This Wednesday marks two weeks since the New York Post dropped its initial Hunter Biden story. Since then, much of the not-so-disinterested press has shown that its scrupulousness is highly inconsistent.
The New York Post story’s details are sketchy and raise questions. That’s as clear as day. Rudy Giuliani himself is a wormy fellow. None of that explains or justifies how the gatekeepers at media organizations — Politico, NPR, the Washington Post among them — have treated the story.
Here is a Politico headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” But in the statement cited by Politico and signed by former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper and former CIA Directors Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, and John Brennan, among others, the officials don’t quite make that leap. What they do say is that it “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information campaign.”
They also say, quite importantly, “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” That is a major qualification.
There are several important distinctions to make. The officials did not claim “Russian disinfo.” They said it smells like a “Russian information campaign.” An information campaign would suggest Russian involvement but not necessarily false “disinformation,” which, in this case, would mean fabricated emails and photographs. This is more than hair-splitting. Politico suggests a level of assurance of “disinformation” among former intelligence officials that isn’t present in the statement.
Either way, the officials are not privy to new intelligence. They are going off of what they saw in 2016 and elsewhere, which counts for something. What counts for more is what current DNI John Ratcliffe said earlier on the day Politico published its report. Ratcliffe said, “Let me be clear: The intelligence community doesn’t believe [it is disinformation] because there is no intelligence that supports that. … It is simply not true.” Politico mentions Ratcliffe’s words, but they are relegated to the seventh paragraph. One would think that Ratcliffe, who currently serves in the government, deserves a larger measure of deference than the former officials, who do not. Officials at both the Justice Department and the Trump-unfriendly FBI later confirmed what Ratcliffe said.
Outside of Politico, the folks at NPR are graciously keeping readers and listeners from having to waste their time with the Hunter Biden story. “Even if Russia can’t be positively connected to this information, the story of how Trump associates Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani came into a copy of this computer hard drive has not been verified and seems suspect,” wrote Kelly McBride, NPR’s public editor. OK, so have your reporters keep digging.
The real treat came from Thomas Rid, an author and professor who wrote for the Washington Post: “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.” Also from Rid: “Most journalists and media organizations reporting on the Hunter Biden leak initially focused on the disinformation, not the content of the leaked files.” What disinformation? He is just using a word as a stand-in for the story. It’s a view from nowhere at this point.
All of these people are comfortable in this intermediate state in which the story looks like Russian disinformation but probably isn’t and “can’t be verified.” And even if it could be, nobody would care. It doesn’t matter what the intelligence officials have said, and it doesn’t matter what the emails say. The stories are “pure distractions,” said Terence Samuel, NPR’s managing editor for news (Distractions from what? Where exactly should our attentions lie?). Anyway, we don’t care, and you shouldn’t either, they say.
Russia interfered in the 2016 election, and they are still working at it. Russia is responsible for creating the frame in which so many in the press and the Democratic Party operate — Russia is ever near. It has almost become a reflex to herald “Russian disinfo” despite evidence to the contrary.
So far, the takeaway from what has been outlined above is that the Hunter Biden story is approximately a Russian plant, but it may well not be, and either way, it isn’t important. The whole story has yet to be told. Many in the press are uninterested in telling it. Their paralysis reveals a consequence of actual Russian interference, which is that it has emasculated the ethics of the press.
