Journalists at the New York Post were reportedly skeptical of the outlet’s “smoking-gun email” report published Wednesday — so much so that the reporter who wrote most of the story didn’t want his name to appear in the byline.
The New York Post published a series of stories last week about the emails and other data recovered from a laptop and hard drive that allegedly belonged to Hunter Biden that critics say raise concerns about foreign business dealings that present possible corruption and national security issues for him and his father, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
The “smoking-gun email” report makes the case that the elder Biden met with an executive at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which employed Hunter Biden, while he was vice president and suggested he directed U.S. foreign policy to protect his son. The Biden campaign released a statement that said the former vice president’s “official schedules from the time” showed no meeting with Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, as was described in the report, but otherwise did not deny the validity of the hardware’s contents.
According to the New York Times, the story was largely written by Bruce Golding, who has worked for the New York Post since 2007. Two reporters who spoke to the New York Times said Golding was concerned about the article’s credibility.
In a report that was published shortly afterward on Sunday, New York Magazine also described skepticism among New York Post staff. One reporter told the outlet, “I think it was very flimsy.” Another told the outlet that the New York Post failed to meet “journalistic standards,” adding that it “should not have been published.”
The two New York Post staff whose names do appear in the byline are Emma-Jo Morris and Gabrielle Fonrouge. Morris, a deputy politics editor, had no previous bylines with the New York Post before the outlet published the series of Biden stories.
According to the New York Times, Fonrouge was not aware that her byline was on the story until after it was published.
The New York Post named two sources in its reporting, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. According to the New York Times, Giuliani gave the New York Post the trove of emails because “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to Golding, Morris, Fonrouge, and the New York Post. As of Monday, Golding’s Twitter and LinkedIn accounts have been deactivated.
