Former Politico Reporters Lament ‘Dumb Decisions of Cowardly Editors’ That Helped Biden

On the menu today: Two former reporters from Politico describe editors killing off stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop and legal problems over his gun; former CIA director John Brennan whines that he’s getting a raw deal by having his security clearance removed; and the GOP faces big decisions.

More Proof That the Hunter Biden Laptop Story Was Buried

We always knew that large swaths of the mainstream media were going to treat Joe Biden with kid gloves for much of his presidency. Part of this was the usual preference for Democrats over Republicans. A lot of this was the widespread belief among media elites that Donald Trump’s first term had been an unparalleled catastrophe, and Biden needed all the boosting he could get to keep Trump from coming back. And perhaps a bit of this was a naïve belief that Biden really was the kindly ice-cream-eating grandfather that his team wanted America to see.

But to hear two former Politico reporters, Marc Caputo of Axios and Tara Palmeri of Puck — tell it, on some issues, there were orders from on high to make life easy for the Biden family.

Forgive the long except from our old friend Isaac Schorr, writing at Mediaite, but the whole exchange just gets more revelatory as it goes on.

“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. Turns out that story was closer to disinformation because the Hunter Biden laptop appeared to be true,” he observed.

“But then Facebook also pulled all stories down about the Hunter Biden laptop, and I think Twitter did at the same time, too,” jumped in Palmeri.

“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,” said Caputo. “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.”

“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” replied Palmeri, delving into her own trouble to publish stories that could hurt the elder Biden’s political prospects.

On March 25, 2021, Palmeri and her colleague, Ben Schreckinger, wrote a story with the headline, “Sources: Secret Service inserted itself into case of Hunter Biden’s gun.” (That story is now behind a paywall.) On September 14, 2023 — nearly two-and-a-half years later — the U.S. Department of Justice charged the president’s son with making a false statement in the purchase of a firearm, making a false statement related to information required to be kept by Federal Firearms Licensed Dealer, and possession of a firearm by a person who is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance. He was convicted on all three charges on June 11, 2024. Hunter Biden was scheduled to be sentenced on December 12, 2024, but after emphatically promising for more than a year that he would not pardon his son, on December 1, President Biden pardoned his son for all crimes committed between January 1, 2014, and December 1, 2024, announced it via a brief written statement, took no questions, and then flew to Angola.

Back to the Caputo and Palmeri conversation:

“. . . 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,” reflected Palmeri. “It was the beginning of his administration, it was a honeymoon period — you know what I mean?”

“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,” recalled Caputo. “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, and they gave no explanation for that either,” he said. “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-”“We just get called, like, ‘the terrible mainstream media.’ It’s like you don’t understand the process there,” interjected Palmeri.

“Well, you also don’t understand the dumb decisions of cowardly editors that are made above us,” agreed Caputo.

For what it’s worth, Politico called the accounts of Caputo and Palmeri “a case of false memory.” The fact that they both remembered editors at Politico either refusing to run or dragging their feet on running stories critical of the Biden family makes it hard to believe this was misremembered or an isolated case.

You don’t have to look too hard to find left-wingers who contend Politico is biased to the right, which sounded absurd before the comments from Caputo and Palmeri, and now looks asinine.

The Power of Secrecy

Speaking of Hunter Biden’s laptop, former Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan believes he’s getting a raw deal now that Trump has revoked his security clearance, and that he and about 50 colleagues never contended that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation:

“He misrepresented the facts in that executive order because it said that we had suggested that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation,” Brennan said Tuesday on MSNBC. “No, we said it was all the hallmarks of Russian information operations, including the dumping of accurate information, which is what we said in that letter.”

Eh, the letter said, “The arrival on the US political scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter, much of it related to his time serving on the Board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” But the Politico headline stated, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”

Do you recall those intelligence officials jumping out in front of the television cameras, emphatically clarifying that they wrote “Russian information operations,” and not “disinformation” or “misinformation”? No, I don’t remember that either. As far as I can tell, all of those officials were just fine with everyone believing they had declared the laptop story to be false disinformation from the regime in Moscow.

