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One of the most profitable disinformation campaigns in trendy American electoral historical past occurred in the weeks previous to the 2020 presidential election. On October 14, 2020 — lower than three weeks earlier than Americans had been set to vote — the nation’s oldest newspaper, The New York Post, started publishing a collection of studies about the enterprise dealings of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in nations by which Biden, as Vice President, wielded appreciable affect (together with Ukraine and China) and would once more if elected president.
The backlash towards this reporting was rapid and intense, resulting in suppression of the story by U.S. company media shops and censorship of the story by main Silicon Valley monopolies. The disinformation marketing campaign towards this reporting was led by the CIA’s all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared underneath this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”
These “former intel officials” didn’t truly say that the “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo.” Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this “suspicion” based on their experience:
We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.
But a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump’s defeat had no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former officials actually said or whether it was in fact true. They had an election to manipulate. As a result, that these emails were “Russian disinformation” — which means that they had been pretend and that Russia manufactured them — turned an article of religion amongst the U.S.’s justifiably despised class of media staff.
Very few even included the essential caveat that the intelligence officers themselves harassed: specifically, that they’d no proof in any respect to corroborate this declare. Instead, as I famous final September, “virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count — began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of Russian disinformation.” The Huffington Post even revealed a must-be-seen-to-be-believed marketing campaign advert for Joe Biden, masquerading as “reporting,” that unfold this lie that the emails had been “Russian disinformation.”
This disinformation marketing campaign about the Biden emails was then utilized by Big Tech to justify brute censorship of any reporting on or discussion of this story: easily the most severe case of pre-election censorship in modern American political history. Twitter locked The New York Post‘s Twitter account for close to two weeks due to its refusal to obey Twitter’s orders to delete any reference to its reporting. The social media site also blocked any and all references to the reporting by all users; Twitter users were barred even from linking to the story in private chats with one another. Facebook, through its spokesman, the life-long DNC operative Andy Stone, announced that they would algorithmically suppress discussion of the reporting to ensure it did not spread, pending a “fact check[] by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners” which, needless to say, never came — precisely because the archive was indisputably authentic.
The archive’s authenticity, as I documented in a video report from September, was clear from the start. Indeed, as I described in that report, I staked my career on its authenticity when I demanded that The Intercept publish my analysis of these revelations, and then resigned when its vehemently anti-Trump editors censored any discussion of those emails precisely because it was indisputable that the archive was authentic (The Intercept‘s former New York Times reporter James Risen was given the green light by these same editors to spread and endorse the CIA’s lie, as he insisted that laptop computer ought to be ignored as a result of “a group of former intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation.”) I knew the archive was real because all the relevant journalistic metrics that one evaluates to verify large archives of this type — including the Snowden archive and the Brazil archive which I used to report a series of investigative exposés — left no doubt that it was genuine (that includes documented verification from third parties who were included in the email chains and who showed that the emails they had in their possession matched the ones in the archive word-for-word).
Any residual doubts that the Biden archive was genuine — and there should have been none — were shattered when a reporter from Politico, Ben Schreckinger, published a book last September, entitled “The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power,” in which his new reporting proved that the key emails on which The New York Post relied were entirely authentic. Among other things, Schreckinger interviewed several people included in the email chains who provided confirmation that the emails in their possession matched the ones in the Post‘s archive word for word. He also obtained documents from the Swedish government that were identical to key documents in the archive. His own outlet, Politico, was one of the few to even acknowledge his book. While ignoring the fact that they were the first to spread the lie that the emails were “Russian disinformation,” Politico editors — underneath the headline “Double Trouble for Biden”— admitted that the book “finds evidence that some of the purported Hunter Biden laptop material is genuine, including two emails at the center of last October’s controversy.”
The vital revelations in Schreckinger’s book were almost completely ignored by the very same corporate media outlets that published the CIA’s now-debunked lies. They just pretended it never happened. Grappling with it would have forced them to acknowledge a fact quite devastating to whatever remaining credibility they have: namely, that they all ratified and spread a coordinated disinformation campaign in order to elect Joe Biden and defeat Donald Trump. With strength in numbers, and knowing that they speak only to and for liberals who are happy if they lie to help Democrats, they all joined hands in an implicit vow of silence and simply ignored the new proof in Schreckinger’s book that, in the days leading up to the 2020 election, they all endorsed a disinformation campaign.
It will now be much harder to avoid confronting the reality of what they did, though it is highly likely that they will continue to do so. This morning, The New York Times published an article about the broad, ongoing FBI criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s international business and tax activities. Prior to the election, the Times, to their credit, was one of the few to apply skepticism to the CIA’s pre-election lie, noting on October 22 that “no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation.” Because the activities of Hunter Biden now under FBI investigation directly pertain to the emails first revealed by The Post, the reporters needed to rely upon the laptop’s archive to amplify and inform their reporting. That, in turn, required The New York Times to verify the authenticity of this laptop and its origins — exactly what, according to their reporters, they successfully did:
People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.
That this cache of emails was authentic was clear from the start. Any doubts were obliterated by publication of Schreckinger’s book six months ago. Now the Paper of Record itself explicitly states not only that the emails “were authenticated” but also that the original story from The Post about how they obtained these materials — they “come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop” — “appears” to be true.
What this means is that, in the crucial days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, most of the corporate media spread an absolute lie about The New York Post‘s reporting in order to mislead and manipulate the American electorate. It means that Big Tech monopolies, along with Twitter, censored this story based on a lie from “the intelligence community.” It means that Facebook’s promise from its DNC operative that it would suppress discussion of the reporting in order to conduct a “fact-check” of those paperwork was a fraud as a result of if an trustworthy one had been performed, it might have confirmed that Facebook’s censorship decree was based mostly on a lie. It implies that tens of millions of Americans had been denied the potential to listen to about reporting on the candidate main all polls to develop into the subsequent president, and as a substitute had been subjected to a barrage of lies about the provenance (Russia did it) and authenticity (disinformation!) of those paperwork.
The objections to noting all of this at present are drearily predictable. Reporting on Hunter Biden is irrelevant since he was not himself a candidate (what made the reporting related was what it revealed about the involvement of Joe Biden in these offers). Given the warfare in Ukraine, now is not the time to debate all of this (regardless of the undeniable fact that they’re normally ignored, there are at all times horrific wars being waged even when the victims usually are not as sympathetic as European Ukrainians and the perpetrators are the movie’s Good Guys and never the Bad Guys). The actual purpose most liberals and their media allies don’t need to hear about any of this is as a result of they consider that the means they used (intentionally mendacity to the public with CIA disinformation) are justified by their noble ends (defeating Trump).
Whatever else is true, each the CIA/media disinformation marketing campaign in the weeks earlier than the 2020 election and the ensuing regime of brute censorship imposed by Big Tech are of historic significance. Democrats and their new allies in the institution wing of the Republican Party could also be extra excited by warfare in Ukraine than the subversion of their very own election by the unholy trinity of the intelligence neighborhood, the company press, and Big Tech. But at present’s admission by The New York Times that this archive and the emails in it had been actual all alongside proves {that a} gigantic fraud was perpetrated by the nation’s strongest establishments. What issues excess of the curiosity stage of varied partisan factions is the core truths about U.S. democracy revealed by this tawdry spectacle.
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