As Burisma Bombshell Breaks, NY Post Adds to Hunter's Very Bad Thursday by Informing World What FBI Knew
Well, here’s a shocker: On the same day that Twitter censored reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the FBI reportedly told the social media giant that the contents of it were accurate.
I know, you would think, given that information, the platform wouldn’t have suppressed sharing of reportage on the scandal. But then, you would be surprised how willing and able our media are prepared to be in service of the Biden family. It was something to keep in mind as the events of Thursday unfolded.
In case you missed it, the latest bombshell about the laptop — fittingly reported by the New York Post, the same paper that originally broke the laptop scandal in October 2020 — was part of an astoundingly bad afternoon for President Joe Biden and his son.
Not much earlier, Republicans on the Senate Oversight Committee, led by Iowa GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley, released a document from an FBI informant who alleged Burisma executives told him that the Ukrainian energy conglomerate had paid $10 million in bribes to the Bidens.
While Hunter Biden’s strange dealings abroad had long been reported in the conservative media, it was the messages from Hunter’s laptop — left at a Delaware repair shop in 2019 and then never picked up — that began to drive home the point that the president’s only living son had been trading off his father’s name in an exceptionally untoward way for some time.
“Among them,” the Post notes, “was the revelation that Joe Biden — referred to as the ‘big guy’ — was penciled in for a 10% cut of proceeds from son Hunter and brother James Biden’s partnership with Chinese government-linked CEFC China Energy.”
Not only that, but if the laptop were genuine, his father had been dissembling about just how much he knew regarding his son and his international business dealings — which was, to hear Joe tell it, absolutely nothing.
Granted, his claim that he’d never talked to Hunter about what he was doing with overseas business dealings had a whiff of Captain Renault insisting he was shocked — shocked! — that gambling was going on in here, but the information on the laptop drove that home.
However, if you were on Twitter, generally the most important network in terms of disseminating news and views on American politics, you couldn’t distribute the article for two days.
That’s because the social media giant blocked distribution of the story for two days and locked the paper out of its account for two weeks in a standoff over whether information from the computers were “hacked materials.”
On Oct. 15, then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the company’s “communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable.”
Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable. https://t.co/v55vDVVlgt
— jack (@jack) October 14, 2020
In March 2021, he also told Congress the company doesn’t have a “censoring department” and the decision to curtail sharing of the reporting just before the 2020 election was a “total mistake.” Locking the Post out of their account was merely a “process error,” Dorsey said. But, as the paper noted, he wouldn’t attribute those mistakes or errors to anyone in particular.
That story gains an additional wrinkle with the news that, on Monday, Laura Dehmlow — section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force — told the House Judiciary Committee that Twitter was informed on the day that they started censoring the reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop that its contents were genuine.
“Somebody from Twitter essentially asked whether the laptop was real,” Dehmlow said in closed-door testimony Monday, according to the Post.
“And one of the FBI folks who was on the call did confirm that, ‘yes, it was,’ before another participant jumped in and said, ‘no further comment,’” she continued.
Not that they were going to share that information with the American public, mind you. As the Post noted, “The FBI’s non-public verification of the laptop occurred on Oct. 14, 2020, hours after The Post published a story detailing how an email showed Joe Biden met while vice president with an executive at Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings — contradicting his claims that he ‘never’ discussed foreign business dealings with his relatives.”
Now, of course, every major media organization worth its salt recognizes the contents of the laptop as genuine.
And at the same time, they all pretended, by the time they got around to “verifying it” — a few years after the FBI did, mind you — that it was no big deal.
None of these media organizations is going to do any self-reflection on the fact it whiffed so badly on branding the laptop disinformation (assuming it wasn’t intentional), nor are they going to seriously start asking Joe Biden about his claim during the Oct. 22, 2020, debate that the laptop was a “Russian plant,” referring to a letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials saying that the information on it had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Because, again, all of this is no big deal to them.
Naturally, too, the same people who were crowing over the contents of the laptop being shared on social media are going to be crowing about the Republican members of the Senate Oversight Committee releasing a document detailing a conversation with an FBI informant who said the CEO and founder of Burisma — the energy giant that once had Hunter Biden on its board despite Hunter’s complete lack of experience with Eastern Europe or the energy sector — bragged about buying off two Bidens. (Subscribe to The Western Journal to read our full breakdown of the document in its entirety.)
🚨BREAKING🚨
The FD-1023 form alleging then-Vice President JOE BIDEN was involved in a $5,000,000 bribery scheme with a Burisma executive has been released by @ChuckGrassley.
Read 👇 pic.twitter.com/Mc6dVIwdsG
— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) July 20, 2023
During the conversations, the FBI informant expressed concern to Burisma CEO Myopia Zlochevsky that wire transfers to the Bidens might set off alarm bells in the United States. The source said Zlochevsky balked at any chance of being caught, saying he “did not send any funds directly to the ‘Big Guy‘ (which [the informant] understood was a reference to Joe Biden).”
The informant said Zlochevsky insisted that “it would take them (investigators) 10 years to find the records (i.e. illicit payments to Joe Biden).”
The kind of reporting that got? Take this headline in The Hill (which, unlike many establishment outlets, at least had a story about it): “Republicans release FBI form with unverified Biden-Burisma allegations.” An hour later, same publication: “FBI ‘expressly’ opposed GOP release of unverified Biden tip.”
Because the FBI and the media have never steered us wrong on the Bidens and their business dealings, right?
Thank heavens for our national big-government deep-state apparatus — and the media gatekeepers who stand watch with them to make sure that unverified, hacked, stolen, errant misinformation doesn’t fall into our hands without at least a smirking headline and a dismissive wave.
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