Democrats are obsessed with the idea that when they lose elections it must be because of outside forces, usually some sort of Russian. But what we know now is that if anyone has been manipulating our once precious democracy, it has been the Democrats.
The latest findings by the Durham investigation make clear that the 2016 Clinton campaign paid for and implemented a massive disinformation strategy to falsely link Donald Trump to Russia, and then worked the intelligence services of the United States and the mainstream media to drive that narrative deep into the American psyche.
When Trump won, Democrats used that same strategy to try and drive him from office. That that too failed is not the point; the playbook was being worked out for manipulating an election within the boundaries of the American system. The Dems/intel services/MSM proved to be fast learners, because when it came to 2020, the basic plan did work, deep-sixing the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop to help glide Joe into the White House.
Surveys suggest the information could have swung the election if voters had known about it. One showed enough people in battleground states would have changed their votes to give Trump the electoral push needed for reelection. I fully agree. How can I say that? Because unlike almost everyone else in America, as a journalist, I read the contents of the laptop in 2020.
Here’s why you couldn’t.
On October 14, 2020, three weeks before the Trump-Biden election, the nation’s oldest newspaper, founded by Alexander Hamilton himself, the New York Post, published reports about the business dealings of Hunter Biden. Hunter took large sums of money from businesses in Ukraine that were part of his father’s official portfolio as vice president, and took large sums of money from Chinese shell companies with ties to the Chinese oligarchy.
Hunter performed no work in return for the money. In the case of China, he appeared to launder money, taking in six figures, skimming off a percentage, then handing the remainder over to a US corporate entity of the Chinese organization. That got around Chinese government currency export regulations.
The funds sent to Hunter were obscured in a number of ways. They passed through paper companies Hunter set up. They traversed numbered Cypriot and British Virgin Island bank accounts, came in the form of prepaid Visa cards, and as gifts including diamonds and Apple products. Some money was routed through Joe Biden’s brother’s office, Hunter’s uncle. When Uncle Jim ran into financial trouble, having triple mortgaged his home, he was bailed out via loans from Joe and Hunter and a loan of $500,000 from John Hynansky, a Ukrainian-American businessman and longtime donor to Joe Biden’s campaigns.
Hunter illegally did not report much of the income, and recently paid $1 million dollars in back taxes (fraud charges may be pending).
In return for all this money, Hunter introduced a Ukrainian energy businessman to his daddy, then the VP, and promised other global characters similar access. He met with oligarchs in Beijing alongside his father’s official meetings, having flown to China aboard the same Air Force plane. In correspondence with his clients, Hunter regularly referenced his access to the “Big Man,” Papa Joe.
Astride all the financial filth on the laptop was evidence of Hunter’s own filthy life, actions simply screaming to a foreign intelligence service “blackmail me!” Hunter’s laptop was choked with video showing him smoking crack. Hunter spent money on escorts, some $21,000 on cam sites, big plays on all sorts of depravities. Correspondence referencing Hunter’s affair with his dead brother Beau’s widow for goodness sake. The blackmail fodder is so clear Chinese intelligence would probably assign the case to an intern.
But the public never saw any of this, thanks to the collaborative efforts of the American intelligence services and the MSM, working for the Democratic Party.
Soon after the New York Post broke the laptop story, the disinformation campaign began with a Politico piece headlined “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” They wrote “our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case…all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” And that was good enough for the MSM to take the handoff.
The emails were a “hoax,” said fact-check site NewsGuard, discredited by “many, many red flags” according to NPR. Twitter locked the New York Post‘s account after the Post refused to obey Twitter’s orders to delete its own reporting. Twitter also blocked all references to the laptop story by all users, even banning links to the story in DMs. Facebook announced it would suppress discussion of the reporting pending a “fact check” that never came.
Compare that Orwellian treatment of the laptop story to the way the same organizations handled the Russiagate dossier, slathering it across the media. The irony is that any fact checking would have proved the laptop story true, and the dossier completely false.
So how do we know now the laptop story was always true? Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski confirmed the emails were legitimate months ago. Last week, the New York Times agreed, reporting on an ongoing FBI criminal investigation into Hunter’s business and tax activities based in part on the contents of the laptop. The FBI’s use of the laptop finally forced the Times to send out its own reporters so it could claim as valid this year what it said last year was bunk. The conclusion was that the emails “were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”
Politico now, too, admits the emails are real, not Russian disinformation, based on a book by one of its own writers. The president of the United States for his part claims to have known nothing about his own son’s and brother’s business dealing and name dropping, and is sticking, loosely, to the Russian disinformation version of things. Biden’s defense has always been sweeping: “My son did nothing wrong.” The most charitable reading of that is that Joe Biden, one of the most powerful men in the world, is a gullible idiot.
Russiagate. Alfa Bank. The laptop. All coordinated disinformation campaigns run by the Democrats involving the MSM and intelligence communities, all aimed at defeating Donald Trump. You see how it works now. Watch for the same pattern as we approach the midterms, and in 2024.
