What they did do, Zuckerberg said, was downgrade posts about the Hunter Biden laptop so that fewer people would see them. When Rogan asked for specific numbers, Zuckerberg said he didn’t know them off the top of his head but conceded that the downgrading was significant.
(1) Although the Big Tech platforms don’t exactly seem like they have to be dragged kicking and screaming into suppressing unpopular opinions, we keep learning about ways the federal government has been pressuring them to do so.
We found out quite recently that the federal government pressured Twitter to drop Alex Berenson, for example.
The latest case came just the other day, when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg made an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Rogan asked him about the Hunter Biden laptop story, and we found out that the FBI had approached Facebook cautioning it against allowing the free dissemination of what it of course called Russian propaganda.
Zuckerberg said:
“The FBI basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that there is about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that, so just be vigilant.
“So our protocol is different from Twitter’s. What Twitter did is they said you can’t share this at all. We didn’t do that.”
What they did do, Zuckerberg said, was downgrade posts about the Hunter Biden laptop so that fewer people would see them. When Rogan asked for specific numbers, Zuckerberg said he didn’t know them off the top of his head but conceded that the downgrading was significant.
Zuckerberg went on: “We just kind of thought, hey, look, if the FBI, which I still view as a legitimate institution in this country — it’s a very, very impressive law enforcement — they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously.”
You think there’s the tiniest chance that the FBI is a political organization?
One favorable development has come from all this, at least: the right side of the ideological divide has rapidly shed its superstitious reverence for agencies like the FBI.
(2) On another note: in case you missed episode 2183 of the Tom Woods Show, I had a chance to speak to Mikkel Thorup, an expert on international relocation and expat issues, having visited 100 countries himself and lived in nine, and an expat himself for over 20 years.
I myself am too much of a homebody to leave the U.S., but I know for a fact that more of my readers than ever are considering their international options, whether that’s outright relocation or measures short of that, like second citizenships and the like.
Several FBI whistleblowers say that the agency’s probe into Hunter Biden was internally sabotaged during the 2020 election in order to derail the investigation, after agents wrongfully deemed verified evidence as “disinformation” to ignore.
According to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), agents investigating Hunter “opened an assessment which was used by an FBI headquarters team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease,” adding that his office received “a significant number of protected communications from highly credible whistleblowers” regarding the investigation.
Grassley added that “verified and verifiable derogatory information on Hunter Biden was falsely labeled as disinformation,” according to the Washington Examiner.
FBI supervisory intelligence agent Brian Auten opened in August 2020 the assessment that was later used by the agency, according to the disclosures. One of the whistleblowers claimed the FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Washington field office, Timothy Thibault, shut down a line of inquiry into Hunter Biden in October 2020 despite some of the details being known to be true at the time.
A whistleblower also said Thibault “ordered closed” an “avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting,” according to Grassley, even though “all of the reporting was either verified or verifiable via criminal search warrants.” The senator said Thibault “ordered the matter closed without providing a valid reason as required” and that FBI officials “subsequently attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future,” according to the disclosures.
The whistleblowers say investigators from FBI headquarters were “in communication with FBI agents responsible for the Hunter Biden information targeted by Mr. Auten’s assessment,” and that their findings on whether the claims were in fact disinformation were placed “in a restricted access sub-file” in September 2020, according to Grassley, who added that the disclosures “appear to indicate that there was a scheme in place among certain FBI officials to undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation.“
Grassley summarized the new allegations in a Monday letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
The Examiner notes that FBI agent Auten was involved in the Trump-Russia investigation, including interviewing Christopher Steele’s primary source, Igor Danchenko.
According to Grassley, the “volume and consistency” of the allegations regarding the handling of the Hunter Biden probe “substantiate their credibility.”
The assessment by Auten in August 2020 was opened the same month Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) received a briefing from the FBI “that purportedly related to our Biden investigation and a briefing for which the contents were later leaked in order to paint the investigation in a false light,” Grassley said. The senator said Senate Democrats asked for a briefing in July 2020 “from the very same FBI HQ team that discredited the derogatory Hunter Biden information.”
