New York Times scolded for handling of Hunter Biden laptop story

The New York Times finally confirmed the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop this week but critics feel it was too little, too late by the liberal newspaper. 

The laptop, which was left in a Delaware repair shop in 2019 by the first son before being turned over to the FBI by the repair shop owner, was first reported by the New York Post in October 2020 but swiftly censored by Twitter and dismissed by most mainstream media outlets. The laptop’s contents included emails, text messages, photos and financial documents between himself, his family and business associates that showed how he used his political influence in his foreign business dealings, specifically in his work as a board member of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company. 

NEW YORK TIMES FINALLY CONFIRMS HUNTER BIDEN’S LAPTOP AFTER DISMISSING IT AMID 2020 CAMPAIGN

The Times dismissed the Biden laptop story as “Russian disinformation” at the height of the 2020 presidential campaign and claimed in a September 2021 piece that The Post’s reporting on the laptop was “unsubstantiated.” Wednesday’s admission came two years later, and the paper didn’t even bother to give it a breakout story, instead using it as a colorful tidbit deep inside a largely unrelated report about Hunter Biden’s problems. 

“I think the Times buried the big admission here because they recognize that it isn’t actually new news,” journalist Drew Holden told Fox News Digital. 

“I think they’re pretending as if that aspect is just one, somewhat minor detail in a broader story about the President’s son’s legal problems. That isn’t fair framing — the emails, particularly the ones that reference President Biden’s potential involvement in a kickback scheme with a Chinese client – are incredibly serious, but this sort of framing allows them to talk through the news they can take credit for around the investigation while talking around the major scoop from a few months ago,” Holden said. 

NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck blasted the Times for placing the story 20 pages into the paper. 

“You would think that, if you had a really good story and it was imperative for the public to know about it, you wouldn’t bury it on A-20 of your print edition,” Houck told Fox News Digital. 

“But since this is a story that makes the liberal media look absolutely horrible and like partisan fiends, that’s the kind of thing one would do. To top it all off, it was no surprise either that they took over 20 paragraphs to actually mention both the e-mails, the laptop, and the woman who has alleged Hunter is the father of her child,” Houck added. 

The New York Post’s editorial board first slammed The Times on Thursday. 

“Forgive the profanity, but you have got to be s–tting us,” the Post wrote. 

GLENN GREENWALD BLASTS THE NEW YORK TIMES OVER HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP ADMISSION

New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin scolded the Gray Lady in another scathing column Friday, “The New York Times hates to say The Post told you so,” that took the Times to task for its handling of the situation. 

“Sometimes a newspaper story is just a story about someone. And sometimes the story inadvertently reveals far more about the newspaper itself,” Goodwin wrote, noting the subtle admission that Hunter Biden’s emails were “authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”

The Times buried the claim in the 24th paragraph of its report about the president’s son paying back taxes. 

“What the discerning reader learns about the Times is far more important than anything disclosed about the president’s scheming son,” Goodwin wrote. “Heart be still. It took the Gray Lady nearly 17 months to grudgingly concede even a fraction of what New York Post readers learned in October 2020. Of course, Times readers would have learned all that too if their paper was still in the news business instead of being a running dog for Democrats.”

Indeed, the Post first broke the story weeks before the 2020 election but the liberal media largely chalked it up as disinformation. 

“The reason for that coverup was simple: Many of the e-mails to and from Hunter Biden implicated Joe Biden in the international influence-peddling business run by Hunter and Joe’s brother, Jim Biden. If the whole country knew then that Joe Biden was corruptly using his office to help his family cash in, we would now be in the second year of Donald Trump’s second term,” Goodwin wrote. “But the Times, Facebook, Twitter, CNN and the deep state couldn’t let that happen. They had spent four years trying to drive Trump out of office, mostly by falsely alleging he had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. They were determined he would not get four more years.”

FLASHBACK: BIDEN OFFICIALS PUSHED ANGLE THAT HUNTER LAPTOP WAS ‘RUSSIAN DISINFO’

Goodwin mocked the Times for having the gall to act as if it did heroic digging by claiming Thursday the e-mails “were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”

“Oh, please,” he wrote. 

“Unlike the Times, The Post didn’t rely on anonymous sources, saying openly that Rudy Giuliani gave the paper a copy of the laptop’s hard drive,” Goodwin continued. 

Goodwin noted the infamous laptop contained “pictures of drug-addled Hunter having sex with prostitutes,” in addition to emails from Tony Bobulinski that declared 10 percent of cash from “a joint-venture Hunter set up with a Chinese communist who headed an energy conglomerate” went to “the big guy.”

“Bobulinski identified Joe Biden as the big guy. And nobody in the Biden family has ever denied it,” Goodwin wrote. “Here’s an idea: Why doesn’t it let Ken Vogel, one of three reporters on Thursday’s story, write what he knows. Bobulinski told Vogel the ‘big guy’ e-mail was authentic in October 2020, but the Times has never seen fit to print it.

The Federalist columnist Eddie Scarry feels the Times’ sudden admission comes “very far away from the time that it mattered,” which was prior to the election back when the mainstream media was calling it disinformation.

“Now they’ve come around and say they’ve authenticated it when it’s about two years too late,” Scarry said Friday on “Fox & Friends First.”

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“The other point about this, one more point of confirmation that we cannot trust– the public cannot trust these people, meaning the national media at large, this social media giants to be arbiters of what’s true and what’s not,” Scarry said, noting that media organizations and social media platforms that intervene to help Democrats are simply “activists.” 

Journalist Glenn Greenwald wasn’t thrilled with the Times’ handling of the story, either. 

In a Substack post, Greenwald argued that The Times’, as well as other liberal media outlets’, desperation to prevent former President Trump from being re-elected amounted to “one of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern electoral history” that denied millions of Americans the chance to hear reporting on Biden in the run-up to the 2020 election. 

Fox News’ Brandon Gillespie contributed to this report.