The president’s plummeting popularity, especially among independents, reflects a growing realization among voters that Joe Biden is not the man they thought they had voted for.
There’s a good reason for their disenchantment. They were denied the normal due diligence the media is supposed to conduct on presidential candidates.
It’s been more than a year since The Post published the first of a series of damning stories about then-candidate Biden, based on material on his son Hunter’s abandoned laptop.
It’s been more than a year since Facebook and Twitter colluded with Democrat-friendly media to censor a story that reflected badly on their preferred candidate less than three weeks before the 2020 election.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey blithely admitted after the election that locking The Post’s account for two weeks on the basis of a non-existent “hacking” offense was a “mistake.”
Facebook has never revealed the results of the “fact-check” it used as a pretext for blocking The Post. It likely never occurred because Facebook never contacted key recipients of emails we published from the laptop.
But the damage was done. The coordinated censorship of America’s oldest newspaper — with more than 80 million readers online alone — amounted to election interference.
If the full story of the Bidens’ international influence-peddling scheme had been told before the election, polls indicate it may have affected the result. Almost 50 percent of Biden voters knew nothing about Hunter’s laptop scandal, according to polling conducted after the election by the Media Research Center, and almost 10 percent said they would not have voted for Biden had they known.
With fewer than 45,000 votes in three states deciding the outcome, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that suppression of The Post’s stories won Biden the election and denied voters the truth about his character.
This is the importance of Hunter Biden’s laptop and why it refuses to be shoved down the memory hole, where other inconvenient truths go to die.
It provides a rare and detailed window onto the corruption that is Washington’s original sin, as conducted on a global scale by one of its most calculating practitioners.
The sordid secret vices of a son of political privilege are an incongruous backdrop to the monumental oil and gas deals Hunter was mixed up in around the world, a drug-addled neophyte bumbling through geopolitical minefields, with the Secret Service in tow.
Hunter’s encounters with cutthroat oligarchs in Monte Carlo, Lake Como, Hong Kong and Shanghai are documented in vivid detail on his laptop. It takes us from a billionaire’s beach villa in Acapulco to the desolate oil fields of Kazakhstan, from a judo competition in Budapest with Vladimir Putin to dinner in Beijing with Xi Jinping.
A Chinese tycoon cooks Hunter dinner in his new $50 million penthouse, a Ukrainian oligarch flies him to his fishing shack in Norway. Beautiful Russian escorts and thieving drug dealers float through his self-imposed exile on Sunset Boulevard, amid slapstick scenes as crackhead Hunter comes unstuck and his hapless Uncle Jim Biden rides in to the rescue.
Text messages chronicling the disintegration of Hunter’s love affair with his brother’s widow, Hallie Biden, are laced with flashbacks to the pain of a troubled childhood.
Eye-popping financial windfalls are shaded by the grim fate of Chinese business partners who wind up missing, presumed dead. It’s a life of greed and luxury in a shadowy world of kleptocrat oligarchs whom law enforcement can’t touch.
Despite his secret debaucheries, Hunter was acutely aware of what he brought to the table: access to his powerful father.
The Biden family business is documented in eye-popping detail in the 11-gigabyte trove. Over nine years from 2010 to 2019, the laptop shadows Joe’s life as the globe-trotting vice president of the Obama administration, the favor-trading senator from Delaware who would go on to become leader of the free world.
Much of The Post’s reporting over the past year has been quietly accepted as accurate, and even was admitted by Hunter in his 2021 addiction memoir. The White House confirmed our reporting when it admitted to a Washington Post fact-checker that then-VP Biden did attend a dinner attended by Hunter’s business associates from Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan on April 16, 2015, in a private room at Café Milano in Washington, DC. Yes, Joe went to the dinner, the White House admitted, but only briefly, and not for any nefarious purpose, of course.
You would think reporters at organs such as USA Today and the Washington Post might be miffed about being lied to by Biden’s campaign, which categorically denied any such meeting had taken place.
“I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” candidate Biden said angrily, as if it were an affront to question his integrity. But few in the media showed any interest in holding him to account and simply ignored our reporting.
The killer blow came five days after The Post’s exposé, from 50 former senior intelligence officials led by former CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Using the institutional weight of their powerful former roles, they published a letter in Politico that claimed the material on Hunter’s laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” although not one of them had seen any of it.
This was partisan propaganda designed to disparage The Post’s reporting and dissuade the rest of the media from looking deeper.
The Brennan letter was a lifeline to Joe Biden, three days before his final debate against a fired-up President Donald Trump. “Joe, they’re calling you a corrupt politician,” said Trump. “Take a look at the laptop from hell.”
Biden relied entirely on the Brennan letter to dismiss the laptop stories: “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan. They have said this is … a bunch of garbage.”
But The Post’s reporting has held up.
Corroborated from multiple angles, Hunter’s laptop tells an alarming story of the national interest sold out for personal gain at the highest level, in particular to Communist China, America’s greatest strategic foe.
The conclusion is inescapable: The president cannot extricate his family’s moneymaking schemes from America’s foreign policy imperatives.