The FBI inquiry into Hunter Biden reportedly began as a tax investigation, then expanded into a scrutiny of potential money-laundering and foreign lobbying; the DOJ has declined to hand over investigative details. -Washington Examiner
Thibault, the FBI agent who allegedly quashed the Hunter probe, may have violated the Hatch act in 2020 after making posts on social media which were critical of then-president Donald Trump and former AG William Barr.
Also notable – Hunter had the numbers of several FBI agents in his iCloud contacts.
Since Hunter Biden does not appear to know much about oil or gas, he was obviously given his Burisma appointment and lavish pay because the company’s owners believed he could influence – through his father – American policy in ways that were favorable to the company.
Joe Biden would get a cut from Hunter’s takings, a fact which was communicated by Hunter in his emails. In their drive to enrich themselves, the Bidens would enter relationships with some of the shadiest characters around. Burisma, for instance, was co-founded by a well-known corrupt Ukrainian oligarch who is now a fugitive from justice.
Last week the Russian government held a press conference where it aired accusations of breath-taking corruption on the part of Joe Biden and his family.
Unfortunately, this event was no fake news Russian propaganda. The incriminating evidence presented at the event came straight from the hard drive that belonged to Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
As you may know, in 2019 Hunter Biden carelessly abandoned his laptop at a computer repair shop in Delaware. This was an act of astounding recklessness, since the emails, text messages, files, photos, and videos contained on that computer provided an extensive record of greed, corruption, bribery and graft not only on his part but also on the part of his father and other members of their family.
When the New York Post tried to report on the hard drive in October 2020, the America mainstream media and law enforcement authorities refused to acknowledge it or take appropriate action. Rather than commencing an investigation, the establishment falsely claimed that the hard drive was a product of “Russian misinformation.” They did this even though they knew it was real. The staff of the New York Post conducted an extensive, multi-level authentication process to ensure that the hard drive was genuine, and they made the details of this process available to anyone who cared to check.
The establishment, however, banded together and refused to act. Instead of investigating the guilty party, they attacked the messenger and went into overdrive to censor the incriminating information under the cover of the “Russian misinformation” canard. With the collaboration of Big Tech and the legacy media, they managed to suppress the truth and most voters were unaware of the hard drive’s contents. Most of those who managed to hear of it still believed that it was Russian misinformation. That they fell for the establishment’s “Russian misinformation” lie is not so surprising, given the revelations seemed too outrageous to be factual.
Needless to say, it was all true. In the months following the November 2020 election, various individuals and media outlets were gradually forced to admit that the hard drive was, indeed, real. The hyper partisan New York Times and the Washington Post are among the latest to confirm this fact.
But even though the establishment has largely succeeded in keeping this information from the American public, their malfeasance is now coming back to bite us. This is because foreign entities and governments also have Hunter Biden’s hard drive, and they are now using it to point out the obvious corruption of our president and the whole of the Washington establishment. In other words, they will do the job that our media and legal system refused to do when the scandal was first brought up in America.
They will do this before the eyes of the whole world and will bring shame on what the international community now increasingly views as a corrupt American president who leads a corrupt administration.
We got a taste of this last Thursday when the Kremlin used Hunter’s messages to show he apparently facilitated and financially benefited from bioweapons research in Ukraine. And even though the American mainstream media – true to form – refused to report on it, the rest of the world saw the evidence clear and loud. This is the headline from the British MailOnline:
To make matters worse, Hunter did this while his father was vice president of the United States. He thus used his father’s influence to put himself in a position where he could benefit from these kinds of illicit ventures.
“I take special pride in personally swinging the election away from Trump,” John Sipher, who served for decades as a senior operations officer at the CIA, wrote in a recent post on Twitter.
One of the former CIA officers who signed a letter claiming stories about a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden were disinformation says he helped swing the 2020 election from former President Donald Trump.
“I take special pride in personally swinging the election away from Trump,” John Sipher, who served for decades as a senior operations officer at the CIA, wrote in a recent post on Twitter.
“I lost the election for Trump? Well then I fell [sic] pretty good about my influence,” he also wrote.
Sipher and 50 other former U.S. intelligence officials signed the letter on Oct. 19, 2020, alleging that the effort to distribute its contents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” despite not knowing whether the laptop was legitimate.
The Post was the first to report on emails on the laptop, which was dropped off at a computer repair store and never picked up by then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, according to the store’s owner.
