How Hunter Biden Laptop Got The CBS News Treatment

In the 60 Minutes interview with then President Trump, correspondent Lesley Stahl said of the Hunter Biden laptop, “It can’t be verified.”  As I watched the broadcast, I felt sick.

I knew the laptop records could be vetted and confirmed. I was confused by what seemed a disconnect between the CBS News division and 60 Minutes.

TOP LINE:

With new allegations this week about suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in the last Presidential election, I can’t help but reflect on my own experience at CBS News — what I believe was a missed opportunity to rebut false claims it was Russian disinformation.

DEEP DIVE

This week, our investigative team revealed new evidence on X from IRS whistleblowers about alleged double standards at the IRS and Justice Department in the Hunter Biden probe.

Case agent Joseph Ziegler told us they were blocked from taking actions that could have revealed the investigation’s existence prior to the 2020 election.

“There were a lot of overt investigative steps that we were not allowed to take because we had an upcoming election,” Ziegler explained  “And related to the President’s son. So not even the candidate. And we weren’t allowed to do certain investigative steps.” (IRS,DOJ and others declined to comment)

The findings from our investigation on X, called “Bucking the Bureaucracy: The Cost of Coming Forward in the Hunter Biden Tax Case,” were amplified by new reporting from the republican-led House Judiciary committee.

They allege the Hunter Biden laptop reporting was suppressed leading up to the 2020 election to curry political favor, “Facebook executives discussed calibrating censorship decisions to please what they assumed would be an incoming Biden-Harris administration…”

With these new developments, I can’t help but reflect on my own experience with the Hunter Biden laptop in the fall of 2020 after the New York Post broke the story (and bravely stayed with it.)

It’s the question I get asked the most.

“What happened with the Hunter Biden story at CBS before the 2020 election?”

I believe it’s best that the account comes directly from me.

On October 23rd, 2020 about 10 days after the story surfaced, I was contacted by senior CBS News executive Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews for “confirmed reporting” on the Hunter Biden story.  She said the confirmed reporting was for Evening News Anchor and Managing Editor Norah O’Donnell.

Days earlier, I had been tasked with vetting the laptop and its contents after multiple platforms had suppressed the story. Due diligence included working the phones, reaching out to people on the Hunter Biden emails for corroboration and cross-referencing court records.  The vetted documents I collected also indicated the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden.

Million Dollar Retainer from Chinese Energy Firm

Signature Page

I told Ciprian-Matthews the vetted materials included a million dollar retainer from a Chinese energy firm, emails with Hunter Biden’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski as well as Hunter Biden text messages.

Asked by Ciprian-Matthews if there was a “Hunter connection,”  I responded, “Yes, all of them.”

I then provided some of the vetted records directly to Ciprian-Matthews.  We did speak briefly on the phone. I don’t know at this point what happened next.

QUESTIONS FOR CBS NEWS/SEEKING A RESPONSE

This weekend, on Saturday, I reached out to CBS News PR with questions for Ciprian-Matthews and Norah O’Donnell. I followed up with a voice mail, and text message to confirm CBS had received our questions as well as the Sunday noon deadline.

When there was no response, Sunday morning, I forwarded our questions, adding the head of CBS PR and O’Donnell’s agent, writing:

“We are taking the extra step this morning of reaching out to you for comment and as a courtesy, extending the deadline until 2pm eastern.

We have copied Ingrid and Norah.  If the email addresses are not accurate, we ask that the queries be shared with them so there is full opportunity to respond.

Thank you in advance for the consideration and confirming receipt of our questions.”

As of this writing, there has been no response, nor the courtesy of acknowledging receipt of our questions.  For transparency, you can read the questions here.

Questions provided to CBS News

Based on my reporting, and as the network’s senior investigative correspondent,  the CBS News investigative unit was not tasked in October 2020 to develop more reporting on the laptop.  That would have been standard practice.

In the 60 Minutes interview with then President Trump, correspondent Lesley Stahl said of the Hunter Biden laptop, “It can’t be verified.”  As I watched the broadcast, I felt sick.

I knew the laptop records could be vetted and confirmed. I was confused by what seemed a disconnect between the CBS News division and 60 Minutes.

OUR FORENSIC REVIEW OF HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP DATA

It took an additional two years for the network to broadcast a forensic review of the Hunter Biden laptop data.  I advocated for the report which determined that both the data belonged to Hunter Biden and it had not been tampered with.  Our report was broadcast in November 2022, after the midterm elections.  I may have more to say about the delay in the future.

Analyzed Laptop Data

By contrast, in October 2020, there seemed little push back to claims from 51 former intelligence officials that the laptop had “classic earmarks” of a Russian information operation.

According to the published transcript of the edited 60 Minutes interview with then candidate Joe Biden, Norah O’Donnell asked, “Do you believe the recent leak of material allegedly from Hunter’s computer is part of a Russian disinformation campaign?”

Candidate Biden responded, “… And so when you put the combination of Russia, Giuliani– the president, together– it’s just what it is. It’s a smear campaign because he has nothing he wants to talk about. What is he running on? What is he running on?”

CBS News executives make the final call on editorial. In October 2020, I believe the preliminary reporting provided to senior CBS News executive Ciprian-Matthews showed the laptop was worth digging into, and more facts should be gathered. I saw it as an opportunity for CBS News to lead on a major story and to rebut disinformation claims.

I was eventually assigned to the Hunter Biden case.   I was encouraged that the most senior corporate executives told me privately they wanted reporting that spoke truth to power on both sides of the aisle.  They even provided additional resources, but based on my experience, it seemed their corporate objectives were frustrated by CBS News executives and other employees who were reluctant to take on a story about the President’s son.

INTEREST WANES

In 2023, the CBS investigative unit did exclusively interview the same IRS whistleblowers, Shapley and Ziegler. But I found, after the July 2023 plea deal for Hunter Biden fell apart and he faced felony gun and tax charges, that the network’s interest waned.

As a senior investigative correspondent at CBS News for more than 4 years, our award winning reports were a catalyst for legislative change, impacting a million service members and their families.

We helped secure 50 Purple Hearts for soldiers who were wrongly denied the award under the Trump administration after an Iranian ballistic missile attack on their base in January 2020.

We obtained the audio tape of former President Trump seeming to brag and discuss secret documents about Iran at his New Jersey golf club.  CNN was first to report the recordings.

We helped right a decades’ old wrong so that retired Col. Paris Davis, one of the first Black officers in the elite Green Berets, could be recognized with the Medal of Honor for his heroism in Vietnam.

Two weeks before my position was terminated in February,  army whistleblower Nick Nicholls came forward with new evidence that service members were exposed to toxic agents at their overseas base after 9/11.

Since, with the help of veterans’ advocates, Nicholls’ courage has opened the door to long overdue VA benefits and recognition.

While I remain proud of these projects, I also believe that prior to the 2020 election, the Hunter Biden laptop was a missed opportunity for CBS News.

From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A. Tucker, Debbie Lerman  

For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.

Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.

It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.

Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.

Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.

As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.

The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.

In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.

It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.

What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.

We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:

Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.

Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.”  All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.

To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”

When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.

Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years,  Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.

Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.

Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.

Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.

This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.

Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.

Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.

No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.

All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.

One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.

As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.

The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.

Authors

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.