Friday, December 11, 2020

Greenwald: Don't Forget the Media Outlets That Peddled the 'Russian Disinformation' Lie



Now that Hunter Biden is (finally) under criminal investigation, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald has a message for those outraged by the media’s lack of coverage of Joe Biden’s prodigal son’s email-laptop scandal:

Don’t forget the media outlets that knowingly suppressed the explosive story — primarily to protect Hunter’s dad and benefactor Joe Biden prior to the presidential election.

“The now-validated facts about Hunter are precisely those the U.S. media — in tandem with Silicon Valley and the intelligence community — suppressed based on lies.”

“With news of Hunter Biden’s criminal probe,” Greenwood admonished, “recall the media outlets that peddled the ‘Russian disinformation’ lie.”


In a column self-published on Substack on Thursday, Greenwald wrote:

“The revelation that Hunter Biden is being criminally investigated for his business activities in China came on Monday from the investigative target himself, and he predictably and self-servingly depicted it as just a narrow probe about his ‘tax affairs’ by the U.S. Attorney for Delaware.

“As I wrote last night, that by itself would be significant enough — the documents published in the weeks before the election by The New York Post contained ample information about exactly that matter, yet were widely repressed by a union of mainstream news outlets, the intelligence community and Silicon Valley-based on propaganda and lies.

[See: Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, and Sundar Pichai’s Google.]

“But new reporting suggests the investigation has been far broader.”

Greenwald cited a report by Politico, which said the Justice Department’s interest in Hunter Biden covered more than just taxes. Federal prosecutors, Politico said, have also been looking into Biden’s foreign ties and possible money laundering.

Greenwald:

“Specifically, ‘the securities fraud unit in the Southern District of New York also scrutinized Hunter Biden’s finances’; ‘investigators in Delaware and Washington were also probing potential money laundering and Hunter Biden’s foreign ties’; and ‘federal authorities in the Western District of Pennsylvania are conducting a criminal investigation of a hospital business in which Joe Biden’s brother James was involved.’

“CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz added that ‘at least one of the matters investigators have examined is a 2017 gift of a 2.8-carat diamond that Hunter Biden received from CEFC [China Energy’]’s founder and former chairman Ye Jianming after a Miami business meeting.'”

If you’re outraged that this story is unfolding after the presidential election, after everyone from lying Rep. Adam Schiff to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, to NPR told us the story was concocted by Russia or was simply not newsworthy because it wasn’t true, join the club.

Greenwald singled out CNN “journalist” Amanpour and her recent segment with RNC National Spokesperson Elizabeth Harrington as an “amazing” example.

Amanpour: “As you know, I am a journalist and I follow the facts, and there has never been any issue with corruption.”

Harrington: “I would love if you guys would start doing that digging and doing that verification.”

Amanpour: “No, we’re not going to do your work for you.”

Harrington: “It’s a journalist’s job to find out if it’s verified!”

Wrong, Liz. Amanpour is not a journalist. Among her other activist “jobs,” she is a flack for the Biden family’s international wheeling and dealing.


“All of these topics are what the large bulk of the U.S. media, working in concert with the intelligence community and Silicon Valley, suppressed prior to the election,” wrote Greenwald.

“One of the first New York Post articles based on materials from Hunter’s laptop, headlined ‘Emails reveal how Hunter Biden tried to cash in big on behalf of family with Chinese firm,’ described how he ‘pursued lucrative deals involving China’s largest private energy company — including one that he said would be ‘interesting for me and my family,’ and specifically noted that Hunter ‘was identified as ‘”Chair/Vice Chair depending on agreement with CEFC,”’ an apparent reference to the former Shanghai-based conglomerate CEFC China Energy Co.”

And the “Russian disinformation campaign,” that pathological liar Schiff, CNN, MSNBC, and others desperately peddled, according to Greenwald?

“There has never been any evidence that Russia played any role whatsoever in these materials (The New York Times acknowledged that “no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation” and the paper said even the FBI has acknowledged that it had not found any Russian disinformation on the laptop).

[…]

“Critically, not even the Bidens denied the materials from the laptop were authentic, as The Times noted last night in its story about the criminal investigation into Hunter: ‘The Biden team has rejected some of the claims made in the NY Post articles, but has not disputed the authenticity of the [laptop] files upon which they were based.’

“Even the letter used by these media outlets to peddle the ‘Russian disinformation’ lie — from known liars: former CIA and other intelligence community leaders, who claimed that the Hunter laptop story ‘has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information” — admitted that ‘we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.'”

“In sum, we have the extraordinary historic disgrace of media outlets collaborating with the intelligence community in the weeks before a presidential election to manufacture and peddle a propagandistic lie,” Greenwald wrote.

And to what end?

“To justify censorship of highly relevant materials about the presidential front-runner and his family’s efforts to profit off his name — namely, that the documents were not authentic but rather ‘Russian disinformation.’”

“That’s the choice these media outlets made,” Greenwald wrote, in closing. “They got the election outcome they wanted. But they and their reputations and legacy will have to live with this choice.”

The sad and ominous reality is, the Democrat state media and Big Tech are only concerned with their respective reputations and legacies among themselves; a choice that they will be more than happy to live with. As Greenwald said, they got the election outcome they wanted. I suspect they are and will continue to be pleased as punch with themselves.