While the FBI picked up the computer and a hard drive from the owner, the bureau’s apparent inaction in probing the matter prompted him to pass on a copy of the hard drive to a lawyer representing former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who in turn passed it on to the Post.
The Oct. 14, 2020, story about the emails came as some voters were still deciding whether to vote for Biden or Trump. The story was widely questioned by legacy news outlets, suppressed by social media platforms, and claimed to be part of a Russian effort, despite top officials like Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe saying there was no evidence that was the case.
Sipher is one of the few former officials who signed the letter to respond to fresh questions about its contents, after more legacy outlets, including Politico, said they’ve confirmed it is legitimate.
Sipher got into arguments with former acting DNI Richard Grenell and others on Twitter, where he later said his claims of helping Trump lose were sarcasm.
He also write that “the letter didn’t say the laptop was disinformation” but in May 2021 posted a link to the Politico story that did say that.
Nick Shapiro, once a top aide to former CIA Director John Brennan—both Shapiro and Brennan signed the missive—and who provided it to Politico, has not responded to requests for comment from The Epoch Times.
Most other signers didn’t respond to requests for comment or declined the requests, the Post reported.
James Clapper, a former DNI, told the paper that he stands by the statement “made AT THE TIME,” adding that, “I think sounding such a cautionary note AT THE TIME was appropriate.”
“The letter explicitly stated that we didn’t know if the emails were genuine, but that we were concerned about Russian disinformation efforts,” added Russ Travers, former acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center. “I spent 25 years as a Soviet/Russian analyst. Given the context of what the Russians were doing at the time (and continue to do—Ukraine being just the latest example), I considered the cautionary warning to be prudent.”
John-Henry Westen from LifeSiteNews.com interviews Jack Maxey, who was one of the first journalists to be given access to a copy of Hunter Biden’s hard drives, which contain shocking evidence of moral and financial corruption within the Biden family, in what Maxey calls “The biggest National security scandal in the history of our planet.”
Maxey says “There are a dozen hours of Hunter smoking crack and there is child pornography [including of Hunter with his own 13-year old niece]. The FBI had this laptop before the first [Trump] impeachment. There is a concentrated effort to protect the Biden family.”
The Hunter Biden files detail Hunter’s direct involvement with Chairman Xi Jinping, the Biden family’s Beijing-backed business deals all over the world and possible Chinese infiltration of the US Government with Hunter Biden’s help.
Emails show Hunter Biden and the Chinese eventually scrambling to clean up their mess, as the Bidens’ top business contacts end up arrested or “disappeared”. Hunter goes so far as to purposefully incriminate his own family members, including his president father to protect himself.
Perhaps the most stunning of all, the American intelligence community knew for years about what Rudy Giuliani has called the ‘Biden Crime Family’ and they did nothing about it for darker reasons than you might think.
This certainly would be a convenient time to give Joe Biden the hook, as he’s so far underwater he’s dragging the whole party down with him, and a predicted dire assessment of his party’s chances in the midterms seems widespread. If the charges against Hunter are filed, his father is inextricably involved in the foreign payoffs,
The New York Post, without all these sordid details and photographs, reported the story in that same month before the election. But in the face of widespread denial, the story got little coverage. It is only now almost two years later, that the New York Timesconfirms that the Post’s reporting on the laptop was accurate.
A comprehensive report about the ongoing federal probe into Hunter Biden’s tax filings published by the New York Times on Wednesday night confirmed the existence of the first son’s infamous laptop.
In October 2020, The Post exclusively reported on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop that he ditched at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019.
The laptop’s hard drive contained a trove of emails, text messages, photos and financial documents between Hunter Biden, his family and business associates — detailing how the president’s son used his political leverage in his overseas business dealings.
The repair shop owner reported the laptop to the FBI, which seized the device and its hard drive.
As part of their investigation into Hunter Biden, the Times reports, federal prosecutors have looked into emails between the first son and his former business associates that were recovered from the laptop.
Emma-Jo Morris the author of the Post report tweeted:
“Just to clarify: the New York Times did not ‘confirm’ my reporting on the laptop from hell. They did not add any new information speaking to its authenticity. All they did was ADMIT that it was legit. That is not a minor distinction.”
No, it isn’t minor. There was ample evidence the report was accurate, as Apelbaum’s reporting all that month demonstrated.
