With Hunter Biden's laptop back in the news thanks to the NY Times, which turned "yes, some emails on the laptop were legit copies of emails" into "BIDEN'S UKRAINE SCANDAL!11!!", Washington Post reporter Philip Bump reminds us all why the laptop was at best a fantasy nothingburger, and at worst a deliberate Russian plant designed to sink Joe Biden.
When the New York Post reported on Oct. 14, 2020, that it was in possession of emails between a Ukrainian businessman and Hunter Biden, son of the then-Democratic presidential nominee, it would have been hard to predict what followed. This was less than three weeks before the election itself, and the content of the report was soon subsumed to the odd way in which the paper obtained the information. Mainstream outlets and social media companies balked at elevating the story’s claims, triggering frustrations on the right that remain to this day.
New reporting has re-elevated questions about how the story emerged and was handled. In light of that resurrection, it seems useful to articulate exactly why there was suspicion about the story’s origins — suspicion that itself has not entirely been resolved.
There are at least four questions that arose from the initial report. Those are:
- How did the information published by the New York Post purportedly get from Hunter Biden to the paper?
- Was that information legitimate?
- Was the media’s skepticism about the chain of custody and the information warranted?
- Was the social media blackout of the Post’s story warranted?
In this article, we’ll only look at the overlap of the first and third questions: Was the sourcing for information sufficiently dubious to justify caution by mainstream outlets? The answer, it seems clear, is yes.
You’ll remember the story. Hunter Biden allegedly showed up at a computer repair shop with three water-damaged laptop computers. According to John Paul Mac Isaac, the proprietor of that shop, one of the three computers was beyond repair, one simply needed an external keyboard and one required data recovery. Mac Isaac recovered the data, but no one ever came to pick the machine up. Eventually the data from the computer made its way to Rudolph W. Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal attorney. It was Giuliani that gave it to the Post.
That summary excludes a lot of detail, some known at the time the Post story broke, some that only emerged afterward. Here, in the form of a timeline, is detail that seems salient to our current consideration of how the Post got the material from the laptop as well as what was known at the time.
The 2016 election. It’s critical to remember what happened in the 2016 election cycle. Then WikiLeaks published two large clusters of documents stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee’s network and from John Podesta, a top aide to the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. The Podesta material in particular was released in tranches for days beginning Oct. 7, 2016. It was real information, understood even then to have been a product of Russian efforts, that became fodder for criticism of Clinton.
After the election, we learned the full scope of Russia’s involvement in the election. Suddenly, the coverage of the WikiLeaks material took on a new light: It was stolen by a foreign government to try to influence U.S. politics. Media companies reconsidered their coverage; should there have been more caution about playing into the hands of a foreign influence campaign?
This question was very much on people’s minds in the months before the 2020 election — particularly given indications that Russia was again hoping to aid Trump’s election.
Bump's timeline does make it clear that the source of the story has a massive credibility problem: a laptop that was never picked up from the shop made its way to Rudy Giuliani, the only taker.
And Rudy Giuliani is not exactly the most reliable source for anything other than laughs.
We still don't know anything about the laptop's journey some 18 months later. Nothing at all. It was complete bullshit then, and it's complete bullshit now. I could put copies of emails on my 8 year old laptop and then drop it off somewhere and never pick it up, yeah. Scandal!
Idiocy is what it is.
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