After Election, Politico Says Hunter Biden’s Laptop Story ‘Fizzled’

Politico reported Sunday morning that the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop — and the emails connecting Joe Biden to his son’s business interests — “fizzled.” Curiously, the outlet did not notice that the story had been censored by the media and big tech.

The article, by Kyle Cheney and Andrew Desiderio, says that stories about Hunter Biden, and the Obama administration’s spying on the Trump campaign, failed to resonate with voters — ignoring the media’s role in suppressing these narratives.

They write:

Trump pushed two factually challenged narratives about Biden in the waning weeks of the campaign. In one, Biden was a mastermind of an effort to spy on Trump’s 2016 campaign, collaborating with top intelligence officials to derail Trump’s incoming administration. In the other, Biden was the secret beneficiary of multi-million-dollar business deals with shady foreign interests carried out by Hunter Biden.

But both stories were riddled with falsehoods, exaggerations and assumptions, often pushed by unreliable narrators who revealed no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden.

In fact, no one suggested that Biden was a “mastermind,” but Biden has never explained his presence at an Oval Office meeting where the investigation into Michael Flynn was discussed — an investigation that the FBI already knew had no legitimate reason to continue. Biden also was among those Obama administration officials who “unmasked” Flynn’s name in intelligence reports.

As for the Hunter Biden story, there was ample evidence that Joe Biden knew — contrary to his earlier claims — about his son’s dealings, and that Hunter Biden’s position on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma posed a conflict of interest. Several Obama administration officials admitted that they had raised the issue themselves.

Cheney and Desiderio claim that Senate investigations into Hunter Biden were a bust — ignoring the fact that the most recent report conclusively established that Joe Biden had been warned that his son’s activities posed a conflict of interest: “In October 2015, senior State Department official Amos Hochstein raised concerns with Vice President Biden, as well as with Hunter Biden, that Hunter Biden’s position on Burisma’s board enabled Russian disinformation efforts and risked undermining U.S. policy in Ukraine.”

The report also provided details that led Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner of Hunter Biden, to conclude that he had been swindled out of $5 million in Chinese funds that were meant for a joint venture.

Politico‘s Cheny and Desiderio claim: “The storylines appealed almost exclusively to Trump’s diehard political base, and were featured on right-wing websites and the Fox News primetime lineup — a large audience indeed, but a narrow sliver of the wider electorate.”

They also claim that stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop “have not stood up to scrutiny when investigated, and did not conclusively show any corruption.” They do not provide any evidence to substantiate those claims.

Moreover, Politico fails to note that the Hunter Biden storm was actively suppressed by Twitter, Facebook, and the media, with the New York Post suspended from posting anything on Twitter for more than two weeks based on the false claim that materials on the laptop had been “hacked.”

Now, with the election safely distant, Politico calls the story a distraction.

Yet they conclude: “[T]here are lingering questions about the FBI’s pursuit of alleged financial improprieties by the younger Biden that Trump may attempt to air during his last two months in office — or set up landmines for Biden on the matter after he takes office.”

They do not explain why a baseless conspiracy theory that “fizzled” should have such dire consequences.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.