For the Laptop from Hell scandal, the coverup is worse than the crime

Screenshots from alleged iCloud

Over at the New York Post this week, Michael Goodwin has an excellent op-ed on where we stand in the ongoing exposure of the Biden administration and the FBI conspiring to censor news and opinions unfavorable to the Biden family. More importantly, he examines where the story will take us next and what our prospects are for seeing this sordid mess be cleaned up. While examining the story to date, Goodwin invokes two key phrases from the famous Washington Post investigation into the Watergate scandal back in the 70s. The first is a question posed by Senator Howard Baker to White House counsel John Dean. “What did the President know and when did he know it?”

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At first blush, the question would seem to have no relevance to the FBI’s use of Twitter and other social media platforms to censor reports on Biden family corruption. After all, the president in the fall of 2020 was Donald Trump.

But that’s exactly the point and a key element that makes the evolving scandal so distinct. It shows the FBI, the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, secretly working to defeat the sitting president of the United States and elect Joe Biden.

Recall that, under former Director James Comey’s band of dirty cops, the agency had done something similar in 2016. Then it spied on the Trump campaign and many top FBI leaders actively worked to flip the election to Hillary Clinton.

Knowing that the FBI was working with “the Biden campaign” to suppress conservative information, most particularly the absolutely true Hunter Biden laptop story is one thing. It’s another to put Joe Biden himself “in the room” (as the saying goes) and demonstrate that he was directly involved. The same goes for the FBI’s actions after Biden was in office, working to stomp on any stories that painted the administration in a bad light. But if enough people find out about it, these stories may be too much for even the Washington Post to ignore and people will be rightly infuriated.

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The key phrase in that last paragraph is, of course, “if enough people find out.” That’s where Goodwin gets to the second Watergate-era phrase that has since become infamous: “The coverup is worse than the crime.”

That’s because we are on the cusp of the coverup phase of what the FBI, and perhaps the CIA and others, did to influence the outcome of the 2020 election. Predictable denials of “nothing to see here” come despite clear proof agents interfered with the First Amendment rights of the American public, and not just on Twitter.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said agents warned him about “Russian disinformation” before the election. Those warnings came in weekly meetings FBI agents had in San Francisco with the Big Tech firms and some reportedly mentioned Hunter Biden. It remains an open question to what extent free speech was infringed on by government minders across the media ­landscape.

We’ve been talking about this here from the beginning, and Goodwin is correct. With every fresh batch of Twitter Files that emerges and no matter how high the mountain of evidence grows, the reaction in the MSM has been the same. On the rare instances when these data dumps are mentioned on any cable news network aside from Fox, the “coverage” is a very brief version of “nothing to see here.”

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Should we be surprised? Until the election was over you couldn’t even get them to talk about the border crisis. (And Biden is still trying to make sure nobody talks about it.) The reason for the paucity of coverage of anything that might reflect negatively on Biden, such as the shady deals his son had going on, is that there was almost no media hunger for such a story. The MSM had a shared objective with Team Biden, that being to remove Donald Trump from office. The mission may have been accomplished, but Trump is still lurking out there, frightening them all to death with the possibility that he might take back the Oval Office. And that can’t be allowed.

If we’re being honest, this treatment is no longer exclusive to Donald Trump. Pretty much any conservative or Republican candidate would receive the same treatment when facing off with any liberal or socialist Democrat. You probably noticed how quickly the “DeSantis Is The Devil” stories began showing up as soon as polls showed him leading Trump in a hypothetical primary matchup. They did the same thing to Tulsi Gabbard as soon as she no longer met the liberal purity test, though they loved her when she first emerged on the scene.

As Goodwin points out, we may be in for a long, dark road before we come out of the fog of political war, assuming we ever do. Far too many people simply believe what they see on CNN or read in the New York Times without asking any questions. And if a story doesn’t exist in those outlets or is dismissed as a “nothingburger,” the story isn’t real to them, even if they are vaguely aware of it. That’s not going to change overnight. And it may not change in some of our lifetimes.

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