Yesterday, Ed pointed out that, according to a new book published by a Politico reporter, the core of the Hunter Biden laptop story was true. Specifically, reporter Ben Schreckinger was able to verify that several of the emails which were the focus of articles published last year by the New York Post were indeed accurate and were not, as was widely claimed at the time, the product of Russian disinformation. Ed concluded that piece by pointing to some tweets by Glenn Greenwald who was arguing that the decision to block the NY Post‘s reporting by claiming they were part of a foreign disinformation was a kind of combined operation between the CIA and the media.

Today, Greenwald released an hour-long video and a lengthy post on Substack in which he walks through the remarkable lies and media censorship that took place last year. You might imagine that an hour-long video would include a lot of rambling over the same points but that’s not the case. It just takes an hour to go through all the evidence even moving at a fairly good pace. It’s one of the most egregious widespread abandonments of journalistic principles in recent history and there’s not a bit of doubt that the whole thing happened for one reason: To protect Joe Biden from accurate claims weeks before an election.

Greenwald starts by pointing out that the basic emails on which the Hunter Biden laptop story were based were confirmed as being accurate by several sources within days of being published. This wasn’t a case where the basic facts were in doubt. Nevertheless, a group of former intelligence officials wrote a letter (first highlighted by Natasha Bertrand at Politico) claiming the whole story sounded a bit like Russian disinformation. The media ran with it even though the the letter in question admitted there was no proof whatsoever to back up the claims.

…former intelligence officials such as Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan and his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper led a group of dozens of former spooks in issuing a public statement that disseminated an outright lie: namely, that the laptop was “Russian disinformation.” Note that this phrase contains two separate assertions: 1) the documents came from Russia and 2) they are fake (“disinformation”). The intelligence officials admitted in this letter that — in their words — “we do not know if the emails are genuine or not,” and also admitted that “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.” Yet it repeatedly insinuated that everyone should nonetheless believe this:

Greenwald spends a lot of time offering video clips of reporters simply refusing to cover the NY Post story about Hunter Biden because it allegedly couldn’t be confirmed or might be disinformation. “I cannot overstate to you how deliberately and relentlessly the corporate media lied and deceived and schemed in order to keep this story from reaching the American public,” Greenwald said. He then walked through examples of how the media lied about the accuracy of the story in order to not cover it. For instance, this from NPR.

Why haven't you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post's Hunter Biden story? Read more in this week's newsletter➡️ https://t.co/CJesPgmGvo pic.twitter.com/jAi7PnpbZf

— NPR Public Editor (@NPRpubliceditor) October 22, 2020

And this from CNN:

Of all the media deceit and propagndizing disseminated in the lead-up to the election to justify their refusal to report on the Hunter Biden documents — despite knowing they were genuine and not from Russia — this on CNN from @camanpour may be the most amazing: pic.twitter.com/mkI4Jtd4SN

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 10, 2020

And on top of these efforts by major media outlets to ignore or dismiss the story, you had Facebook and Twitter both limiting the sharing of the original NY Post story on their platforms in the days leading up to the election. The media wouldn’t discuss the story and the social media sites wouldn’t let regular people discuss it either. Again, the reasons were obvious.

There’s a section of the video about how this dynamic played out at Greenwald’s own site, the Intercept. Greenwald was informed that he wouldn’t be able to write about the NY Post story without his work going through editorial to make sure it was accurate. But he says he knew accuracy wasn’t the goal because the same editors had just published a story repeating the claims that the whole thing was Russian disinformation without any proof at all. “There are no editorial standards as long as you feed liberals what they want,” Greenwald said. His Substack piece concludes: “No matter how much you despise this sector of the corporate media, it is nowhere near close enough to the level of contempt and scorn they deserve.”

Here’s the full video: