If there were a federal “Truth in Headlines” law, the Washington Post would be facing severe penalties for the banner over last Sunday’s editorial “The Hunter Biden story is an opportunity for a reckoning”. Any reader who expected a mea culpa found the opposite, a series of excuses for mainstream and social media’s pre-election suppression of news about the contents of the laptop that Joe Biden’s son dropped off at a computer repair shop and never reclaimed.
The editorial does its best to minimize the significance of the laptop’s information, which it belatedly started covering last week:
The Post reported Wednesday on the multimillion-dollar deals the president’s son made with a Chinese energy company. The investigation adds new details and confirms old ones about the ways in which Joe Biden’s family has profited from trading overseas on his name – something for which the president deserves criticism for tacitly condoning. What it does not do, despite some conservatives’ insistence otherwise, is prove that President Biden acted corruptly. This is a reality that an election-year probe by Senate Republicans into improper influence or wrongdoing has already confirmed.
It’s true that Hunter’s hard drive doesn’t contain an e-mail from Biden père to fils saying, “Great work, son. Thanks for my ten percent of the bribe money.” But it does furnish much circumstantial evidence that Joe Biden knew about his son’s activities and that money from them wound up in his bank account. The WaPo’s assertion that a “probe by Senate Republicans” cleared the President of corruption allegations is sleight-of-hand. The report discussed in the New York Times story linked by the editorial never mentions Hunter’s laptop. It draws entirely on other records and was completed in September 2020, weeks before the New York Post broke the laptop story.
Let’s give Joe Biden a gigantic dose of benefit of the doubt. The WaPo itself concedes that “Joe Biden’s family has profited from trading overseas on his name – something for which the president deserves criticism for tacitly condoning”. (Not that the WaPo has ever proffered any such criticism.) Why is criticism deserved? Because Joe made it possible for his relatives to profit from their corrupt schemes. And this wasn’t the petty profiteering from kinship of which figures like Donald Nixon, Billy Carter and Hugh Rodham were at various times accused. Hunter Biden and his uncle Jim have raked in millions of dollars by exploiting their relationship to Joe. What the laptop materials reveal is that Joe knew that he was being exploited and cooperated. Whether he himself received a share of the loot hardly matters.
Why, then, was this important insight into Joe Biden’s character suppressed? The WaPo doesn’t deny the deliberate suppression but tries to attribute it to appropriate skepticism:
When the New York Post published its blockbuster exclusive on the contents of a laptop said to have been abandoned at a Delaware repair shop by Hunter Biden, mainstream media organizations balked at running with the same narrative. Social media sites displayed even greater caution. Twitter blocked the story altogether, pointing to a policy against hacked materials, and suspended the New York Post’s account for sharing it; Facebook downranked the story in the algorithms that govern users’ news feeds for fear that it was based on misinformation. Now, The Washington Post and the New York Times have vouched for many of the relevant communications.
This series of events has prompted allegations of a coverup, or at best a double standard in the treatment of conservative and liberal politicians by mainstream media and social media sites. Yet there was reason in this case for reluctance on the part of the publications and the platforms alike. Both had been the unwitting tools of a Russian influence campaign in 2016, and it was only prudent to suspect a similar plot lay behind the mysterious appearance of a computer stuffed with juicy documents and conveniently handed over to President Donald Trump’s toxic personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. Indeed, at the time there was also an ongoing disinformation operation from Moscow involving – among other things – doctored recordings supposedly showing Joe Biden improperly pressuring the then-president of Ukraine to aid Hunter Biden’s business interests – a fraud promoted by Mr. Giuliani.
That political campaigns are rife with what is now trendily called “disinformation” isn’t exactly a new discovery. It’s been true ever since polities started holding elections. One would think that the WaPo’s editors would have some tools in their kit for distinguishing the plausible sheep from the meritless goats. If they do, they didn’t bring them out to evaluate the laptop disclosures. Instead, they and their MSM peers assumed that Russian skullduggery likely lay behind the story. Writing in The Spectator, Peter Van Buren, a veteran of many years of U.S. “information operations”, explains why the notion that Russia fabricated the laptop requires heroic suspension of disbelief:
During my twenty-four-year State Department career, I was exposed to foreign disinformation, and as a journalist today, I read the Hunter Biden emails. There is no way experienced intelligence officers could have mistaken the contents of the Biden laptop for fake, produced material.
The most glaring reason is that most of the important emails could be verified by simply contacting the recipient and asking him if the message was real. Disinfo at this level of sophistication would never be so simple to disprove.
In addition, the laptop contents were about 80 percent garbage and maybe 20 percent useful (dirty) information, a huge waste of time if you are trying to move your adversary to act in a certain way. Such an overbearing amount of non-actionable material also risks burying the good stuff, and if this is disinfo you want your adversary to find the good stuff. It is also expensive to produce information that has no take attached to it, and fake info of any kind is at risk of discovery, blowing the whole operation. Lastly, nothing on the laptop was a smoking gun. You need the disinfo to lead fairly directly to some sort of actionable conclusion, a smoking gun, or your cleverness will be wasted.
One shouldn’t need 24 years in the State Department to reach those commonsensical conclusions. Mr. Van Buren contrasts the laptop with a real disinformation document, the “Steele Dossier”, whose allegations were zealously pursued by the WaPo, among many others, during and after the 2016 Presidential campaign. (I’m pretty sure that the WaPo’s reference to a “Russian influence campaign in 2016” isn’t to Mr. Steele’s production. If it is, the editorial is a cosmic instance of “buying the lede”. Surely the editors aren’t now conceding that the dossier was “fake news”.)
To begin, Steele pastes fake classified markings on his document. That signals amateur work to the pros but causes the media to salivate: Steele’s goal (always remember who your target is and who you are trying to fool).
Steele never names his sources, to prevent verification by the media (a major tell). Steele also finds a way to push the important info up front, in his case a Summary. If Biden’s laptop was disinfo, the makers could have included an Index, or Note to Self where “Hunter” called out the good stuff. Or maybe even a fake email doing the same. Steele’s dossier is also concise, at 35 typed pages. Hunter’s laptop is a pack rat’s nightmare of jumbled stuff: thousands of pages, receipts, info on cam girls and the like.
The WaPo editors pose as naïve babes in the wood, only now forced to think about the rudiments of their craft. Therefore, they and their counterparts can’t be blamed for their innocent dismissal of news first trumpeted by the declassé New York Post. They argue, in short, that because they are fools, they can’t be knaves. But in fact it’s possible to be both.