‘Unverified’ is a (false) excuse for ignoring The Post’s Hunter Biden scoops
Much of the push to ignore The Post’s drop of Hunter Biden’s e-mails centers on the charge that it’s all “unverified.” The claim is more excuse than truth.
First, a host of media outlets have now interviewed the computer-repair guy who provided the data at the heart of these exposés — and he’s said exactly what we’ve reported from the start about how the laptop came into his possession.
Second, neither Hunter nor Joe Biden has even questioned the fact that the drive is real — they merely dismiss the entire line of questioning, while charging that The Post has an agenda in presenting it to the world.
Third, we’ve published emails and pictures — most of which have nothing to do with Ukraine or China — that contain an extraordinary level of detail. Is that all fabricated? The Biden campaign’s response, notably, is not that an e-mail from a Burisma official thanking Hunter for an introduction to his father isn’t real, it’s that said meeting doesn’t show up on Joe’s “official” schedules. Pressed by Politico, the campaign acknowledged that they couldn’t say for certain if Joe Biden had met him casually.
It’s particularly rich that The New York Times has fixated on the “unverified” excuse, since it’s spent much of the Trump era offering supposed dirt from anonymous sources — which, by definition, makes the info unverifiable.
A simple but striking case of that is The Atlantic’s “reporting” that President Trump spoke contemptuously and insultingly of US troops during his trip to France for war-memorial ceremonies. Its claims were based purely on anonymous sources — but contradicted by a number of on-the-record sources, including ex-National Security Adviser John Bolton, who has absolutely no reason to lie to protect the man who fired him.
Yes, the Times and other outlets “confirmed” the story — but only with anonymous sources of their own. What are the chances that these are the same people who talked to the Times anonymously?
More significantly, this is true of the Times and Washington Post reporting that built vast hysteria over “Russiagate” in the administration’s first days.
Some of the stories proved completely false, as no less than former FBI chief Jim Comey (who also has zero motive to protect Trump) said at the time. Others proved to be partial truths, retailed to suggest the opposite of the whole truth — such as the host of reports that the FBI was “investigating” one or another alleged horror, without ever mentioning that everything it had found so far indicated that the charge was pure fiction.
And all of it rooted in “opposition research” commissioned by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, or third-hand gossip retained by Clinton partisans in the Obama administration.
Now, suddenly, with a trove of information — which, again, the Bidens aren’t even claiming is false — these same outlets want to ask endless questions about the chain of evidence. A chain of evidence that The Post has been up-front and open about.
Desperate for Biden to win, they want to sink the story with innuendo rather than actually report on it. Don’t ask too many questions, and you can dismiss it all as “unverified.”
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