Where is the outrage over Hunter Biden's laptop abomination?
When President Donald Trump raised Hunter Biden's laptop during the final 2020 presidential debate, Joe Biden dismissed it as a “Russian plant,” citing “five former heads of the CIA” who say it's “a bunch of garbage.”
We now know this was patently untrue. But at the time, almost no one in the news media questioned Biden's false assertion. To the contrary, CNN questioned whether Trump had “spread Russian disinformation” during the debate.
Twitter suppressed the New York Post story that broke the news of the laptop's existence, preventing users from sharing the story or even sending it by direct message. Worse, the company suspended the New York Post's Twitter account.
This is a scandal — one that appears to involve collusion between the FBI, the intelligence community and social media platforms to block a valid news story that could have damaged Biden. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy points out that the evidence the FBI interfered in the 2020 presidential election “is by leaps and bounds stronger than the evidence that the Trump campaign corruptly conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election.”
We now know that Twitter and Facebook suppressed the story after U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials warned them to be on the lookout for foreign disinformation. In a sworn declaration to the Federal Election Commission, Yoel Roth, Twitter's then-head of “site integrity,” said he had held “regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and industry peers regarding election security” during which “federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected `hack-and-leak' operations by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October,” adding “I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
At the time the FBI was delivering these warnings, it was in possession of the laptop, which it had seized in December 2019 from the computer repair shop where Hunter Biden left it.
Rep. Ro Khanna, a Bernie Sanders ally who represents Silicon Valley in Congress, revealed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week that he had written to Twitter expressing concern about the suppression. He points out that Twitter defended its actions by claiming the story violated company policy because it contained information obtained through illegal means. By that definition, he writes, “they'd have to suspend any account that posted the Pentagon Papers.” He is right.
Not only that, they would also have to suppress any account that cited the illegally obtained classified intelligence released by WikiLeaks, or the classified intelligence unlawfully shared by Edward Snowden. They did not.
So where is the outrage from the mainstream news media? What was the origin of that letter signed by those 51 intelligence officials? Who wrote it and circulated it for signature? To this day, the news media shows little or no interest in investigating how this story was suppressed.
The laptop's suppression was justified as an effort to protect our democracy from foreign interference. But many Americans believe that reporting failures like this are the real threat to democracy. An October New York Times-Siena College poll found that 84% of respondents view the media as a threat to democracy — including 59% who agreed the press is a “major threat.”
More Americans said the media is a major threat to democracy than said Trump is. And an October Gallup poll found just 34% of Americans trust major news organizations to report “fully, accurately and fairly” on the news.
Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, is working to restore public trust in the social media platform by providing transparency as to how this sorry episode took place. Good for him. Perhaps mainstream news organizations ought to be engaged in similar soul-searching — so they can restore public trust in their platforms as well.