When the New York Post first reported in 2020 about a laptop once used by Hunter Biden, which the newspaper said contained incriminating evidence against him and his father, Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was running for president, the issue broke out that creates a firestorm.
Many national news outlets raised questions about the laptop’s existence and claims about its contents, while major social media platforms limited contributions to the Post’s reporting. Conservatives said these reactions were evidence of liberal censorship.
Many of the Post’s claims in its reporting on the laptop, in which the publication attempted to link President Biden to corrupt business dealings, have not been proven. But the laptop contained enough incriminating evidence to continue prosecuting Hunter Biden.
The laptop and some of its contents played a visible role in federal prosecutors’ case against the president’s son, who was accused of lying on a gun application in 2018 by failing to disclose his drug use. A prosecutor briefly held the laptop before a jury in Delaware, and an FBI agent later testified that messages and photos on it and in personal data stored on cloud computing servers by Mr. Biden made clear his drug use.
On Tuesday, the jury found Mr. Biden, 54, guilty of three felonies. He will be sentenced at a later date.
A copy of the hard drive of the laptop, a silver Apple MacBook Pro, that Mr. Biden accidentally left behind at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, was given to The Post by Rudolph W. Giuliani, an ally of Donald J. Trump, who was president at the time.
The Post first reported the laptop’s existence on October 14, 2020, less than a month before the presidential election. In a front-page article, The Post wrote that the laptop contained emails it called “smoking gun” showing corruption in the Biden family, including correspondence that appeared to describe a meeting Mr. Biden had between his father and had arranged for a Ukrainian businessman when his father was vice president.
Immediately after the Post published the article, questions were raised, including about the legitimacy of the laptop. Facebook and Twitter restricted the distribution of links to the Post article, saying fact-checkers needed to verify the claims before they could be shared. A few days later, more than 50 former intelligence officials signed a letter claiming that the emails had “the classic hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation.”
Even in the Post newsroom, whose coverage is often pro-Trump, some reporters and editors had initial doubts about the laptop. The journalist who wrote most of The Post’s first article on his laptop withheld his byline because he had concerns about the article, The New York Times reported at the time. Mr. Giuliani said he gave the laptop to the Post because “either no one else would take it, or if they did take it, they would all spend time contradicting it before releasing it.”
The Wall Street Journal, which like The Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch, was approached by Trump’s allies in 2020 but refused to cover up the laptop, The Times also reported.
Since then, the existence of the device and the authenticity of some materials contained within it have been confirmed by several media outlets. But the Post’s extensive and sustained reporting alleging irrefutable links between messages on the laptop and President Biden’s alleged corrupt foreign dealings has not stood up to scrutiny.
On Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the New York Post pointed to several editorials published by the newspaper about the laptop, including one from June 6 that sharply criticized news outlets. They dismissed the Post’s original reporting at the time as “Russian disinformation,” the editorial said, “but now that Joe Biden’s own Justice Department has introduced the laptop as evidence in Hunter’s gun trial, the media is readily discussing the story as.” “I never denied it if they had done it.”
Sohrab Ahmari, who was opinion editor at The Post at the time of the first Laptop article, said in an interview that the behavior of much of the mainstream media in reporting the story was “shameful.”
Mr. Ahmari, who left The Post in 2021 to co-found the online political magazine Compact, which is often critical of Mr. Trump, was not involved in reporting or editing the Post’s laptop coverage. However, he criticized many media outlets for what he said were advocating a “rush of censorship” through social media platforms.
“Whatever you think of the Post’s policy, the responsibility of other journalists is to do their own reporting,” he said.
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2024-06-12 00:59:51
www.nytimes.com
