Now that the Washington Examiner has exclusively and definitively proven what everybody with logic and integrity already should have known, namely that Hunter Biden’s laptop was not a fake, we eagerly await apologies and corrective action from those who quashed the story in 2020.
The Examiner’s Andrew Kerr and Jerry Dunleavy report that former Secret Service agent and cyber forensics specialist Konstantinos “Gus” Dimitrelos used sophisticated, exhaustive methods to determine with “100% certainty that Robert Hunter Biden was the only person responsible for the activity on this hard drive and all of its stored data.”
The laptop contained massive stores of highly embarrassing information about Hunter Biden’s private life and, of much more public relevance, evidence of business transactions that fall within the range of the unethical or even possibly illegal. Some of the items have reportedly been under federal criminal investigation for more than a year.
Of even more public relevance are the laptop’s indications that now-President Joe Biden knew far more about and was more involved in Hunter’s business affairs than he has admitted.
Because Hunter’s business entanglements involve multiple foreign entities, including ones under the sway of governments hostile toward the United States, the question becomes whether the elder Biden’s foreign affairs decisions were in any way affected. Those angles to the story should all be vigorously pursued now, but just as important is the conduct of Big Tech corporations that tried to censor the original reporting of the laptop’s existence.
Just hours after the New York Post broke the story, Facebook throttled the sharing of the story on its platform. Twitter went even further, kicking the New York Post off of its platform entirely.
In the heat of a presidential campaign, it can be difficult to tell which stories are true and which are not. But the answer should always be more investigation, not censorship. There was plenty of evidence from the laptop that was immediately verifiable. Instead of banning the New York Post story, Twitter and Facebook should have encouraged more scrutiny of it.
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has since admitted his company’s decision to limit the story was a “total mistake.” Facebook should do the same.
What is needed, not just on the laptop story but in general, is a major course correction by Big Tech. These companies need more humility about their own biases and their lack of expertise in distinguishing truth from fiction. Toward that end, perhaps we can take heart that Elon Musk has indicated that if his purchase of Twitter is consummated, he will consider it “incredibly inappropriate” for the platform to use political lenses to censor speech.
The rest of Big Tech should follow Musk’s lead.
