When prosecutors in Hunter Biden's trial introduced his infamous "laptop from hell" as evidence, it was tremendous vindication for those of us who reported on the laptop and its salacious contents since October 2020. We were right.
Of course, we knew that all the way back in October 2020, but Big Tech, the Biden campaign, and the mainstream media colluded to keep the laptop from the headlines and social media with the completely contrived story that the laptop was Russian disinformation. Sure, after the election, once Biden had been installed as president, the mainstream media slowly started to admit that the laptop was genuine.
However, the fact that the Biden Justice Department was now using the laptop as evidence and admitting the laptop was genuine and untampered with was the ultimate vindication of conservative media and an indictment of Big Tech and the mainstream media. Yet there are still some holdouts in the mainstream media who can't admit that they are wrong.
I give you Philip Bump of the Washington Post, who concludes that the right is celebrating the DOJ's admission of the laptop as evidence for no reason. Get this: he writes, "The issue was always whether the material was part of a foreign effort to influence the election — as had occurred four years before."
Bump then proceeds to claim that the actual laptop presented as evidence in the trial wasn't necessarily the source of the New York Post story. I'm not kidding.
The FBI was already investigating Hunter Biden when he dropped off his laptop for repairs in April 2019. Eventually, the bureau learned about the abandoned device and took possession of it along with a hard drive that contained some material recovered from the device. At another point, the FBI also obtained material stored by Apple, the contents of Hunter Biden’s iCloud account. That material included photos, messages and emails.
What the New York Post got was apparently a copy of that hard drive, made by the owner of the repair shop, John Paul Mac Isaac.
[...]
The issue at the time of the New York Post report was in part that the material might not be authentic. In part, though, it was that it was authentic — and being released in October 2020 as part of a foreign effort to influence the outcome of the presidential race.
That's a fascinating and hilarious story, especially since we've seen more disinformation from the Biden campaign than we've seen stories about fake evidence on the laptop.
What we did see was a massive effort to dispute the laptop and prevent it from even being talked about, including the "Russian disinformation" theory that 51 intelligence officials boosted. And we now know that the Biden administration recruited them to say so.
Related: Will Joe Biden Pardon Hunter?
And the letter itself was laughable. The signees not only admitted that they never examined the contents of the laptop but also that they had no evidence of Russian involvement. In other words, they had no clue; they just needed to cast doubt on it so Biden could deny the authenticity of the laptop during his debate with Trump.
But no one seriously believed that the laptop was Russian disinformation. Anyone who saw what was on the laptop knew that it was legitimate and verifiable. Russians hadn't forced Hunter Biden to take his laptop to the repair shop and abandon it.
The only reason the whole Russia narrative gained any legs is that the media needed the excuse not to cover the laptop's contents, which included countless details of influence-peddling, which were far more interesting and important than the documentation of Hunter's drug abuse and paying women for sex.
Sadly, people like Bump have to cling to the idea that the efforts to censor the laptop story in the fall of 2020 were justifiable because they can't admit that they were the ones trying to corruptly influence an election by preventing damaging information about their candidate from being exposed.
Weird. That's exactly what Alvin Bragg charged Trump with.
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