The Washington Post Accepts Hunter Biden Laptop Story

Dems in disarray leading into midterm and presidential elections

People vote at a voting station during a special election in Santa Clarita, Calif., on May 12, 2020. (Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images)

News Analysis

The Hunter Biden laptop story has just blown up from the New York Post, which broke the story to the mainstream liberal media.

Almost two years later, the media finally accessed a copy of the purported laptop and expertly verified the authenticity of much of its most important material, including evidence of millions of dollars in payments to the Biden family from a Chinese conglomerate and the apparent involvement of President Joe Biden himself in some of Hunter Biden’s foreign business maneuvers.

According to two March 30 Washington Post articles, which reported the verification of 22,000 emails on the laptop and newly discovered financial and government documents, CEFC China Energy and its executives “paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and his uncle [James Biden].”

The laptop only “purportedly” belonged to Hunter Biden because The Washington Post’s expert authenticators couldn’t verify all data on the laptop copy and claimed that some of it appeared irregular.

“In their examinations,” according to The Washington Post, the two experts “found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.”

Nevertheless, the New York Post is legitimately cross that The Washington Post and The New York Times took so long to access and verify the email data.

The closely fought presidential election was likely thrown to Joe Biden because these pro-Democratic outlets—plus Twitter, Facebook, and dozens of former intelligence officials—downplayed the original reporting, including calling it “Russian disinformation.”

Hunter Biden arrives at the inauguration of Joe Biden on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 20, 2021. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Now, they are mostly admitting, one by one, to the legitimacy of the main outline of the story.

The NY Times buried its reporting of the authentication of the emails within a long story whose headline provides information that could bias jurors against any future conviction of Hunter Biden on tax-related criminal offenses.

That is, that after a reported failure to pay all his taxes, Hunter Biden did, in fact, pay—which wouldn’t change any actual fraud. Any competent prosecution of Hunter Biden would try to keep his later payment, likely seen as exculpatory by average citizens, from the jurors.

As noted by the New York Post on March 30, “The Times buried its verification of the emails in the 24th paragraph of a 38-paragraph story that said Hunter Biden had paid off a significant tax debt to the IRS, potentially making it harder for prosecutors to win a conviction or a long sentence against him for tax fraud.”

That the NY Times and Washington Post are addressing the issue at all, however, especially when the president had a record-low approval rating of just 40 percent on March 27, does not augur well for a second term.

Fifty-one percent of Democrats in a recent CNN poll would prefer a different candidate than Joe Biden for their party in 2024. Of those, 72 percent wanted anyone other than Joe Biden, while those potential candidates most frequently named were Bernie Sanders (5 percent), Michelle Obama (4 percent), Pete Buttigieg (2 percent), and Kamala Harris (2 percent).

The Democrats aren’t expected to do well during the midterms. They could easily lose the presidency in 2024 to Donald Trump if he decides to run or someone that Trump anoints during the 2024 Republican National Convention. Fifty percent of Republican respondents in the CNN poll preferred Trump as the presidential nominee for 2024, while 49 percent preferred someone else.

In the latter category, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis got the most support (21 percent), with most other potential candidates getting just 1 percent, including top-runners Donald Trump Jr., Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and Sen. Rand Paul.

While DeSantis has not been as tough on China as other leading Republicans, including Mike Pompeo and Sen. Marco Rubio, he has supported decoupling from China and reshoring American jobs.

On March 29, DeSantis counterattacked Disney, which criticized Florida’s new law against teaching sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom, by pointing out that the California-based company self-censors for China and hasn’t condemned the Uyghur genocide.

Democrats are finally recognizing the authenticity of the most important China-related parts of the Hunter Biden laptop story. We need better protection against the foreign influence of our highest politicians, including through their families. But we already knew that.

It also suggests that coming into the 2022 midterm elections and 2024 presidential elections, the Democrats are entirely disorganized. Based on what the presidential field looks like today, Trump and DeSantis both have a good shot at being our next American president.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.