As the President’s son pays $1,000,000 in back taxes in a desperate attempt to avoid criminal prosecution, The New York Times tries to take credit for verifying the existence of his laptop after the media establishment and their partners in the intelligence community have been lying about it for almost two years. This is election interference on a grand scale.
Last week, The New York Times buried a bombshell story about President Joe Biden’s troubled son, Hunter, and the ongoing investigation into his financial dealings deep in the paper, somewhere way back on page 20. They chose to lead with the rather mundane headline, “Hunter Biden Paid Tax Bill, but Broad Federal Investigation Continues,” as though the salient point was that he paid up properly. Of course, Hunter only paid the estimated $1 million bill because he’s in the middle of a massive Justice Department investigation and has been for several years. The hope on his part is that “the payment could make it harder for prosecutors to win a conviction or a long sentence for tax-related offenses, according to tax law experts, since juries and judges tend to be more sympathetic to defendants who have paid their bill.” Unfortunately for Hunter and the Biden family including the President himself, “Mr. Biden’s taxes are just one element of the broader investigation stemming from work he did around the world. Hunter Biden is a Yale-educated lawyer; his professional life has intersected with his father’s public service, including working as a registered lobbyist for domestic interests and, while his father was vice president, pursuing deals and clients in Asia and Europe.”
This is a convoluted way of saying that the President himself might be implicated in the investigation, especially as the two shared a bank account and other financial arrangements highly unusual for a Senator and a sitting Vice President. Likewise, the Times seems intent on downplaying Hunter’s potential criminal exposure, that “broader” investigation which includes an empaneled grand jury taking witness testimony, “As recently as last month, the federal grand jury heard testimony in Wilmington, Del., from two witnesses, one of whom was a former employee of Hunter Biden whose lawyer was later subpoenaed for financial records that reflected money Mr. Biden received from a Ukrainian energy company.” It goes without saying that these are not the sort of developments that surround a simple tax matter, especially when the investigation is wide ranging enough to include “Mr. Biden’s relationships with interests in Kazakhstan, a Chinese energy conglomerate and Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company.” It is, however, the sort of thing that happens when a Special Counsel is looking into “possible criminal violations of tax laws, as well as foreign lobbying and money laundering rules, according to the people familiar with the inquiry.” Still, the authors are rather quick to point out that “prosecutors face a number of hurdles to bringing criminal charges, the people familiar with the investigation said,” claiming that the “Justice Department has given no public indication that it has made decisions about any element of the case,” as if it ever does until an indictment is issued. Needless to say, they provided no such caveats when reporting on any of the myriad investigations into former President Donald Trump, however flimsy the charges.
Normally, such pro-Biden spin would be unremarkable given the friendly source, but the real outrage arrives when the Times rather flippantly remarks that “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.” Rarely do we see such a dramatic rewriting of a sordid history in just a couple of sentences, completely disregarding that the laptop was part of an almost two year cover up perpetrated by the mainstream media, social media companies, the “retired” intelligence community, and even the FBI itself. Further, this cover up was designed specifically to interfere with an election. The Times would like to pretend these are some new revelations from their own reporting, but it was The New York Post that first broke the story way back in October 2020 complete with the emails in question and photographs of Hunter himself in various compromising positions including with a crack pipe.
At the time, the mainstream media and social media giants Facebook and Twitter conspired to completely suppress the existence of both the laptop and the damaging materials by flat out lying about it. These lies included claims it was “Russian disinformation” (Politico), “hacked materials” (Twitter), or simply discredited (NPR), none of which were true and, worse, they clearly knew it at the time, choosing to intentionally deceive the public rather than report the truth. How do we know this? For starters, Hunter Biden himself never denied the emails were real or the laptop was his. Shortly after the story broke, multiple witnesses came forward to corroborate the details. The only evidence in question was the laptop itself, everything else like the claims of Russian disinformation was simply made up. This is why the supposed intelligence experts that conspired with Politico noted in their own piece, “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails…are genuine or not,” meaning they had no evidence, but were willing to make the claim and interfere in a Presidential election anyway. The lies, however, were enough to ban the story from social media including the locking of the oldest newspaper in the country’s Facebook account and so severe the ban extended even to sharing it in private messages.
They also provided then-candidate Biden with a useful talking point in the Presidential Debates. When President Trump referenced the laptop, Biden responded by saying “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant…Five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except his good friend Rudy Giuliani.” In other words, the future President told the American people a total lie and he knew it as well. The exchange was promptly fact-checked, where CNN found it only “somewhat misleading,” oddly insinuating that the Post’s reporting overlaps “with Russia’s own disinformation efforts against Biden.” Then, they launch into a broadside against Trump himself, as if he were not the one being smeared, claiming that the people disputing the Russian disinformation nonsense including then Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe “were accused of politicizing intelligence to help Trump,” and “abusing his position and politicizing intelligence to help Trump’s campaign.” They showed no such ire for the former intelligence frauds who made the obviously fake Russian disinformation claim in the first place. Apparently, they were not abusing their positions or politicizing intelligence, even though they, the mainstream media, and social media companies quite literally weaponized all of their positions in the middle of a Presidential campaign.
This level of cognitive dissonance doesn’t occur accidentally. There is no doubt that there were meetings in editorial rooms and board rooms where the main question wasn’t whether the story was legitimate or not, but rather how best to suppress it. In other words, how best to interfere in a Presidential election and the “disinformation” conclusion was reached to support the primary goal of suppressing the story rather than in any attempt to learn the truth. This, of course, is the precise opposite of what the media is supposed to do, but they are still doing it to this day. The Post attempted to contact some of the fifty experts to get their thoughts on how they could’ve been so wrong. Rather than expressing any remorse or shame, most stood by their statements. James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence said, “Yes, I stand by the statement made AT THE TIME, and would call attention to its 5th paragraph. I think sounding such a cautionary note AT THE TIME was appropriate.” Russ Travers, former National Counterterrorism Center acting director, “The letter explicitly stated that we didn’t know if the emails were genuine, but that we were concerned about Russian disinformation efforts. I spent 25 years as a Soviet/Russian analyst. Given the context of what the Russians were doing at the time (and continue to do — Ukraine being just the latest example), I considered the cautionary warning to be prudent.” One of them had the temerity to insist he was too busy to comment. Of course, they were lying then and lying now: It’s never prudent to make false claims with no evidence.
Perhaps even more frightening, the FBI was in possession of the laptop for months before the story broke. They could have prevented this massive election interference simply by telling the truth. Instead, they chose to lie about it as well, pretending they couldn’t very its authenticity when they already had as part of their investigation. Republican Senator Ron Johnson explains, “The FBI had to know that. They wouldn’t tell us when we were offered the laptop. I couldn’t take it because I had to do my due diligence. The FBI knew,” he said in the interview his past weekend. “We reached out to the FBI. They wouldn’t tell us it was genuine. They should have. But they didn’t. People should be outraged,” he added. I couldn’t agree more: For the past five years, we have been told over and over again that election interference is rampant and our democracy is at risk. The very same people peddling those stories conducted their own interference operation on a grand scale. It’s long past time for a reckoning.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 