Oh, those Hunter Biden emails? At least some of them are real, according to a new book.
Politico staffers casually smuggled a ‘revelation’ from their colleague Ben Schreckinger’s The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty Years of Tragedy into Tuesday’s edition of the Playbook AM email. By sheer coincidence, Schreckinger’s book was also released on Tuesday.
Schreckinger independently verified both the ’10 held by H for the big guy?’ email and a 2015 email ‘from a Ukrainian businessman thanking him for the chance to meet Joe Biden’.
Politico further confirms that ‘emails released by a Swedish government agency also match emails in the leaked cache, and two people who corresponded with Hunter Biden confirmed emails from the cache were genuine’.
The Playbook authors then bravely add the following caveat: ‘While the leak contains genuine files, it remains possible that fake material has been slipped in.’
Cockburn takes the opposite view: if some of the emails (and, let’s face it, most of the pictures) are genuine, as the New York Post said they were in October 2020, does the burden of proof now fall on other publishers to show that fake material has been slipped in?
Publishers, that is, like Facebook, who restricted the circulation of the Post’s scoop based on the basis of an egregiously applied ‘misinformation’ policy?
Set aside for a second the fact that the opposite has happened: various other outlets, from the Daily Caller to the Washington Free Beacon, have confirmed the veracity of emails and photos from Hunter Biden’s laptop, as far back as October 2020.
Instead, Cockburn is considering the case study Schreckinger and Politico are offering us in the pitfalls of ‘saving it for the book’: a practice when reporters uncover ‘damning‘ information about important figures and decide to sit on it for the purposes of personal enrichment and to save the dying publishing industry, rather than verifying and publishing it immediately because doing so is in the public interest. Bob Woodward’s bombshell this month about Gen. Milley and his Chinese counterpart also springs to mind.
‘Saving it for the book’ must do wonders for restoring the American people’s waning faith in its fourth estate — particularly when the ‘scoop’ is a months-old confirmation of something we all knew anyway…
