Welcome to Byron York’s Daily Memo newsletter.
Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to receive the newsletter.
NOW HE TELLS US! HUNTER BIDEN TALKS. For months Hunter Biden has maintained strict silence about allegations involving his business dealings in Ukraine and China, both when his father was vice president and after. Nothing could make him talk. But now, he’s submitting to media interviews, probably several of them. What changed? The younger Biden now has a book to sell. That’ll do it every time.
In his first interview, with CBS Sunday Morning, Biden admits that the laptop that was the subject of reporting in the New York Post in the final weeks of the presidential campaign could, in fact, be his. Remember that Biden’s defenders denounced the story as “Russian disinformation,” social media giants Twitter and Facebook suppressed it, and many big media organizations did their best to ignore it. Now, though, with a book to sell, Biden says it “certainly” could have been his laptop.
Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine that will keep you up to date with what’s going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00 an issue!
In a true tease, CBS has released just a snippet of the interview between Biden and correspondent Tracy Smith. Here is the entirety of that exchange:
SMITH: Was that your laptop?
BIDEN: For real, I don’t know.
SMITH: I know, but you know this —
BIDEN: I really don’t know what the answer is. That’s the truthful answer.
SMITH: You don’t know, yes or no, if the laptop was yours?
BIDEN: I don’t, I have no idea whether —
SMITH: So it could have been yours?
BIDEN: Of course, certainly. There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me. It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was Russian intelligence. It could be that it was stolen from me.
CBS did not include any excerpts in which Smith might have asked Biden whether he dropped the laptop off at a repair store in April, 2019, or whether Biden, a longtime addict, was doing drugs at that time and might not remember doing so. Surely Smith did ask such questions, but we do not yet know what Biden said in response.
In any event, just what has been released — a 20 second snippet — raises significant questions about the laptop story and the way it was handled in traditional and social media. The story wasn’t just about Hunter Biden. More importantly, it was about whether his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, then running for president, knew about some of his son’s shady business dealings. Was the elder Biden actually a part of some of those dealings? Those were the questions that were suppressed as media organizations scrambled to keep the laptop story away from the public.
Hunter Biden’s book — which is apparently mostly a memoir of his addiction — could bring some much-needed discussion of the issues raised by the laptop story. Already, National Public Radio has had to correct a review of the book. The review originally claimed that U.S. intelligence services had debunked the laptop story — a claim that is not true. Now, it has been changed to say only that “numerous news organizations” have “cast doubt on the credibility” of the story. That’s progress.
There will surely be some who claim that there is hidden evidence in the Hunter Biden story that will be explosive. But the point in all this is not to blow anything up. The point is that the public deserves to know more about the Hunter Biden laptop story, especially since the information was suppressed earlier.
For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found. You can use this link to subscribe.
