Biden that confirms that some of the emails on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden are authentic. This is barely a scoop, since neither Hunter Biden nor Joe Biden’s campaign denied last year that the laptop provided to the Post by Rudy Giuliani was Hunter’s. Both men counted instead on the rest of the media to serve as a cordon sanitaire, and did they ever. Twitter barred the Post’s feed for a time lest Americans be able to read about the emails and their content...We also now know that the Russian email disinformation story was false. But that didn’t stop 50 former intelligence officials from signing a statement on Oct. 19, 2020, that floated the Russia canard...
By the way, our Kimberley Strassel at the time examined hundreds of emails and texts provided to us by Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, who confirmed their authenticity. Those emails corroborated and expanded upon the Post’s laptop emails. They showed that Hunter was seeking to cash in on his name via a business deal with a Shanghai-based company with ties to the Chinese government and military. One email noted that the deal envisioned “10 held by H for the big guy,” whom Mr. Bobulinski identified as Joe Biden. That struck us as news. The conformist non-coverage of the Hunter emails is one more embarrassment that undermines public trust in the press.
Here is the Strassel reporting referenced above. As we revisit this entire episode, do not forget that candidate Biden broadly denied ever even discussing foreign business activity with his son back in 2019:
Care to fact check that statement now, media? Better late than never; you've already won your election. I'll leave you with another (more superficial) example of just how far gone some within the journo class truly are. We are witnessing concurrent crises of systemic bias and atrophying critical thinking skills:
Left-wing WashPo propagandist pretends not to understand difference between CNN's Chris Cuomo massively covering up for his NY GOVERNOR brother in midst of nursing home, sex, and various other scandals vs. two related media figures working at same outlet. LOL. Broken. https://t.co/FBH8QoM2jy
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) September 27, 2021