by WorldTribune Staff, May 28, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
A deposition transcript released by the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees in April 2023 revealed that the Biden campaign in 2020 helped spur an open letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials claiming the Hunter Biden laptop story had the "earmarks" of Russian disinformation.
A few days after the letter was released, Joe Biden mentioned it in his debate with President Donald Trump.
Now, the Biden Department of Justice has introduced the laptop as evidence in Hunter Biden's June trial on federal gun charges.
“The defendant’s laptop is real,” the DOJ said.
"The federal prosecutors went on to denounce suggestions of Russian disinformation, long peddled by the Bidens, the media and former intelligence officials, as nothing more than a 'conspiracy theory,' " law professor Jonathan Turley noted in a May 26 op-ed.
"The media eagerly spread the claim of Russian disinformation before the presidential election. Twitter and others suppressed the story. This was done through one of the most skillful disinformation campaigns in history," Turley wrote.
To this day, Turley added, The Washington Post has supported the debunked reporting of Phillip Bump and others who pushed the laptop as a Russian plot.
"Even after the government has declared this reporting as part of a 'conspiracy theory,' the Post continues to support the reporting by Bump and others," Turley wrote.
Related: For The Record, a series of excerpts from ‘Report on the Biden Laptop', March 19 - May 10, 2024
When the New York Post first broke the laptop story, many in independent media noted that the laptop was “self-authenticating” as many of the emails were confirmed by third parties and other evidence.
The DOJ last week, Turley noted, "made the same claim of 'self-authentication' as well as independent confirmation by federal investigators."
The laptop includes not just pictures of Hunter Biden using drugs but brandishing a handgun.
The DOJ told the court in the Hunter Biden gun case: “The defendant’s theory about the laptop is a conspiracy theory with no supporting evidence.” It added that the “laptop is real (it will be introduced as a trial exhibit) and it contains significant evidence of the defendant’s guilt.”
Turley concluded: "The response from the media has been a collective shrug. Worse yet, many of these same political and media figures continue to support censorship and government regulations of 'disinformation' while the government is now acknowledging that they carried off one of the most successful disinformation campaigns in history."