It is hard to imagine how the Times justifies hiding from its readers news this important which clearly would have affected the election.
Its refusal to cover this allowed Joe Biden to get away with brushing off the story without dealing with its serious evidence of incredible family corruption of every sort imaginable.
Brush offs like this when a brave reporter asked about the laptop:
“God love ya man, you’re a one horse pony,” he told the reporter while walking away.
“I promise my Justice Department will be totally on its own making these judgments about how they should proceed,” he added.
Joe Biden oversees the Justice Department, the agency in charge of rooting out corruption – even at the highest levels.
It was not only the NYT, and media figures like Leslie Stahl and Brian Stelter who discounted the report about Hunter’s laptop. Fifty former senior intelligence officials suggested the report was Russian disinformation
On Wednesday, when the New York Timesacknowledged the authenticity of Hunter’s laptop, it struck a blow to Biden and his Democrat lieutenants who have claimed for years the laptop is Russian disinformation.
Biden’s spokesperson, Jen Psaki, is still clinging to Biden’s baseless defense:
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday dodged two questions about Hunter Biden’s laptop after the New York Times confirmed the laptop from hell is in fact real. The New York Times finally admitted that Hunter Biden’s laptop is real…. Two White House reporters confronted Psaki about Hunter Biden’s laptop on Thursday and her previous claims it was Russian disinformation. Psaki looked visibly irritated and refused to answer any questions. The president previously said that the [Hunter Biden laptop scandal] was a bunch of garbage and that it was a Russian plant. Does he stand by that assessment?
C’mon man. They gotcha. Almost two years too late, but you can’t continue to hide this. Game’s up.
I can’t disagree with wretchardthecat who apropos tweeted: “The difference between a conspiracy theory and ‘so it happened, get over it’ is about six months.”
The difference between a conspiracy theory and “so it happened, get over it” is about six months. https://t.co/lhUqQu4966 — wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) March 17, 2022
Well, that seems to be the Clinton-Obama-Biden playbook for what you do when the evidence of your wrongdoing has finally made its way through the layers of disinformation and media coverup.
I don’t think that will work this time. For one thing, there does seem to be some kind of ongoing federal investigation in which at least Devon Archer, Hunter’s close business associate, was sentenced for defrauding an Indian tribe. And that investigation seems to involve Hunter’s dealings:
WASHINGTON — In the year after he disclosed a federal investigation into his “tax affairs” in late 2020, President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, paid off a significant tax liability, even as a grand jury continued to gather evidence in a wide-ranging examination of his international business dealings, according to people familiar with the case.[snip]
But Mr. Biden’s taxes are just one element of the broader investigation stemming from work he did around the world. Hunter Biden is a Yale-educated lawyer; his professional life has intersected with his father’s public service, including working as a registered lobbyist for domestic interests and, while his father was vice president, pursuing deals and clients in Asia and Europe.
As recently as last month, the federal grand jury heard testimony in Wilmington, Del., from two witnesses, one of whom was a former employee of Hunter Biden whose lawyer was later subpoenaed for financial records that reflected money Mr. Biden received from a Ukrainian energy company.
Investigators have examined Mr. Biden’s relationships with interests in Kazakhstan, a Chinese energy conglomerate and Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, according to people familiar with the investigation.
They said prosecutors had investigated payments and gifts Mr. Biden or his associates had received from foreign interests, including a vehicle paid for using funds from a company associated with a Kazakh oligarch and a diamond from a Chinese energy tycoon. Prosecutors also sought documents related to corporate entities through which Mr. Biden and his associates conducted business with interests around the world.
I’m inclined to endorse this Facebook post of Michael Walsh:
It’s important for you civilians to know how to read the secret messages encoded in Pravda’s “news” stories. Its admission that — surprise!! — the Hunter Biden laptop stories were all, of course, true is a signal to Dems that the Big Guy is now expendable.
This certainly would be a convenient time to give Joe Biden the hook, as he’s so far underwater he’s dragging the whole party down with him, and a predicted dire assessment of his party’s chances in the midterms seems widespread. If the charges against Hunter are filed, his father is inextricably involved in the foreign payoffs, and a majority Republican Congress in the coming term could well institute impeachment proceedings. So why not have his own party usher him out the door first to signal their togas are clean?
