The New York Times Finally Admits Hunter Biden's Laptop Was Authentic
Rival breaks media for fueling push to squash Biden emails as 'Russian disinformation,' then says in passing they were real
The New York Times faces criticism from its oldest rival after quietly reversing its stance on the authenticity of emails found on Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop, mentioning only in passing that the messages were real and not the product of a campaign. Russian disinformation.
"Forgive the profanity, but you have to be screwing us," the New York Post said in an editorial published Thursday. “First, the New York Times decides more than a year later that Hunter Biden's business woes are worth a story. Then, deep in the piece, in passing, it shows that Hunter's laptop is legit."
The editorial came in response to a Wednesday article in which the Times reported on a criminal investigation into the tax returns of President Joe Biden's son, Hunter. The newspaper said emails between Hunter Biden and business partners about the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma and other foreign deals had been "authenticated" by "people known" to the messages and the tax probe.
The Times also noted that investigators recovered emails from "a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden at a Delaware repair shop." The article did not attempt to reconcile the admissions with earlier claims by the Times that the Post's bombshell report about the laptop hoard was "baseless" and that the Biden emails may have come from a hack of Burisma's data.
After the Post broke the laptop story in October 2020, exposing the Biden family's alleged influence peddling just weeks before the US presidential election, the Times helped spearhead efforts by legacy media to rule out the scoop. Many of those outlets cited a letter from more than 50 former US intelligence officials who claimed the alleged scandal was the product of Russian disinformation. Discussion of the topic was censored on social media. The Post was temporarily banned from Twitter.
“We are now 16 months away from the 2020 election, Joe Biden is safely in the White House, and the Times finally decides to report the news instead of carrying the Biden campaign water.” the Post said. “And they find that, well, Hunter Biden's business interests benefited from Joe Biden's political status to a suspect degree. Perhaps this is a topic worthy of examination.”
The post added that "There's never any shame with these 180." He mocked the Times for "willful ignorance" of the laptop's authenticity and cast doubt on a meeting between then-Vice President Joe Biden and a Burisma official, only to admit the reports were true more than a year later.
The Times was not alone in quietly acknowledging the veracity of reports previously branded as propaganda. A reporter for Politico, one of many outlets that called the Post's laptop scoop "Russian disinformation," wrote last September that he had verified the authenticity of several of the key emails in question.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki called the laptop emails Russian disinformation both before and after the election, including at least last September.
Candidate Biden then used the letter from former intelligence officials to debunk questions about the laptop, saying former spy chiefs had found the story to be a "Russian Plant."
Some of the emails the Times now recognizes as authentic were between Hunter Biden and a former business associate, Devon Archer, who was sentenced late last month to more than a year in prison for a federal fraud conviction.
