NPR promotes flat-out falsehood regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story

National Public Radio, which is funded by your tax dollars, asserted this week the Hunter Biden laptop story has been “discredited” by the U.S. intelligence community and independent media investigations.

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Not true. No such thing has happened.

NPR's claim isn’t merely misleading. This isn’t a case of a poorly worded sentence. What NPR alleges has no basis in reality.

The false assertion appears in the middle of NPR’s review of Hunter Biden’s new memoir, Beautiful Things. Late in the review, about 12 paragraphs deep, the following lines appear [emphasis added]:

The last gasp of [Rudy Giuliani's] campaign against the Bidens featured a laptop supposedly obtained from sources that would document the younger Biden's drug use and other offenses. The laptop story was discredited by U.S. intelligence and independent investigations by news organizations.

This would come as a major shock to the FBI, which took possession of the laptop sometime in 2019.

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A spokesperson for NPR did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.

This all starts with the New York Post, which published a scoop in October 2020 revealing the existence of a laptop reportedly belonging to Hunter Biden. The device allegedly came into the possession of Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, after the president’s son apparently forgot he had dropped it off for repairs at a shop in Delaware. Giuliani then gave the device to law enforcement officials.

The laptop contains several documents, some of which suggest Hunter Biden leveraged his father’s political influence to line the family’s pockets. The New York Post’s exclusive coverage included the publication of the laptop's contents, including emails purporting to show Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, “to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”

Neither the Biden campaign nor Biden himself has ever denied the authenticity of the laptop or its contents.

Moreover, Hunter Biden himself revealed in December he is under federal investigation. The FBI, the IRS, and federal prosecutors in Delaware are reviewing his overseas business activities for possible tax and money laundering violations.

Evidence of the investigation, which launched in 2018, first surfaced in the public sphere on October 2020 with the scoop announcing the existence of the laptop. Among the documents published by the New York Post was an FBI report marked with a case number with “the code associated with an ongoing federal money-laundering investigation in Delaware,” according to the Daily Beast.

“Another document — one with a grand jury subpoena number — appeared to show the initials of two assistant U.S. attorneys linked to the Wilmington, Delaware, office,” the report adds.

Federal law enforcement officials and other government officials have confirmed the authenticity of the documents retrieved from the laptop.

Lastly, insofar as the bogus narrative alleging the Russians planted the story with pliant U.S. press is concerned, a narrative embraced and promoted by the corporate press immediately following the publication of the New York Post's scoop, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said in October 2020 the information contained on the laptop “is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.” The Justice Department and the FBI concurred with his assessment.

Following these public statements, the news organization that initially dismissed the laptop story as Russian disinformation quietly backed away from their earlier, all-certain positions. Since then, there has been precious little new information about the laptop or the investigation of Hunter Biden.

However, the bottom line is still this: the federal investigation is real. The laptop’s emails are real. The U.S. intelligence community has never said otherwise, and no newsroom has ever conclusively debunked the story.

Yet, here’s NPR this week claiming otherwise.

It's a general truth of the news business that readers tend to stop following major stories after the first few headlines. But who knew the same could be said for certain journalists?

Tags: Opinion, Beltway Confidential, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, NPR, Media, Media Coverage, Media Bias

Original Author: Becket Adams

Original Location: NPR promotes flat-out falsehood regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story