Video of Dems, media rejecting Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story as ‘Russian disinfo’ goes viral after FBI confirms authenticity in court (2024)

Video clips of Democrats and legacy media journalists dismissing The Post’s scoop on Hunter Biden’s foreign influence-peddling as “Russian disinformation” went viral on Wednesday after the FBI confirmed during the first son’s Delaware criminal trial the laptop containing evidence of dirty deeds was authentic.

Network anchors and contributors, ex-US intelligence officials, Democrats in Congress — and then-candidate Joe Biden himself — all denied the accuracy of the report on the contents of the so-called “laptop from hell” in October 2020.

But in Wilmington federal court on Tuesday, FBI Special Agent Erika Jensen verified that the laptop — which contains emails revealing the first son’s involvement of his father in foreign business deals that netted the first family millions — belonged to Hunter Biden and had not been tampered with.

The president’s son is facing felony charges of lying on a federal form about his crack cocaine abuse to illegally purchase a Colt Cobra .38-caliber revolver in October 2018.

The viral video, posted on X by user @KanekoatheGreat, gained more than 28 million views in under 24 hours.

When the Post’s first article on the laptop was published on Oct. 14, 2020, fully disclosing its sourcing from Trump allies Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon, its reach online was suppressed by Facebook and Twitter — where The Post was also locked out of its account for two weeks.

The New York Times, Washington Post and other outlets which initially fed the disinformation smears, later independently — and belatedly — confirmed that the laptop was real.

Shortly after the laptop story broke, former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell organized a letter signed by 50 former intelligence officials, including himself and ex-CIA chiefs John Brennan and Leon Panetta, saying the emails had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence under President Barack Obama and another signee, also told CNN the laptop was “classic, textbook Soviet, Russian tradecraft at work.”

Last year, Morell told the House Judiciary Committee in a closed-door interview that then-senior Biden campaign official Antony Blinken — now secretary of state — “triggered” his decision to organize the letter by reaching out “on or before” Oct. 17, 2020, three days after The Post published its first laptop story.

Morell collected signatures for the letter, which was published by Politico on Oct. 19, to “help Vice President Biden,” he told the Judiciary panel, “because I wanted him to win the election.”

Three days later, Biden used the letter in his second and final debate against President Donald Trump to wave off accusations that his son had raked in funds from Chinese and Ukrainian ventures.

“There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant,” the Democratic candidate said, citing Politico’s article — as did his future White House press secretary Jen Psaki — to deflect from Trump calling attention to Hunter’s laptop.

“Five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage,” Biden added at the debate. “Nobody believes it except his good friend Rudy Giuliani.”

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who was then the panel’s chairman, also rejected the credibility of the laptop — with the latter calling it “Kremlin propaganda.”

“The Kremlin has an obvious interest in denigrating Joe Biden, they want Donald Trump to win, they recognize he’s a weak president,” Schiff said in an Oct. 16, 2020, interview on CNN.

“Clearly they want to help him, so they want to denigrate the vice president, the intelligence community has made that abundantly clear.”

Former Obama-era CIA and Pentagon chief of staff Jeremy Bash told MSNBC around the same time that the laptop emails “looked like Russian intelligence” and “walked like Russian intelligence.”

“This effort by Rudy Giuliani and the New York Post and Steve Bannon to cook up supposed dirt on Joe Biden looks like a classic, Russian playbook disinformation campaign,” said Bash, who also signed Morell’s letter.

“This is collusion in plain sight,” he added, revamping attacks that Trump had endured during his 2016 presidential campaign, which were later found to be false by two special counsel’s reports.

Contents from the laptop have since been cross-checked against data from Hunter’s iCloud account as part of special counsel David Weiss’ prosecution of the first son in Delaware.

Hunter, 54, has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and the trial is expected to conclude by the end of next week.