The Federal Bureau of Investigation refused to disclose to US social media companies that the laptop allegedly belonging to President Joe Biden’s son was genuine, the US House Judiciary Committee revealed on Friday.
The New York Post had published a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020, a month before the presidential election pitting his father against the incumbent President Donald Trump. All social media platforms censored the story – some blocking the outlet itself – with the tacit approval of the FBI and citing a prior Bureau warning about an impending “Russian” disinformation campaign.
It now transpires that the same people at the FBI warning Silicon Valley about a “Russian” operation knew that the laptop story was authentic, because the Bureau had it in custody since 2019.
The House Republicans revealed the news on Friday, citing the July 17 sworn testimony of Laura Dehmlow, the section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) to the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
“Put simply, after the FBI conditioned social media companies to believe that the laptop was the product of a hack-and-dump operation, the Bureau stopped its information sharing, allowing social media companies to conclude that the New York Post story was Russian disinformation,” the House Republicans said.
As proof, they quoted Dehmlow’s testimony about FBI officials meeting with Twitter and Facebook on October 14 2020, the day the Post published its story. When a Twitter employee asked about the laptop story, one FBI analyst “began to respond that the laptop was real, when an FBI lawyer interrupted to say that the FBI had ‘no further comment’, regarding the laptop’s provenance.”
Later that day Dehmlow herself “responded to a similar question from a Facebook employee about Hunter Biden’s laptop by stating that the FBI, again, had “no comment.” The FBI made this decision despite being in possession of the laptop and having confirmed its authenticity. According to Dehmlow, multiple personnel on FITF knew that the laptop was real,” the Judiciary Committee said.
Biden dropped off his laptop at a Delaware shop in April 2019, but never claimed it. He later admitted in his memoir he was on hard drugs at the time. The contents of the laptop proved this, as well as his dalliances with prostitutes and business deals involving the Biden family name – and potentially implicating his father Joe as well.
“We already knew that the FBI took possession of Hunter’s laptop in [December] 2019. What we didn’t know was whether or not the FBI agents warning of Russian disinfo related to Hunter Biden also knew that [the] FBI had his laptop. Now we know they did,” Michael Shellenberger, one of the journalists who investigated the Twitter Files, said in response to the Judiciary Committee statement, adding that “what has just been revealed is evidence of a criminal conspiracy by high-ranking FBI officials to influence the 2020 election.”