Getting the Hunter Biden laptop story wrong. Again.
Consistency.
Related highlights:
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Certain members of the press want very much for the Hunter Biden laptop story to be the work of the Russians, even despite assessments from the U.S. intelligence community that say otherwise.
A smattering of journalists and commentators falsely claimed this week that a recently unclassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence proves the laptop story was Russian disinformation.
The report says no such thing.
“In case you’re still wondering if the Hunter Biden laptop story came from the Kremlin,” Defense One reporter Patrick Tucker said Tuesday in a since-deleted tweet, “ODNI’s new unclassified report says yes.”
In reality, the report says only that Kremlin-linked operatives “sought to use prominent US persons and media conduits to launder their narratives to US officials and audiences.” It says more specifically that the operatives “made contact with established US media figures and helped produce a documentary that aired on a US television network in late January 2020.”
The report also states that “Russian state media, trolls, and online proxies, including those directed by Russian intelligence, published disparaging content about President Biden, his family, and the Democratic Party, and heavily amplified related content circulating in US media, including stories centered on his son.”
It makes no mention whatsoever of Hunter Biden’s laptop, whose contents reportedly came into the possession of Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, after the president’s son apparently forgot he had dropped the device off for repairs at a shop in Delaware. The ODNI report never even questions the veracity of the Biden laptop story; it says only that certain reports in U.S. media were "amplified" by Kremlin-linked operatives.
Recall the story: The New York Post in October 2020 published a scoop revealing the existence of a laptop reportedly belonging to Biden. The laptop, which has since been turned over to the FBI, supposedly contains documents suggesting Hunter Biden leveraged his father’s political clout to line the family’s pockets. The New York Post’s coverage last year included the publication of email excerpts purporting to show that Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, “to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”
Neither the Biden campaign nor Biden himself has denied the authenticity of the laptop or its contents.
Yet, the legacy press’s immediate reaction to the story was to denounce it as Russian disinformation. Only a handful of competing news outlets, including the Washington Examiner, even bothered to investigate the authenticity of the emails.
The pushback from establishment newsrooms was so great, in fact, that Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe himself said in October 2020 that the information contained on the laptop “is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.” The Justice Department and the FBI, which is in possession of the laptop, concurred with Ratcliffe’s assessment.
Yet, here we are again, as journalist and pundit alike claimed falsely Tuesday evening that the press’s original erroneous assessment of the laptop story was indeed the correct one.
“Hey, New York Post and everyone else who got suckered into the ridiculous Hunter Biden laptop story,” said HuffPost White House correspondent S.V. Date. “Take a bow.”
Date claimed last year, without evidence, that the laptop story was “Russian disinformation.”
“The same dudes who ran the play last time!” MSNBC’s excitable Chris Hayes said in a since-deleted tweet.
The mischaracterization of the ODNI report was even shared by NBC News’s resident 4chan correspondent Ben Collins, a supposed expert on disinformation and right-wing extremism.
It was not long after these big-brains claimed victory Tuesday that they started issuing mea culpas, admitting they hadn’t actually read the ODNI report closely.
“I'm just starting to read through the report,” said Hayes, “so not clear they're claiming the Hunter Biden laptop specifically ‘came from the Kremlin’ definitively, but it's incredible that it's the same cast of characters.”
Said Defense One’s Tucker, who kicked off this entire mini-news cycle, “I've deleted a tweet that suggested that a recent ODNI report made explicit reference to the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
Maybe they’ll get it right next time. Maybe.