It is one thing to look at the awful suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 presidential election and imagine what happened. It is entirely another to watch reporters confirm these suppressions and talk about them openly.
Watch as former Politico reporters Tara Palmeri and Marc Caputo discuss the lengths to which Politico avoided the Hunter Biden laptop until The Dirty 51 published their letter (click “expand” to view full transcript):
MARC CAPUTO: Another great example, when Politico did that terrible, ill-fated headline: 51 intelligence agents, or former intelligence agents, say that the Hunter Biden laptop was disinformation, or bore the hallmarks of disinformation (Actual: Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say). Turns out that story was closer to disinformation because the Hunter Biden laptop appeared to be true.
TARA PALMERI: But then Facebook also pulled all stories down about the Hunter Biden laptop, and I think Twitter did at the same time, too.
CAPUTO: Right. Correct. They punished The New York Post, that didn’t help. I mean, Politico, my former employer and I knew at the time, didn’t do itself any favors. I was covering Biden at the time, and I remember coming to my editor and saying, ‘Hey, we need to write about the Hunter Biden laptop.’ And I was told this came from on high at Politico: Don’t write about the laptop, don’t talk about the laptop, don’t tweet about the laptop. And the only thing Politico wound up writing was that piece that called it disinformation, which charitably could be called misinformation, at the least
PALMERI: Yeah, I mean, I had a hard time — you know I wrote some pretty serious reporting on Hunter Biden, which actually ended up getting him prosecuted — the story on the gun.
CAPUTO: Yeah! And I remember you consulted with me ‘cause you had- you did the original report on the gun and you came to me like, ‘How do I write about this?’ I’m like, ‘Honestly, I don’t know.' Because it was, like, four years ago. You figured it out.
PALMERI: Yeah, ‘cause it was hard to get it done. I spent three months on it, I went to the laptop shop, and I did all of the reporting in Delaware, and I did all of that. But yeah, it had, it had to be like much, it had to be 100% nailed down. I had everything, you know, the police reports, every, like, you know, I’m a solid reporter. But I do wonder if it could have, if it would have been published a little quicker if it was a different type of story.
CAPUTO: Well, since we’re spilling tea about our former employer, I still have a copy of the story on my external hard drive. In 2019, a rival presidential Democratic campaign of Joe Biden’s gave to me the tax lien — the oppo research — the tax lien on Hunter Biden for the period of time that he worked at Burisma. And I wrote what would have been a classic story saying, you know, ‘The former vice president’s son was slapped with a big tax lien for the period of time that he worked for this controversial Ukrainian oil concern, or natural gas concern, which is haunting his father on the campaign trail.' That story was killed by the editors…
PALMERI: Whoa.
CAPUTO: …and they gave no explanation for that either.
PALMERI: Interesting.
CAPUTO: So that general experience, you know, obviously the public doesn’t know about those things, but as a reporter having witnessed the way in which the two candidates-
PALMERI: We just get called, like, ‘the terrible mainstream media.’ It’s like you don’t understand the process there.
CAPUTO: Well, you also don’t understand the dumb decisions…
PALMERI: The Man.
CAPUTO: …of cowardly editors that are made.
PALMERI: The Man Above Us, when we’re trying to do our jobs, you know what I mean? We’re just lookin’ for scoops, man!
(LAUGHTER)
CAPUTO: The big bias is toward a good story.
“Don’t write about the laptop, don’t talk about the laptop, don’t tweet about the laptop.” Everybody suspects that this is standard M.O. for the elite Acela media which, in fairness, suppresses Democrat-adverse stuff all the time. But how often are reporters left hanging by their editors?
Although reporters talk process and inside baseball all the time, it is unusual to see them go on the record as Caputo, who is highly respected, does here with the story about Hunter’s tax lien. The timing of that killed story is critical, because the IRS whistleblowers told Congress that the statute of limitations was allowed to expire on Hunter’s tax evasions from 2014. IRS whistleblowers, by the way, that never got the time of day from the media.
The laptop story is proof evident of censorship at Politico. You have their political reporters assigned to Biden on the record saying that they did not write any stories about it until Natasha Bertrand, who previously promoted the Russia Hoax, took the Dirty 51 letter and ran with it. Editor decisions drove these omissions, which our own data show helped swing the election to then-Former Vice President Joe Biden.
When considering the extent to which the media’s credibility has been destroyed, it is important to consider their silence over these suppressions in comparison to the collective mea culpa over their coverage of the 2016 presidential election. The media’s course correction from 2016 is still ongoing, as the stupid Salute Hoax demonstrates.
It didn’t have to be this way, but editorial “cowardly decisions” made it this way. One suspects that there will be many such stories coming down the pike as it pertains to the event that surpassed suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop as the greatest political fraud perpetrated upon the American people: the conspiracy Joe Biden’s mental decline.
Don’t write about the decline, don’t talk about the decline, don’t tweet about the decline.
