If the Hunter Biden Story Was ‘Irrelevant,’ Why Was It Censored?

A t the University of Chicago’s “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference this week — a “how to” discussion, apparently — the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum was asked about the use of the “disinformation” charge as a pretext for suppressing news. Specifically, the student was referring to the concerted effort by mass media, Big Tech, and government to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story to protect Joe Biden.

“My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop is I think it’s totally irrelevant,” she responded. “I mean, it’s not whether it’s disinformation. . . . I didn’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States.”

Someone might let the January 6 committee, which questioned Ivanka Trump for eight hours the other day, know that the actions of the president’s offspring are totally irrelevant. Applebaum believed questions about presidential kids were relevant during the Trump years. She shared dozens of them, and wrote her own piece about their alleged corruption. And when the Hunter story broke, Applebaum thought it relevant enough to note that the “amazing thing is that even the fraudulent claims about Hunter Biden are so much less bad than many genuine, fully-reported, well-known stories about Trump, his children and their business deals.”

My italics indicate a word that is a synonym of disinformation. That was Applebaum’s contention. Now that a Politico reporter, the Washington Post, and New York Times have all confirmed the veracity of the New York Post’s reporting (probably because that information is going to be revealed in some filing), suddenly the story is a mere distraction.

Of course, if Hunter’s actions were irrelevant, why did virtually the entire media censor the story? Why did major newspapers spend thousands of words pretending to debunk the claims? Why did more than 50 former intelligence officials sign a letter casting doubt on its veracity of the reporting, giving the media additional justification to dismiss the revelations?

The New York Post had worked within the same ethical and journalistic guidelines that were used to uncover many of journalism’s most celebrated scoops. The Post used a higher standard of professionalism than did outlets that had been passing along the concocted conspiracies of Adam Schiff and State Department officials to gin up the Russia-collusion hysteria. The Post was upfront about how it came into possession of Hunter’s laptop, interviewed the owner of the Delaware computer shop where it had been abandoned, and offered pictures of Hunter’s signature on the receipt. The Daily Caller had Hunter’s emails authenticated by forensic specialists.

Setting all that aside, the story’s most explosive aspect wasn’t about Hunter, but his dad. Not only did the emails implicate Joe Biden as the “big guy,” but the Post had Hunter’s former partner and Navy veteran Tony Bobulinski on the record claiming that Joe was intimately involved in the family business for years. To this day, Biden denies having any knowledge of his son’s business deals with Chinese Communists and Ukrainian energy interests. In a healthy media environment, these revelations would have sparked widespread curiosity.

You will notice, also, whenever circumstantial evidence of wrongdoing by a conservative emerges, it only “raises more questions” and hastens a full-court journalistic press to ferret out the truth. When circumstantial evidence implicates Joe Biden as a beneficiary of the unsavory or corrupt behavior of his son, it is the lack of tangible evidence that proves it was untrue and irrelevant.

At the same conference, the Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg argued that it was “a preposterous counterfactual” to claim that the Hunter-email story would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election. Sure. Counterfactuals are nothing but guesses. But it isn’t preposterous to imagine a candidate who is caught in a lie about his involvement in a shady moneymaking scheme losing votes. Accusations can snowball. What if we found out during the election that Joe Biden had done favors for Hunter’s Chinese business associate after claiming he knew nothing about his son’s deals? Surely the chances of such a story changing the momentum of the race is more likely than, say, a plastic bottle repelling polar bears, as Goldberg quips.

Moreover, that is the consequentialist argument. The fact is that a constellation of powerful interests decided to kill a legitimate news story to protect their preferred candidate. And, in many ways, their reaction to the revelation of the story’s authenticity is more telling than the initial cover-up. There’s nothing wrong with some skepticism, especially after the habitual unprofessionalism we’ve witnessed over past six or seven years. Yet now that we know the Hunter scoop is true, many of the same people who dismissed the story or justified censoring it claim the entire episode was irrelevant. They’ve abandoned democratic principles to save democracy, I guess.