On Oct. 14, 2020, the New York Post began publishing a series of reports about the business dealings of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in countries in which Biden, as Vice President, wielded considerable influence (including Ukraine and China) and would again if elected president.
U.S. corporate media and Big Tech moved immediately to suppress the reports that were potentially devastating to their preferred candidate in the 2020 presidential election.
It was "one of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern American electoral history," noted independent journalist Glenn Greenwald, who saw his own reporting on the issue suppressed by the outlet, The Intercept, he was working for.
In their effort to suppress the news of the emails found on Hunter Biden's laptop, Big Media and Big Tech universally cited a letter signed by more than 50 former intelligence officials who suspected the story was "Russian disinformation."
The former intel officials "did not actually say that the 'Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo.' Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do with them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this 'suspicion' based on their experience," Greenwald noted in a March 17 analysis on substack.com.
The intel officials said in the letter: "We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case."
"But a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump's defeat had no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former officials actually said or whether it was in fact true," Greenwald noted. "They had an election to manipulate. As a result, that these emails were 'Russian disinformation' — meaning that they were fake and that Russia manufactured them — became an article of faith among the U.S.'s justifiably despised class of media employees. Very few even included the crucial caveat that the intelligence officials themselves stressed: namely, that they had no evidence at all to corroborate this claim."
The authenticity of the New York Post's reporting "was clear from the start," Greenwald wrote, adding that he had "staked my career on its authenticity when I demanded that The Intercept publish my analysis of these revelations, and then resigned when its vehemently anti-Trump editors censored any discussion of those emails precisely because it was indisputable that the archive was authentic."
"Any residual doubts that the Biden archive was genuine," Greenwald noted, "were shattered when a reporter from Politico, Ben Schreckinger, published a book last September, entitled "The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power," in which his new reporting proved that the key emails on which the New York Post relied were entirely authentic."
The revelations in Schreckinger's book "were almost completely ignored by the very same corporate media outlets that published the CIA's now-debunked lies. They just pretended it never happened," Greenwald added.
"What this means," Greenwald continued, "is that, in the crucial days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, most of the corporate media spread an absolute lie about The New York Post's reporting in order to mislead and manipulate the American electorate. It means that Big Tech monopolies, along with Twitter, censored this story based on a lie from 'the intelligence community.' It means that Facebook's promise from its DNC operative that it would suppress discussion of the reporting in order to conduct a 'fact-check' of these documents was a fraud because if an honest one had been conducted, it would have proven that Facebook’s censorship decree was based on a lie. It means that millions of Americans were denied the ability to hear about reporting on the candidate leading all polls to become the next president, and instead were subjected to a barrage of lies about the provenance (Russia did it) and authenticity (disinformation!) of these documents."
The "real collusion" was between the Big Tech, Media, and the Intelligence Community, whose suppression of the reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop amounted to a "highly effective information Iron Curtain," Steve Cortes wrote in a March 18 op-ed for substack.com.
An Oct. 19, 2020 article by the Intelligence Community’s "loyal stenographer," Politico's Natasha Bertrand "(now with CNN, naturally), formed the supposed basis for a near-total media blackout on the Laptop story and a concomitant Big Tech suppression of the explosive allegations against Joe Biden," Cortes wrote.
Legacy media only mentioned the laptop in passing, ignoring "the crux of the story was — and is — the 'big guy' Joe Biden who received 10% of all dirty money deals, according to his own son, whom Joe happily exploited," Cortes noted.
Cortes added: "In a more rational country, we citizens would hope for some media contrition, now that even the biased and disgraceful New York Times concedes that the Laptop is totally authentic. But do not hold your breath awaiting such self-awareness and introspection from some of the most duplicitous powerbrokers in American public life.
"So, instead of simply relying on fanciful hopes that a more honest legacy media will somehow emerge, what are the policy solutions to prevent this kind of suppression and manipulation going forward? The answer lies in using government power to deconstruct the mammoth power of Big Tech."
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