Republicans call to investigate Democrat-Big Tech collusion in covering up Hunter Biden story
In October 2020, just weeks before the presidential election, the New York Post broke a bombshell story about Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son.
The report revealed damning communications from Hunter Biden’s laptop, left at a computer repair shop, which showed that the former vice president’s son had colluded with deep-pocketed Chinese and Ukrainian corporations on behalf of his father.
When the story broke, it was immediately censored by social media platforms, causing a national uproar.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey were both subpoenaed to testify before Congress and explain why they censored a negative story about Biden just before the election. Neither of the Big Tech oligarchs could provide a valid justification for doing so, though after the election was over, Dorsey admitted that he made a “mistake”.
The mainstream media also went to work trying to discredit the story, using the go-to accusation of “Russian disinformation”.
A statement signed by 50 intelligence officers saying that the story was Russian disinformation was even published by left-wing Politico to further the claim. However, none of the signatories were able to cite any data or evidence to support it.
Nevertheless, in the final presidential debate, Joe Biden used this letter as proof that the story was a “Russian plant”.
But in a report last week regarding a current federal investigation into Hunter Biden, 17 months after the original story broke, the New York Times quietly inserted an acknowledgement that the laptop story was indeed true.
People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.
The admission was slipped in to the 24th paragraph.
While it is unsurprising that the mainstream media and Big Tech censored a factual report that was damning for a Democrat, the spotlight has now swiveled to the 50 members of the intelligence community who claimed the story was “Russian disinformation”.
Those members included many Obama appointees, such as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA director John Brennan, and other signatories such as former Director of National Intelligence Michael Hayden and former CIA director Leon Panetta.
Following the vindicating report by the Times, the Post reached out to every one of those 50 intelligence officers. Not one issued an apology.
Now, calls for investigation are ramping up among Republican lawmakers.
“Big Tech’s censorship of a story the liberal media has now acknowledged to be true just proves that a Republican House majority must take meaningful action to rein in Big Tech censors next year,” said Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY). “All options should be on the table, including probes into their conduct and its impact on the Democratic process.”
Republican Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA) also joined the call for an investigation.
“Tonight, I’m calling for a Congressional investigation into how big tech, mainstream media, and the Democrat industrial complex colluded to suppress the Hunter Biden scandals — and during the last days of the 2020 election,” wrote the lawmaker on Friday.
“The most basic accountability requires firing those responsible for the ‘Russian disinfo’ lie about the Biden family’s corruption, including and especially the former intelligence officials who were elevated to the top of cable news because they pushed wild and unsubstantiated Russia conspiracy theories about President Trump,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) told the Post. “Furthermore, Big Tech leaders who participated in censoring the truth should answer to Congress and the American people in sworn testimony.”
Former Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell tweeted that a “Republican Senate MUST hold hearings with all 50 of the people who signed that letter 3 weeks before the 2020 campaign. They all said Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. And they didn’t have a single piece of intel to suggest it.”
Almost 50 percent of Biden voters knew nothing of the laptop scandal at the time of the election and about 16 percent said they would not have voted for Biden had they known, according to a survey from The Media Research Center.
