Sources: NY Post published Biden story amid staff doubts
NEWYORK— The New York Post’s front-page article about Hunter Biden published last week was written mostly by a staff reporter who refused to put his nameon it, two Post employees said.
Bruce Golding, a reporter at the Rupert Murdochowned tabloid since 2007, did not allow his byline to be used because he had concerns over the article’s credibility, the two Post employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
Coming late in the presidential campaign, the article suggested that former Vice President Joe Biden had used his position to enrich his son Hunter.
The Post based the story on photos and documents the paper said it had taken from the hard drive of a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden.
Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents, said five people with knowledge of the tabloid’s innerworkings. Staffmembers also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing, the people said.
The article named two sources: Steve Bannon, the former adviser to President Donald Trump now facing federal fraud charges, who was said to have made the paper aware of the hard drive last month; and Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, who was said to have given the paper “a copy” of the hard drive Oct. 11.
Giuliani said he chose the Post because “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.”
Top editors met Oct. 11 to discuss how to use the material provided by Giuliani. The group included tabloid veteran Colin Allan; Stephen Lynch, editor-inchief; and Michelle Gotthelf, the digital editor-inchief, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting. Allan, who was The Post’s editor-in-chief from 2001 to 2016 and returned last year as an adviser, urged his colleagues to move quickly, the person said.
As deadline approached, editors pressed staff members to add their bylines to the story— and at least one aside from Golding refused, two Post journalists said.
Headlined “BIDEN SECRET E-MAILS,” the article appeared Wednesday with two bylines: EmmaJo Morris, a deputy politics editor who joined the paper after four years at the Murdoch- owned Fox News, and Gabrielle Fonrouge, a Post reporter since 2014.
The article relied on documents purportedly taken from the hard drive to suggest that the elder Biden, as vice president, had directed U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine to benefit his son, a former board member of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company.
The article also suggested that the elder Biden had met with a Burisma adviser, Vadym Pozharskyi.
On Wednesday, a Biden campaign spokesman said Biden’s official schedules showed no meeting between the former vice president and the adviser.
Last month, two Republican-led Senate committees investigating the matter said they had found no evidence of wrong doing by the former vice president.
The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have reported that they could not independently verify the data in the New York Post article.
“The story was vetted and The Post stands by its reporting,” a Post spokeswoman said in a statement.