Last week, the New York Times published a bombshell scoop confirming the reporting that got the New York Post banned from social media during the 2020 presidential election.
Apparently, it’s safe now to tell the story.
“In the year after he disclosed a federal investigation into his ‘tax affairs’ in late 2020,” the New York Times reported, “President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, paid off a significant tax liability, even as a grand jury continued to gather evidence in a wide-ranging examination of his international business dealings. … Mr. Biden’s failure to pay all his taxes has been a focus of the ongoing Justice Department investigation.”
The report added, “Mr. Biden’s taxes are just one element of the broader investigation stemming from work he did around the world. … Over the last two years, federal prosecutors in Delaware have issued scores of subpoenas for documents related to Hunter Biden’s foreign work and for bank accounts linked to him and his associates, including two formerly close business partners, Eric Schwerin and Devon Archer, according to people familiar with the investigation.”
These are not even the most startling details included in the investigation. The most incredible moment comes more than 20 paragraphs deep. It reads [emphasis added]:
“People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer, and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”
How far we’ve come since the election.
The New York Post was booted from social media in 2020 after it broke the news of the alleged Hunter Biden laptop and its contents. The computer’s contents allegedly came into the possession of Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, after the younger Biden abandoned several electronic devices at a repair shop in Delaware in 2019.
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.”
Big Tech and the press were swift to act.
Twitter locked the New York Post out of its account on Oct. 14, 2020, and barred users from sharing the paper’s reporting. Twitter even briefly suspended journalists, including PunchBowl News’s Jake Sherman, simply for sharing the story. Twitter went so far as to prevent users from sharing it with someone via direct message. Facebook similarly barred users from sharing the New York Post exclusive.
Both Twitter and Facebook offered half-hearted explanations for their behavior. They claimed the story’s alleged “lack of authoritative reporting on the origins of the materials,” which was weird at the time given neither the Biden family nor the Biden campaign nor the recipients of said Biden emails ever disputed the authenticity of the emails.
Meanwhile, in the world of journalism, reporters and news outlets practically tripped over themselves to declare the story “Russian disinformation.”
“[The] alleged emails underpinning the NY Post stories may be part of a Russian disinformation campaign,” said CNN’s Marshall Cohen.
The New York Times reported, “Trump said to be warned that Giuliani was conveying Russian disinformation.”
National Public Radio, meanwhile, flat-out refused to cover the story when it broke, calling it a “waste” of time. NPR likewise suggested the story was too dubious to be trusted.
Then-Politico reporter Natasha Bertrand, who is now at CNN, authored a report that week titled “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”
This directly contradicted what then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and the FBI said at the time, but OK.
The worst thing isn’t that the New York Times is nearly two years late verifying the emails. The worst thing is that tech companies and the press, including the New York Times itself, reflexively dismissed the New York Post’s original reporting in 2020 as “Russian disinformation.” The broader press was largely comfortable with this.
Everyone who peddled the baseless “Russian disinformation” allegation, and everyone who nodded in silent approval as Twitter and Facebook muzzled the New York Post, owes the paper an apology.
I suspect apologies won’t be forthcoming anytime soon, even though it’s safe now to admit the Hunter Biden emails are authentic.
Grave-dancing
The press is filled with many good people.
It is also filled with many bad people.
The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser is one of the many bad people.
Tragedy struck Fox News last week. Two of its newsroom operatives were killed near Kyiv while covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Among the dead were cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and local reporter and producer Oleksandra Kuvshynova. Meanwhile, Fox News State Department correspondent Benjamin Hall was seriously injured in the attack.
Back in the states, some seized on the tragedy as an opportunity to go after Fox News, including host Tucker Carlson, who uses his nightly platform to peddle Russian-friendly talking points.
“What a tragedy,” said Glasser. “A cameraman died covering the war for a TV network that airs a pro-Putin propagandist as its top-rated primetime host.”
She added later, “So grateful for the heroic work that Pierre and all the journalists, Ukrainian and foreign, have been doing, risking their lives to show us the horror of this war. Makes the years of lies and propaganda so much harder to take — there are truly deadly consequences.”
The Washington Post’s media critic, Margaret Sullivan, was not far behind, adding in agreement to Glasser’s remarks, “Summing it up succinctly.”
For her part, Puck News founding partner and Washington correspondent Julia Ioffe accused Fox News of ignoring Kuvshynova’s death because Kuvshynova wasn’t an American journalist or something.
“Lest we forget, the deaths of Ukrainian journalists in this war are just as important as the deaths of American journalists,” Ioffe said. “She was Fox News reporter Benjamin Hall’s local fixer, but [Fox News] isn’t mentioning her.”
However, Fox News senior field producer Yonat Friling had memorialized Kuvshynova’s death before Ioffe’s tweets. Fox itself followed suit soon after that.
When tragedy strikes, a simple “I am sorry for your loss” is sufficient. There’s no need to use the dead to score personal or political points. No need, that is, unless one considers point-scoring more important than honoring the victims of tragedy.
