1. Clear From the Start That Biden Laptop Was Authentic (12mins) #7

The FBI knew about the Hunter Biden laptop story and had subpoenaed the laptop a year earlier. They wanted social media companies to censor the story to protect Joe Biden. Media outlets like the New York Times and CNN initially claimed the laptop story was Russian disinformation, but later admitted it was authentic. Journalist Peter Schweitzer was able to verify the authenticity of the laptop using basic journalistic techniques. The media outlets ignored the evidence because they wanted to lie to the public. Twitter and Facebook both censored the story, with Facebook suppressing its distribution until after the election. This shows a deliberate collaboration between corporate media and intelligence agencies to spread misinformation. Now, if you saw our last slideshow where we interviewed the New York Post reporter, Miranda Devine, she explains that the FBI knew exactly the story that was coming, in part because they had been eavesdropping on and following Rudy Giuliani, and because the year earlier the FBI had subpoenaed that laptop and knew the story that was coming, and so all of these meetings were about priming these social media companies to believe it was their duty to censor the story because they wanted to protect Joe Biden. Now, before delving further into the specific revelations and talking to Michael Schellenberger, I just want to pause to note two vital facts about this episode that are so often overlooked. We now know that most large corporate outlets that the Democrats have been taught to regard as respectable, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, CNN, have now all admitted that the CIA's pre-election lie, one that was ratified by most media outlets running up to the election, namely that the documents in the Hunter Biden laptop were Russian disinformation, we now know that was a complete lie, and even those media outlets admit it, they have purported to independently authenticate those documents many months after Joe Biden safely won the election, in part by being able to dismiss all these questions about his son's sleazy business dealings, trading on his name as, quote, Russian disinformation. That these media outlets admitted that the documents were authenticated sometimes obscures the crucial reality that it was completely clear from the start that these documents were genuine. As I've explained before, the reason I was willing to stake my own career on that, first by publishing an article with my name on it, treating these documents as real, back in October 2020, and then quitting the media outlet I co-founded, the Interstate, when it refused to let me publish that article, because its editors absurdly claimed that they doubted the authenticity of that archive, all of that was because all the evidence and techniques I had always used to authenticate other large journalistic archives, from Wikileaks, the Snowden archive, the archive that I reported in Brazil, all made indisputably clear that that archive was real. That was something I was sure of, not two years later, but back in October 2020. Nobody needed the New York Times or CNN to say this 18 months later. The evidence of authenticity was there in abundance within days of the New York Post's publishing of those articles. Media corporations didn't see it because they didn't want to see it, because they wanted to lie to the public by saying that it came from Russia and may have been forged. In this video clip posted by Schellenberger, the long-time journalist Peter Schweitzer explains how he was able, almost immediately, to verify the authenticity of the archive, not using esoteric and complex means, but using basic, standard journalistic techniques. When the laptop dropped in 2020, I had no idea where it came from. I didn't know if it was real, but what I did was I took the files on the Hunter Biden laptop and I compared it to bodies of information that we knew were absolutely true. So for example, the Secret Service, again at the request of the U.S. Senate Committee, had released Hunter Biden's travel records. So we were able to take the laptop and say, when he says he's in Dubai, does that correspond with the Secret Service travel records? If he's emailing somebody and saying, I'm in Hong Kong, does that line up? In each and every case, it lined up. Then we compared the laptop to the suspicious activity reports, the SARS reports. When the emails referenced $5 million being wired to Hunter Biden's business, does that correspond with the SARS? And again, it lined up completely. And the laptop really came out at about the same time as the Secret Service travel logs and the wire transfers. So it really would not have been possible for somebody to create thousands of emails simultaneously to demonstrate it. Then the final thing we did, Michael, is we looked at Hunter Biden's laptop emails and we compared them with a collection that we'd received from Hunter Biden's business partners, a guy named Bevin Cooney, who's in jail. He shared his Gmail account with us and we looked at it. The Hunter Biden laptops that have Bevin Cooney correspondence on them, do they actually line up with Bevin Cooney's Gmail account? And again, they did 100%. Now again, none of that is complicated or controversial. That's just basic journalism. So much journalism these days, if you think about it, comes from journalism painting large archives of information. That was the innovation that Julian Assange foresaw before anybody else did, that so much journalism in a digital age would be accomplished by sources transferring large amounts of digital information from institutions of power to journalists. And obviously when you get a large archive like that, the first question you have as a journalist is, how am I going to authenticate it? How am I going to know that all of these documents are real? And over time, techniques have been developed that are used to prove that they're real. They're all ones that Peter Schweitzer just mentioned. When Edward Snowden gave us the full archive in Hong Kong, we obviously had to make sure that those documents were real before we reported them at