President Biden, Twitter, others were wrong about Hunter Biden’s laptop

It’s been called the laptop from hell. Three years later, the laptop Hunter Biden dropped off at a computer repair shop in April 2019 is still burning. 

The New York Times recently ran a story confirming the laptop and the cache of files and emails on it are legitimate. 

Critics say the NYT piece is a very obvious conclusion that came way too late. The emails showed Hunter Biden may have used his father’s vice presidency to enrich himself and his dad. 

The revelation first came during the height of the 2020 Presidential campaign, when the information about the laptop could have damaged Joe Biden’s reputation. News organizations and tech giants like Twitter and Facebook buried the story and even labeled it Russian disinformation. 

Now that its authenticity is fit to print, here’s a look at the most important people and organizations who got the story wrong.

Number one on the list is President Joe Biden. 

“There are fifty former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant,” then-candidate Biden said in Nashville during the final 2020 presidential debate. 

“Five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage,” candidate Biden continued.  

That statement was a lie, according to former Attorney General Bill Barr, who told Fox News he was “shocked” and “disturbed” when Biden said it. 

“He’s squarely confronted with the laptop, and he suggested that it was Russian disinformation and pointed to the letter written by some intelligence people that was baseless. Which he knew was a lie,” Barr said.

Number two: Twitter.

When the New York Post published the original story about the laptop, the social media site took it down and blocked anyone else from sharing the story. It also locked The Post out of its account for two weeks. 

Then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey later admitted the company made a “total mistake”. 

“It was literally just a process error. This was not against them in any particular way,” Dorsey said during a Congressional hearing. 

Twitter originally said they blocked the story because it violated what they call their “Hacked Materials Policy”. 

According to the Post, Twitter said in a statement the Post’s article included “personal and private information — like email addresses and phone numbers — which violate our rules.”

That explanation was not good enough for the Republican National Committee, which filed a complaint against Twitter with the Federal Elections Commission for blocking the story, claiming Twitter used corporate resources to help a campaign. The New York Times first reported that the FEC dismissed the complaint. 

Mac Isaac, the owner of the Mac repair shop where Biden left the laptop, sued Twitter for defamation. Isaac claimed that when Twitter labeled the material as hacked, it harmed his reputation as a computer repairman. He lost that case and was ordered by the court to pay Twitter’s legal fees.

Third: left-leaning media outlets. 

The moment former intelligence officials wrote that the laptop had the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign, news organizations labeled as left or lean left by AllSides focused their coverage on Russian disinformation for the remainder of the campaign.  

The Washington Post, NBC, CNN, USA Today, Bloomberg, PBS, and others published reporting that the laptop was being investigated as Russian disinformation. They also interviewed high-level figures, like members of Congress and former intelligence officials, who were outright calling it a Russian disinformation campaign. 

NPR even put out a statement explaining why it wasn’t reporting on the story. Terence Samuels, NPR’s Managing Editor for News, wrote: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” 

But John Ratcliffe, the Director of National Intelligence at the time, came out and publicly stated the laptop was not Russian disinformation. Other sources, including Hunter Biden’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski, publicly stated that the laptop was legitimate.

“Let me be clear: The intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports that,” DNI Ratcliffe said in October 2020.

Last but not least: politicians.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has been criticized by Republicans for using his influence as the House Intelligence Committee Chairman to push the Russian disinformation narrative. 

“We know that this whole smear on Joe Biden comes from the Kremlin,” the California Democrat said on CNN. 

Schiff added that then-President Trump “is only too happy in having Kremlin help in trying to amplify it.” 

Joe Biden – and all of us – SHOULD be furious that media outlets are spreading what is very likely Russian propaganda.

1/ I’ve seen the intel. The mainstreaming of misinformation is Russia’s 2020 goal. Here’s what we know, and why we can’t take it lying down.

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) October 17, 2020

As mentioned earlier, DNI Ratcliffe confirmed that intelligence connecting the laptop with Russian disinformation didn’t exist and that nothing was shared with Members of Congress.