New York Post columnist Miranda Devine has committed the story of the laptop from hell to book form. Published on November 30, the book is Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide.
The story is familiar to Power Line readers, yet in Devine’s telling it comes infuriatingly to life — an almost unbelievable story of censorship and suppression in the land of the free. I had forgotten some of the pertinent details until listening to Devine’s plenary address to the National Conservatism Conference this past November 2 (video below). The title of her speech is “The Laptop from Hell and New Censorship Regime,” which puts the the emphasis where it belongs.
In her remarks Devine pauses over the contribution of the national security establishment of the United States. They rose in unison to condemn Devine’s story as Russian disinformation. Their absurd “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails” remains posted online where it can serve as a continuing reproach to those who take our politics and media at face value.
UPDATE: The Examiner’s Virginia Aabram includes the laptop from hell as one of five theories that dropped the “conspiracy” in 2021:
On the eve of the 2020 election, reports emerged of a laptop believed to have belonged to President Joe Biden’s son Hunter containing materials detailing salacious elements of his personal life and foreign business dealings, a claim dismissed as “misinformation” by mainstream sources.
The laptop and hard drive were abandoned at a Delaware repair shop, and the shop owner turned them over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2019. The New York Post gained access to copies of the contents and investigated emails on the laptop relating to business deals in which the younger Biden bargained political connections with his father in exchange for money.
Initially skeptical publications such as Politico later reported that that the emails were genuine.
“A person who had independent access to Hunter Biden’s emails confirmed he did receive a 2015 email from a Ukrainian businessman thanking him for the chance to meet Joe Biden,” the outlet reported in September. “The same goes for a 2017 email in which a proposed equity breakdown of a venture with Chinese energy executives includes the line, ’10 held by H for the big guy?'”
But throughout the final months of 2020, large media outlets dismissed the story as “unsubstantiated” and “Russian disinformation” and wouldn’t vet the claims, instead bashing the New York Post for publishing the story. Twitter and Facebook banned the story for “misinformation” and locked the publication out of their social media accounts for days in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.
Hunter Biden himself has never denied that the laptop is his, and a veteran FBI forgery expert concluded the signature on the repair invoice belonged to him.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said she has “neither the time nor interest in exploring or reading” a book about the laptop and its implications.
I think the “conspiracy” dropped in 2020, but the conspiracy of silencers and suppressors is the real deal and it lives.
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