When The New York Post first reported in 2020 about a laptop once used by Hunter Biden, which the newspaper said contained incriminating evidence against him and his father, Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was running for president, it sparked an uproar. fire storm.
Many national media outlets raised questions about the laptop’s existence and claims about its contents, while major social media platforms limited posts about The Post’s coverage. Conservatives said those reactions were evidence of liberal censorship.
Many of the claims made by The Post in its laptop coverage, in which the publication sought to link President Biden to corrupt dealings, have not been proven. But the laptop had enough incriminating evidence to continue pursuing Hunter Biden.
The laptop and some of its contents played a visible role in federal prosecutors’ case against the president’s son, who was accused of lying on a firearm application in 2018 by not disclosing his drug use. A prosecutor briefly held up the laptop before the jury in Delaware, and an FBI agent later testified that messages and photographs it contained and personal data Biden had saved on cloud computing servers had made clear his drug use. .
On Tuesday, the jury found Biden, 54, guilty of three felonies. He will be sentenced at a later date.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, an ally of Donald J. Trump, who was president at the time.
The Post first reported on the laptop’s existence on October 14, 2020, less than a month before the presidential election. In a front-page story, The Post wrote that the laptop contained emails it described as a “smoking gun” showing corruption in the Biden family, including correspondence that appeared to describe a meeting Biden had arranged between his father and a Ukrainian businessman when his father was vice president.
Immediately after The Post published its article, questions arose, including about the legitimacy of the laptop. Facebook and Twitter restricted the distribution of links to The Post article, saying fact-checkers needed to verify the claims before they could be shared. Several days later, more than 50 former intelligence officials signed a letter stating that the emails had “the classic hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation.”
Even within The Post’s newsroom, whose coverage is often pro-Trump, some reporters and editors had initial misgivings about the laptop. The journalist who wrote most of The Post’s first article on the laptop hid his signature because of his concerns about the article, The New York Times reported at the time. Giuliani said he had given the laptop to the Post because “either no one else would take it, or if they did take it, they would spend as much time as possible trying to contradict it before publishing it.”
The Wall Street Journal, which like The Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch, was contacted in 2020 by Trump allies but did not cover the laptop, The Times also reported.
Multiple media outlets have since confirmed the existence of the device and the authenticity of some of the material it contained. But the Post’s extensive and ongoing reporting claiming irrefutable links between the laptop messages and President Biden’s alleged corrupt dealings overseas has not withstood scrutiny.
On Tuesday, a New York Post spokeswoman pointed to several editorials about the laptop published by the newspaper, including one, on June 6, that criticized the media. They dismissed the Post’s original coverage as “Russian disinformation” at the time, the editorial said, “however, now that Joe Biden’s own Justice Department has introduced the laptop as evidence in Hunter’s gun trial, the media They are easily discussing the story as if I never denied it at all.”
Sohrab Ahmari, who was The Post’s opinion editor at the time of the first laptop article, said in an interview that the behavior of much of the mainstream media in covering the story was “shameful.”
Ahmari, who left The Post in 2021 to co-found an online political magazine, Compact, that is often critical of Trump, was not involved in reporting or editing The Post’s laptop coverage. But he criticized many media outlets for what he saw as applauding a “race to censorship” by social media platforms.
“Regardless of what you think about the Post’s politics, other journalists’ responsibility is to do their own reporting,” he said.