NPR Corrects Article That Claimed Hunter Biden Laptop Story ‘Discredited by U.S. Intelligence’

Family members gather for a road naming ceremony with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, centr
Visar Kryeziu/AP

National Public Radio (NPR) has corrected an article that claimed that reports last year about emails on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop had been “discredited by U.S. intelligence and independent investigations by news organizations.”

The article now says: “Numerous news organizations cast doubt on the credibility of the laptop story.” A correction notes: “A previous version of this story said U.S. intelligence had discredited the laptop story. U.S. intelligence officials have not made a statement to that effect.”

In fact, the Hunter Biden laptop story was corroborated by physical evidence; by public declarations by Hunter Biden’s former business partner; and by an FBI investigation revealed after the election had long been over.

As Breitbart News noted in December:

When the New York Post reported on October 14 that Hunter Biden had introduced an official from the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma to then-Vice President Joe Biden — contrary to the latter’s denials that he had ever spoken to his family about their businesses — Facebook announced that it would be suppressing the story, and Twitter prevented people from sharing it. Those who dared were suspended; the Post itself was locked out of its account for more than two weeks.

When the Post followed up with reporting that Hunter Biden had launched a joint venture in 2017 with the CEFC China Energy Co., and that he had reserved 10% for the “big guy,” the media deliberately ignored the story. Never mind that the intended CEO of the new company, Tony Bobulinski, corroborated the story. Never mind that Breitbart News reported independent emails that showed Hunter Biden’s associates bringing Chinese bigwigs to the Obama-Biden White House.

In the final presidential debate, Joe Biden called the story a “Russian plant,” citing a letter by 50 former intelligence officials, including some who spread the “Russia collusion” hoax. Biden lied to to America, as Big Tech and the media applauded.

The 50 intelligence officials who claimed that the laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” admitted that they did not have any actual evidence to back up their claims and did not know if the emails were “genuine.” They were led by by Obama-era Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and joined by former CIA Director John Brennan, two promoters of the false “Russia collusion” hoax about the 2016 election.

As noted by the Washington Examiner, the NPR story was a “flat-out falsehood”; the correction notes that many news organizations “cast doubt” on the Hunter Biden laptop story, but leaves open the possibility that such doubts were justified.

NPR is not the first mainstream media outlet to attempt to rewrite the history of the Hunter Biden laptop story. In December, NBC claimed that accusations about Hunter Biden relating to the laptop and its contents were “unfounded and baseless.”

Update: 

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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