National Public Radio claims the Hunter Biden laptop story has been “discredited” by the U.S. intelligence community and independent media investigations.
Not true. No such thing has happened.
NPR’s claim isn’t merely misleading. This isn’t a case of a poorly worded sentence. What NPR alleges has no basis in reality.
The false assertion appears in the middle of a March 31 review of Hunter Biden’s new memoir, Beautiful Things. Late in the review, about 12 paragraphs deep, the following lines appear [emphasis added]:
This would come as a major shock to the FBI, which reportedly took possession of the laptop in 2019.
A spokesperson for NPR did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
This all starts with the New York Post, which published a scoop in October 2020 revealing the existence of a laptop reportedly belonging to Hunter Biden. The computer’s contents allegedly came into the possession of Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, after the younger Biden apparently abandoned several electronic devices at a repair shop in Delaware in 2019. The computer repairman, John Paul MacIsaac, claims he copied the laptop for Giuliani before turning everything over to the FBI.
Federal officials confirmed for the New York Times that the FBI “seized the laptop and an external hard drive as part of an investigation.”
Giuliani then gave “a hard drive or a laptop or something to that effect” to law enforcement officials in Delaware, according to a spokesperson for Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings. Delaware officials said they likewise turned everything over to the FBI.
The New York Post’s exclusive coverage included the publication of the computer’s alleged contents, including emails purporting to show 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.”
Federal law enforcement officials and other government officials have confirmed the authenticity of the documents reportedly retrieved from the laptop.
Hunter Biden revealed later in December 2020 he is under federal investigation. The FBI, the IRS, and federal prosecutors in Delaware are reviewing his overseas business activities for possible tax and money laundering violations.
Evidence of the investigation, which launched in 2018, first surfaced in the public sphere on October 2020 with the New York Post’s coverage of the laptop. Among the documents published by the news outlet was an FBI report marked with a case number with “the code associated with an ongoing federal money-laundering investigation in Delaware,” according to the Daily Beast.
“Another document — one with a grand jury subpoena number — appeared to show the initials of two assistant U.S. attorneys linked to the Wilmington, Delaware, office,” the report adds.
Lastly, insofar as the bogus narrative alleging the Russians planted the story with pliant U.S. press is concerned, a narrative embraced and promoted by the corporate press immediately following the publication of the New York Post’s scoop, then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said in October 2020 the information contained on the laptop “is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.” The Justice Department and the FBI concurred with his assessment.
Following these public statements, the news organization that initially dismissed the story as Russian disinformation quietly backed away from their earlier, all-certain positions. Since then, there has been precious little new information about the laptop or the investigation of Hunter Biden.
However, the bottom line is still this: Federal officials said the emails allegedly retrieved from the laptop are real. Federal officials also confirmed that the FBI seized the laptop and an external hard drive. The federal investigation is also real, the evidence of which first surfaced after the New York Post published documents reportedly pulled from a laptop seized by the FBI after they met with the computer repairman who claimed to be in possession of several devices belonging to Hunter Biden. The U.S. intelligence community has never said otherwise, and no newsroom has ever conclusively debunked this story.
Yet, here’s NPR this week claiming otherwise.
It’s a general truth of the news business that readers tend to stop following major stories after the first few headlines. But who knew the same could be said for certain journalists?