the Guardian. And one of the key ways we did that was by comparing non-public information to what the documents were in the archive and seeing that they aligned, speaking to people who got emails in real time that were contained in the Snowden archive, asked them to show it to us. And when they showed it to us, we saw that it matched word for word what was in the archive, which of course was proof that those documents, that the archive was real. That was how I authenticated the Brazil archive as well. And often one of the most important metrics is when you go to the source that you're about to report on and you say to them, we have all these documents from your files, NSA or from WikiLeaks or from the judges on whom we're reporting in Brazil, and you breathe a huge sigh of relief when they don't deny it. Because of course, if you're going to report emails that are incriminating about somebody that are forged, the first thing they're going to do, either before you report it or they wait until after you report it, is they'll stand up and they'll say, those are forgeries. That would immediately discredit you in the reporting. And because that never happened in any of those prior cases, we knew the archive was real. And when this archive began to be reported by the New York Post, never once did Hunter Biden or Joe Biden or anybody else involved stand up and say, I didn't write these emails. These emails are fabricated. They're forged. They've been altered in some way. In fact, the opposite happened. Many people involved in the email chains that were in the archive, you mentioned one, another was Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden's partner, were able to show media outlets, look, I have on my phone the emails I got in real time and you see it matches word for word within the Biden archive. That's why the proof of authenticity was there, not 18 months later, but from the very beginning. So when these media outlets ran around spreading the CIA lie that this was Russian disinformation, it wasn't just that it was baseless. It was that they were actively lying because the evidence was all right in front of them. I was pointing it out at the time, as were others, and they purposely turned away from it so that they could lie to the public because they were petrified that this reporting would undermine Joe Biden's chances to win. So that's one point I want to make, is that this is not an accidental case of journalistic ineptitude. It is a case of corporate media outlets uniting with the CIA and the intelligence agencies to lie on purpose. Now let me show you another important point that I think is crucial to make, which is that there's often a lot of focus now on how Twitter censored that story, and we should be focusing on that. That was the topic of Michael Schellenberger's reporting. But I want to remind you that it wasn't only Twitter that censored the story. It was also Facebook at roughly the same time. Here is the tweet from October 14, 2020, where Facebook announced that they would be following Twitter's example and also censoring the story, not by preventing any links, but by doing it more insidiously, by algorithmically tinkering with their own site to prevent the story from spreading. And they chose to announce it through their spokesman, Andy Stone. And he went on to Twitter and wrote, quote, while I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, you can see the snideness in his voice, his anger about the story, I won't intentionally link to that garbage story, I want to be clear that this story is eligible to be fact-checked by Facebook's third-party fact-checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform. He didn't say how, but he obviously wanted to spread doubt about the authenticity of that email, of those stories, and made clear that Facebook would take steps to impede the spreading of the story about Joe Biden less than two weeks before the election, or just a little over two weeks. His next tweet said, quote, this is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. How could he possibly, one day after this story was published, called it misinformation? We temporarily reduced distribution pending fact-checking review. Now, we don't know how long Facebook suppressed spreading of the story. Presumably, they did it until the election. Twitter reversed themselves, allowed the story to be posted, Jack Dorsey, the CEO, ultimately apologized and said it was wrong, but Facebook presumably suppressed the story until the election, and this third-party fact-checking that they claimed they were going to do was never released. That was despite the fact that I've repeatedly asked Facebook, including Andy Stone, whether or not they intended to release it, and he simply ignored that. Now, who is Andy Stone? The Facebook executive who said that Facebook would suppress the spread of disinformation about Joe Biden. This is a critical part of the story. His bio is right on Twitter, and there you can see that Andy Stone, prior to going to work at Facebook, was a lifelong operative of the Democratic Party. His entire existence was devoted to ensuring that the Democrats maintained a majority in the House of Representatives, and there you see it. He's for MEDA. That's his current job. An alum, he calls it, of the House Majority PAC, which is the political action committee designed to keep Democrats in the majority in the House. He worked for Senator Barbara Boxer, the longtime liberal Democrat from California. He worked for the DCCC, the House group that is most responsible for ensuring that Democrats maintain control of the House, and then for Representative McNerney, also a Democratic member of the House. This is a Democratic Party operative that Facebook chose to announce that Facebook, the largest social media site on the planet, would be impeding reporting about Joe Biden on the grounds that it was, quote, misinformation that in fact turned out to be completely true. That is a huge scandal, a major part of the story that we shouldn't let be forgotten because we're focused now on these files about what Twitter did because Elon Musk made a very noble decision to release them.