It’s been more than two years since The Post published the first article on Hunter Biden’s laptop and for much of that time, the effort to reveal Joe Biden’s role in his son’s dirty deals seemed stalled or even hopeless.
Democratic propaganda outlets circled the wagons around the president they helped elect and never asked him or the White House if Biden is “the big guy” slated to get a secret 10% cut in his son’s deal with a Chinese conglomerate.
Similarly, social media platforms continued to restrict users who didn’t follow the party line that Democrats are the good guys and everybody else is ignorant or evil. Whatever the topic, from COVID to corruption to the transgender agenda, the pattern was gratingly consistent.
Feeling it could always count on this protection, the Biden White House was free to ignore any new evidence against the president. It was proven right when some news outlets that belatedly concluded the laptop was authentic, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, failed to take the logical next step of exploring the evidence that the president shared in the profits of his son’s schemes.
Meanwhile, Attorney General Merrick Garland felt safe enough with Democrats’ control of Congress that he could sit on the 4-year-old probe of the president’s son over taxes and lobbying, even as he raided Donald Trump’s home and launched two probes against the former president.
More recently, several appearances by Hunter Biden at White House events suggest he, too, is emboldened and that an attempt to bring him out of hiding and normalize him is underway. This could indicate that Garland is about to shut down the case, possibly with a no-jail criminal plea or, even more outrageous, a civil settlement.
Catch up on Twitter’s censorship of the Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story
- Happening now: Hunter Biden laptop bombshell: Elon Musk’s Twitter drops Post censorship details
- Our original report: Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad
- Editorial: Twitter is running a blackmail operation — cooperate or no traffic for you
- Dorsey backs down: Twitter CEO admits handling of blocked Post article was ‘unacceptable’
- How tweet it is: Twitter unlocks The Post’s account after two weeks
Here’s the good news: The Biden protection racket is starting to crack and the public is closer than ever to getting the truth about the president.
The hopeful developments are coming from several different directions.
Elon Musk, fresh off his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, is dramatically advancing the cause by pulling back the curtain on the tech partisans who sought to silence criticism of the president. Internal documents released so far also hint at a government role, and as my colleague Miranda Devine reported, a former top official confirmed the FBI secretly warned Twitter to be on the lookout for “hacked” materials in the 2020 campaign.
Yoel Roth, the former head of site security for Twitter, said in a deposition for the Federal Election Commission that “I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter.”
Roth added that “there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
Mark Zuckerberg has echoed the scenario, saying recently that Facebook got FBI warnings about Russian disinformation and hacking before the 2020 election.
More explicit confirmation about the FBI’s role is coming from a little-noticed lawsuit filed by attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana. It alleges the Biden administration violated Americans’ free speech and “colluded with and/or coerced social media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints and content on social media platforms” and the case is already paying big dividends.
The suit cites numerous areas of government suppression, including the laptop story, the lab leak theory of COVID-19’s origin, the efficiency of masks and COVID-19 lockdowns and election integrity issues. The consistent charge is that the feds label content they don’t like as “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and “mal-information,” then lean on Facebook, Twitter and others to block that content from being shared or seen by users.
In its coverage of the case, taking place in Louisiana, Fox News cites the deposition of FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan, who said he organized the meetings with social media companies in San Francisco for as many as “seven DC-based FBI agents ahead of the 2020 presidential election.”
He, too, cited potential “hack and leak” operations, but reportedly could not recall if he mentioned Hunter Biden’s name.
But remember: the FBI had Hunter’s laptop for nearly a year before the election. Leaders had to have known, or should have, that The Post’s stories were legitimate, so any attempt to paint the stories as hacked material cannot be trusted.
Misuse of gov’t power
There is no denying that these bombshell developments in recent days all point in the same direction: the Biden administration has been using government powers, including law enforcement, to silence news and viewpoints critical of it.
To be sure, the battle to save the First Amendment is far from won. Musk must continue to release incriminating Twitter documents and the attorneys-general case needs to prove beyond doubt there is a government-wide attack on free speech.
But most important is the investigative work the new House majority has promised. Armed with subpoena power, Rep. Jim Jordan and other likely committee chairs finally will be able to compel testimony and demand documents about how Joe Biden profited from his family’s influence-peddling schemes.
Even more crucial is the question of whether the president’s involvement has compromised him when dealing with China and other adversaries. As I have noted, Americans are in the dark, but President Xi Jinping certainly knows if there was a quid pro quo for the many millions the Biden family got from China.
Assuming these disparate efforts continue to produce results, the final act in this long drama will begin with growing public outrage, which will cause at least some elements of the mainstream media to finally do their jobs and follow the facts instead of a partisan agenda.
We’re not there yet, but even to imagine the path forward shows how far we have come. It’s been a slow and frustrating slog, but I believe 2023 will produce the truth about a corrupt president.
Legit elex concerns
Count reader Carole Campolo among those drawing big conclusions from The Twitter Files. She writes: “Given what these last 72 hours have proven, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that those of us with legitimate concerns regarding the 2020 and now 2022 elections are not crazy.
“It doesn’t matter which Republican runs in 2024. When elections are not properly investigated, when serious questions are not even allowed to be asked, our democratic republic is done.”
FBI & Big Tech ‘sold their souls’
Martin McGuirk agrees, writing, “It makes me sick how the FBI in 2016 and 2020 was completely dishonest! What in hell does everyone in media and Big Tech see in Hillary and Joe that they would sell out their souls?”