Anne Applebaum of the Atlantic, who developed early conspiracy theories of Russian interference in the 2016 election, told an audience at a University of Chicago “disinformation” conference this week that Hunter Biden’s laptop, which she once dismissed, should be ignored even after it has been authenticated because the president’s son’s business dealings aren’t “interesting.”
Freshman Daniel Schmidt asked a simple and straightforward question about Applebaum’s past dismissal of the laptop:
Here is what Applebaum wrote in the Atlantic in 2020 when various Hunter Biden email caches began to emerge:
Those who live outside the Fox News bubble and intend to remain there do not, of course, need to learn any of this stuff. Judging by what has been published, the very worst thing that [Matthew] Tyrmand’s email cache could reveal (if it is authentic) is that some unattractive people sought to use Hunter Biden’s surname and connections to get business deals or score a visit to the White House for their clients. But we already know about Hunter Biden’s involvement with unattractive people, and his struggles with addiction; we also know that, under normal circumstances, dozens of people visit the White House every day. On the grand scale of misdeeds committed by politicians and their relatives, this kind of thing barely registers.
She likened Hunter Biden’s business dealings to the supposed conflicts of interest involving Trump, his family, and foreign income.
After the election, Hunter Biden revealed that he was under investigation over his taxes. We have also since learned that a grand jury has been impaneled to consider his finances.
And the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post have also admitted that his laptop is real — which means that emails showing that Hunter Biden connected then-Vice President Biden to shady foreign tycoons, and suggesting that former Vice President Biden was to receive 10% of a joint venture with a company tied to the Chinese government, are also real.
Other information on the laptop suggest that the elder Biden and his family’s funds were closely intertwined, with Hunter Biden paying for some of his dad’s expenses, and his father bailing him out of trouble.
Yet this is what Applebaum said this week at the “disinformation” conference: “My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop is, I think, totally irrelevant. I mean it’s not whether it’s disinformation or I mean I don’t think the – Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States. So I don’t find it to be interesting. So that would be my problem with it as a major news story.”
In other words, she — a member of the elite, insider media establishment — claims voters do not deserve to know if one of the candidates is compromised by corrupt dealings with a foreign power.
But she does not believe that.
In 2016, she was one of the original writers behind the conspiracy theory that Russia could throw the election to Donald Trump, whom she said was “advised by several people with Russian links.” She wrote in the Washington Post in September 2016 — months before the actual vote, and well before the rest of the media had seized upon the “Russia collusion” theory — that there could be a “secret Russian plot to throw a U.S. election through a massive hack of the electoral system.” The hacking could elect Trump — or, she said, it could be designed to elect Clinton, the better to undermine her presidency.
She also theorized:
On or before Election Day, Russian hackers will seek to break into the U.S. voting system. We certainly know that this is possible: Hackers have already targeted voter registration systems in Illinois and Arizona, according to The Post, and the FBI has informed Arizona officials that it suspects Russian hacking teams. Possible breaches are being investigated in several other states, and it’s not hard to imagine that many are vulnerable. The U.S. election system is decentralized and in some places frankly amateurish, as we learned in Florida in 2000.
Such statements, made about the 2020 election, are enough to have anyone banned from social media, yet Applebaum was suggesting that the Russians could hack American voting systems to change electoral outcomes.
Though Russia is thought to have been involved with email hacking in 2016, there was never evidence that Russia hacked voting machines.
As Breitbart News warned of Applebaum’s theory at the time: “The point of raising such unfalsifiable theories is merely to cast doubt on the election (which Applebaum accuses both Trump and Russia of doing, en route to doing it herself).”
That is, indeed, what happened, as Democrats and elite journalists used theories of “Russia collusion” to undermine the new administration and its legitimacy, complicating foreign relations and arguably hurting national security.
Even without Hunter Biden’s laptop, his foreign business entanglements while his father was vice president were enough to prompt some journalists and State Department officials to ask about glaring conflicts of interest in countries such as Ukraine.
Yet while deeming her own speculations newsworthy, Applebaum argues that voters do not deserve to see actual, hard evidence that one of the candidates may be compromised by family business entanglements abroad, including to companies with close connection to adversarial regimes.
And she is considered an authority on “disinformation” in democracies.
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). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. 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.