In history, sociopaths have played important destructive roles because they have no moral compass and no commitment to virtuous conduct. A republic cannot stand without a virtuous people.
Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide by Miranda Devine 224 pp Kindle 14.99 Hardcopy 24.33, ISBN978-1-63758-105-6 A Liberatio Protocol Book Imprint of Post Hill Press New York 2021
It is hard to find words to describe the debauched and sleazy satyr that is Hunter Biden and how he used his family name and his father’s status as an important American politician to become an extraordinary international grifter involved in multi-million dollar — sometimes billion dollar — deals with international entities that included corrupt criminal enterprises such as Burisma Holdings of Ukraine and the government- and military-controlled companies of Russia and China, international enemies of the United States.
His business activities and lifestyle were revealed on the laptop he left in a Wilmington, Delaware Mac computer repair shop owned by a Mr. Isaac, who took possession after Hunter failed to pick it up after 90 days. Mr. Isaac had already fixed the water damage and looked at the contents, found discussions about Burisma (the Ukrainian oil and gas company) so he arranged through his father, a retired Air Force Colonel, to turn the laptop over to the FBI in Arizona.
Mr. Isaac kept a hard drive copy to protect himself. Then he made some inquiries after the FBI failed to do anything. The inquiry that was most productive was to Rudy Giuliani, who was Trump’s personal attorney and very interested in the Burisma matter. Mr. G had an old DOJ colleague named Costello from his federal prosecutor days who was an IT expert, and the hard drive was analyzed. Then, in October, it was presented to the New York Post for the bombshell it was — proof of Hunter’s grifting and also proof that Joe Biden lied when he claimed he didn’t know anything about Hunter’s international machinations involving corrupt Ukrainians and nefarious Chinese and Russian autocrats/plutocrats.
The plot thickened as the Post did its due diligence. A full-court press was initiated to suppress and censor the Post’s publication of the laptop materials in October of 2020, the run-up to the election and the interval in the debates being held between Trump and Biden.
An axis of the CIA, Big Tech and the DNC-allied wing of the corporate media spread an absolute lie in the weeks before the 2020 election. We now have definitive proof.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer warns that emails and other documents reported on by The New York Post about Joe Biden’s activities in Ukraine and China may be “Russian disinformation,” Oct. 16, 2020.
A severe escalation of the war on a free internet and free discourse has taken place over the last twelve months. Numerous examples of brute and dangerous censorship have emerged: the destruction by Big Tech monopolies of Parler at the behest of Democratic politicians at the time that it was the most-downloaded app in the country; the banning of the sitting president from social media; and the increasingly explicit threats from elected officials in the majority party of legal and regulatory reprisals in the event that tech platforms do not censor more in accordance with their demands.
But the most severe episode of all was the joint campaign — in the weeks before the 2020 election — by the CIA, Big Tech, the liberal wing of the corporate media and the Democratic Party to censor and suppress a series of major reports about then-presidential frontrunner Joe Biden. On October 14 and then October 15, 2020, The New York Post, the nation’s oldest newspaper, published two news reports on Joe Biden’s activities in Ukraine and China that raised serious questions about his integrity and ethics: specifically whether he and his family were trading on his name and influence to generate profit for themselves. The Post said that the documents were obtained from a laptop left by Joe Biden’s son Hunter at a repair shop.
From the start, the evidence of authenticity was overwhelming. The Post published obviously genuine photos of Hunter that were taken from the laptop. Investigations from media outlets found people who had received the emails in real-time and they compared the emails in their possession to the ones in the Post‘s archive, and they matched word-for-word. One of Hunter’s own business associates involved in many of these deals, Tony Bobulinski, confirmed publicly and in interviews that the key emails were genuine and that they referenced Joe Biden’s profit participation in one deal being pursued in China. A forensics analyst issued a report concluding the archive had all the earmarks of authenticity. Not even the Bidens denied that the emails were real: something they of course would have done if they had been forged or altered. In sum, as someone who has reported on numerous large archives similar to this one and was faced with the heavy burden of ensuring the documents were genuine before risking one’s career and reputation by reporting them, it was clear early on that all the key metrics demonstrated that these documents were real.
Despite all that, 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.”
No, it isn’t minor. There was ample evidence the report was accurate, as Apelbaum’s reporting all that month demonstrated.
MCViewPoint 