As discussed on yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast, a security clearance means access to classified information, which is a form of power. And as the wise philosopher Ben Parker taught us, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Because certain members of Congress have access to intelligence, and we know that the U.S. intelligence community has some pretty darn far-reaching abilities to learn secrets, those of us who don’t have a security clearance are inclined to think they know something we don’t.

And clearly, some figures abuse that power. Former representative and now-senator Adam Schiff repeatedly insisted he had seen evidence that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. That was, apparently, not what he was being told in his briefings:

In July 2017, here’s what former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Mr. Schiff and his colleagues: “I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.” Three months later, former Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch agreed that while she’d seen “concerning” information, “I don’t recall anything being briefed up to me.” Former Deputy AG Sally Yates concurred several weeks later: “We were at the fact-gathering stage here, not the conclusion stage.”

You may recall back in February, when then-intelligence chairman Mike Turner offered a vague and unnerving statement:

Today, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has made available to all Members of Congress information concerning a serious national security threat.

I am requesting that President Biden declassify all information relating to this threat so that Congress, the Administration, and our allies can openly discuss the actions necessary to respond to this threat.

Later in the day, a rumor arose that the threat involved Russia. As I asked that day, “What kind of ‘highly concerning and destabilizing’ Russian capability would have House intel committee chairman Mike Turner so concerned, but that the Biden team would NOT be moving quickly to declassify?” Turner’s cryptic public message made a bunch of people worry something terrible was imminent — a terrorist attack, use of biological or chemical weapons, or even the use of a nuclear weapon.

House speaker Mike Johnson felt the need to go before the cameras and declare, “I saw Chairman Turner’s statement on the issue and I want to assure the American people, there is no need for public alarm. . . . We just want to assure everyone: Steady hands are at the wheel, we’re working on it, and there’s no need for alarm.”

It turned out that the Russian government was working to put a dangerous new nuclear device in space; “By all accounts, this weapon, which is not yet operational, could be used to knock out U.S. satellites that perform critical communications and control functions.” Genuinely something to worry about, but House Republicans were apparently irked with Turner afterwards.

I don’t know if that event played a role in Johnson’s recent decision to replace Turner on the Intelligence Committee, or whether, as Turner contends, it was on Trump’s orders. But last February’s brouhaha is further demonstration that if you have a security clearance and speak to the media or public, you must communicate carefully and clearly. Nature abhors a vacuum, as does the news cycle.

Over in The Atlantic, Graeme Wood tells readers something they would probably rather not hear: that 50 high-level members of the intelligence community, including three former CIA directors and two acting CIA directors, put their collective credibility in a pile and then set it alight in a bonfire, all to assure the public that the Biden family would never be involved in something crooked. Never mind that Hunter Biden’s whole career as a “consultant” and lobbyist had been built upon wealthy people who wanted a conduit to his father:

Why these titans of intelligence were willing to risk their hard-won credibility on the possibility that Hunter Biden might not be a slimeball is deeply mysterious. Even considering their caveats, somehow they signed and published their letter without due diligence and without the slightest consideration that Hunter was, in fact, prone to shady behavior. No doubt they felt that the laptop story was urgent, because it could affect the election in a few weeks. But their job was to seek facts and judge them with restraint. In this case, minimal fact-seeking would entail asking the Bidens if the sordid laptop was real, and restraint would entail not venturing wild accusations. The letter does not suggest that the authors asked the Bidens—although they certainly could have, since (according to a 2023 House Intelligence report) the letter originated with a call to them from Antony Blinken, then a Biden-campaign official and later secretary of state. Did the Biden team lie about the laptop, or claim Hunter had no memory of it? Or did the authors never even bother to inquire if it belonged to Hunter? In either case, the letter exhibited extremely shoddy analytic craftsmanship. Some signers of the letter had access to classified briefings, and could have asked their old colleagues in the intelligence community whether the laptop was a Russian hoax. In 2023, House investigators asked James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence and one of the drafters of the letter, why he did not ask for a briefing. “Because I didn’t want to be tainted by access to classified information,” he told them.

ADDENDUM: In the March issue of the print magazine — available online now — a look at three big early decisions that Donald Trump and congressional Republicans will have to make on taxes, the budget, and immigration.