Otherwise, it would be very hard to explain how these mistakes keep happening and why they seem to favor the same political party.

The New York Times published an article on Sept. 13 titled “The F.E.C. dismisses claims that Twitter illegally blocked a Hunter Biden article.” The story describes an FEC ruling, not yet public, that “has dismissed Republican accusations that Twitter violated election laws in October by blocking people from posting links to an unsubstantiated New York Post article about Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter Biden.” That’s how the New York Times initially reported it.

The paper followed up with posts on social media, including a tweet that said, “Breaking News: The FEC ruled that Twitter’s decision in October to block an unsubstantiated article about President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, did not violate election laws, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.”

New York Times reporter Shane Goldmacher similarly characterized the laptop story as “unsubstantiated.” And competing news outlets, including MSNBC and the Lawfare Blog, parroted the New York Times’s “unsubstantiated” language.

However, the New York Times article has since undergone significant stealth edits. A byline has been added, the URL has been altered, and the language has been heavily amended to remove earlier assertions that the laptop story is “unsubstantiated.”

As of this writing, the New York Times article now states, “Twitter decided briefly last fall to block users from posting links to an article about Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter.”

The following passage has also been removed entirely from the report:

Though the report itself has undergone significant edits to remove the “unsubstantiated” language, both tweets mentioned above are still live. Meanwhile, MSNBC and Lawfare have failed to update their respective stories to reflect the new language of the New York Times report.

The New York Times story, by the way, bears no correction or editor’s note drawing attention to the fact it has undergone significant edits.

In October 2020, the New York Post published a scoop revealing the existence of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the contents of which were allegedly copied by a computer repairman and given to then-President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. The laptop’s contents purport to show the younger Biden regularly traded on his father’s name to enrich the family, including introducing his father “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.”

Giuliani gave “a hard drive or a laptop or something to that effect” last year to law enforcement officials in Delaware, a spokesperson for Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings confirmed. State officials then turned everything over to the FBI. Federal officials confirmed elsewhere the FBI also “seized the laptop and an external hard drive” held by the repairman.

The broader press responded to the New York Post’s scoop by dismissing it out of hand as “Russian disinformation.” Twitter also locked the New York Post out of its Twitter account, blocking the news publication from sharing its report.

For the record, neither Biden, nor his father, nor his father’s administration has denied the authenticity of the emails pulled from the laptop. Further, federal law enforcement officials and other government officials have since confirmed the authenticity of the documents retrieved from the laptop.

Hunter Biden revealed later in December 2020 that he was 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 in 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 “Russian disinformation” narrative is concerned, 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, but the media took Biden’s side anyway and gave him what Republicans considered an in-kind contribution by suppressing the news story.

So, federal officials have said the emails 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 appeared first in the pages of the New York Post. The U.S. intelligence community has never said otherwise, and no newsroom has ever debunked this story.

So, this is the opposite of “unsubstantiated.” That the New York Times claimed otherwise, despite everything we know about the laptop story, suggests either they haven’t been paying attention or they thought they could pull a fast one on you.