The drive features compromising photos and videos of Hunter, who has struggled with addiction. Giuliani unveiled the fruits of his labor earlier this month when he presented the New York Post with a laptop hard drive that he claims is Hunter Biden’s. Now Trump and his team are hoping that they can use it to change the subject in an election that thus far has been dominated by Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic. For years, his fixer Rudy Giuliani has been circling the globe in search of dirt on Hunter and his father Joe Biden. Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist and the founder and principal of Line Drive Public Affairs, a communication consulting firm.Donald Trump really, really wants the 2020 election’s “October Surprise” to be Hunter Biden. If their concerns were genuine, they would look at themselves first. We have a news media that is always worrying about election interference. Another survey by The Polling Company showed that even more Biden voters in seven swing states - 17% - would have switched their votes if they had been aware of the laptop and other stories. Trump pollster John McLaughlin found that 4.6% of Biden voters would have changed their minds if they had known about it, easily enough to flip results in key states. Regardless, we now have evidence that if Hunter’s laptop received the attention it deserved, it would have affected the election. Feinberg’s story an admission that the media didn’t cover the story precisely because it would have aided the Trump campaign? What tipped him off? Was it the dozen press conference calls we held at the end of the campaign pleading with the media to cover it? Or was it the press conference with Mr. This is an incredible piece of journalistic sleuthing. In fact, most outlets have acted as if The New York Times confirmation simply didn’t happen.īut perhaps the most ludicrous coverage of this sorry episode was another variation of the “Republicans pounce” genre of reporting.Īndrew Feinberg wrote an item for The Independent under the headline, “Trumpworld figures admit campaign expected Hunter Biden laptop story to help them in 2020.” This was a direct eyewitness, going on the record about his own experience with the Bidens, and the media only scoffed.Īt the time, all the usual suspects, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC and CNN, went into overdrive to discredit the New York Post and parrot the bogus claim that it was all “Russian disinformation.”ĬNN’s Brian Stelter, supposedly a media critic, last week couldn’t find time to amend or correct his own previous reporting - or that of his network’s - that the laptop was a Russian plant. We laid out the facts as revealed by the emails and implored the media to do their jobs in reporting on them.īefore the final debate of the race, the Trump campaign produced Tony Bobulinski, a former business associate of Hunter’s, who said he sat with President Biden as they discussed a deal with a Chinese energy company. I served as the communications director for former President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign throughout 20, so I was intimately involved in the battle over the coverage of Hunter’s laptop.įor the final two weeks of the campaign, we held daily press conference calls, usually featuring members of the Senate or House of Representatives. Other than The Post and Fox News, no major news outlets would touch it except to aggressively discount it.Ī few days into the drama, Politico published a letter from more than 50 “former intelligence officials,” who asserted that the laptop appeared to be a “Russian disinformation operation.” In the letter, the group actually admitted that “we do not know” if the emails were “genuine or not” and that “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.”īut that enormous caveat did not stop them from signing their names anyway, and it certainly didn’t stop the media from latching onto the letter as a shield to protect them from reporting on the story honestly. Facebook similarly throttled its dissemination. Twitter suspended The New York Post’s account and barred anyone from sharing the story. This was explosive stuff just before a presidential election.
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