The New York Times Belatedly Admits the Emails on Hunter Biden's Abandoned Laptop Are Real and Newsworthy
A year and a half after the New York Post broke the story, the Times says it has "authenticated" the messages it previously deemed suspect.
Yesterday The New York Times published a story that quotes emails from a laptop that Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden's son, abandoned at a computer repair shop in Delaware. The messages reinforce the impression that Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that reportedly paid the younger Biden $50,000 a month to serve on its board, expected him to use his influence with his father for the company's benefit—an allegation that figured prominently in the scandal that led to Donald Trump's impeachment for pressuring the Ukrainian government to announce a Biden-Burisma corruption investigation. The messages include evidence that Hunter Biden arranged an April 2015 meeting between his father, then the vice president, and a Burisma executive.
If all that sounds familiar, it's because the New York Post first reported this eyebrow-raising information back in October 2020, a month before the presidential election. Pro-Biden, anti-Trump journalists, including several at the Times, portrayed the Post's story as unsubstantiated at best. Politico reported that "more than 50 former senior intelligence officials" believed the emails had "all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation." Some journalists suggested it was reckless even to acknowledge the Post's report. Twitter, which initially blocked links to the article, seemed to agree. While the Times did not ignore the story, the paper's coverage treated it with skepticism and disdain.But that was then. A year and a half later, the Times thinks the emails it viewed as suspect before Joe Biden's election are now newsworthy. "People familiar" with a federal investigation of Hunter Biden, it reports, "said prosecutors had examined emails" between him, his former business partner Devon Archer, "and others" regarding "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 messages "were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation."
In October 2020, by contrast, the Times reported that the Post's story was so iffy that "some reporters withheld their bylines." Here is how the Times described its competitor's scoop:
Coming late in a heated presidential campaign, the article suggested that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had used his position to enrich his son Hunter when he was vice president. The Post based the story on photos and documents the paper said it had taken from the hard drive of a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden.
Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive's contents, said five people with knowledge of the tabloid's inner workings. Staff members also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing, the people said.
In an editorial published today, the Post mocks the Gray Lady's belated certification of the emails as "authenticated" by unnamed sources: "Authenticated!!! You don't say. You mean, when a newspaper actually does reporting on a topic and doesn't just try to whitewash coverage for Joe Biden, it discovers it's actually true?"[/highlight]
More here-
https://reason.com/2022/03/17/the-new-york-times-belatedly-admits-the-emails-on-... Everyone from the left dismissed this as Russian disinformation which shows how stupid they were.