In the Post’s telling, the emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop contained dispositive evidence that Joe Biden had used his power as vice-president in 2015 to advance the interests of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural-gas company that had employed Hunter Biden. In the conservative media’s account, meanwhile, Hunter’s “laptop from hell” proved that Joe Biden had engaged in acts of corruption so wanton that they made Donald Trump look like Ralph Nader.

In reality, neither the Post’s reporting nor any subsequent investigations of Hunter Biden’s laptop (or his relationship with Burisma) has documented a single instance in which Joe Biden used public power to aid his son’s private interests.

There is little question that Hunter Biden was an influence peddler who sought to monetize his access to the American vice-president. Burisma was not paying Hunter $50,000 a month for his expertise on the Eastern European natural-gas market. It was paying to be one degree of separation away from Hunter’s father.

This is sordid. But it’s also mundane. If influence peddling were illegal, K Street would house a sprawling penitentiary. Hunter monetizing his last name is not a noteworthy scandal. Joe Biden changing U.S. policy to aid that monetization effort would be. Thus, the key claim in the right’s narrative about the “laptop from hell” is that Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to oust its prosecutor general so as to protect Burisma from legal scrutiny.

The Post purported to substantiate that claim, but in reality did no such thing. The tabloid did uncover an apparent email that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, had sent to Hunter Biden in April 2015, wherein Pozharskyi thanked Hunter for “inviting me to D.C. and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.” Given unfettered access to 217 gigabytes of (what was ostensibly) Hunter Biden’s personal data, this was the closest the Post could come to evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption: an email that suggested that one of Hunter’s associates at Burisma had some unspecified form of contact with Joe Biden during a trip to D.C. The message does not indicate that Pozharskyi received a private audience with the vice-president, let alone one in which he got to lobby Biden for Burisma’s interests.

Nevertheless, the Post characterized this as a “smoking-gun email.” It proceeded to assert that after his meeting with Pozharskyi, the “elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.” This was false.

It is true that, as vice-president, Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. But Biden did so at the behest of a coalition of Western interests. In addition to the U.S. government, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and European Union all believed that Shokin was complicit in endemic corruption that was diverting development funds to oligarchs. And not without reason. Troves of diamonds, cash, and other assorted valuables were discovered at the homes of Shokin’s underlings, indicating that they had been taking bribes. Yet the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office declined to take the officials to court; individual prosecutors who tried to pursue the case were fired or resigned.

In truth, Shokin was not fired for investigating Burisma but for the opposite; one of the West’s complaints about his office was that it failed to pursue a corruption inquiry against Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky.

The Post claimed otherwise solely on the basis of statements that Shokin made after losing his job. Beyond the fact that Shokin is an unreliable narrator with a clear motive to disparage Joe Biden, even Shokin’s remarks themselves did not actually support the tabloid’s claims: While the Post reported that Shokin “was investigating” Burisma at the time he was fired, Shokin only claims that he had made “specific plans” to investigate the company. Conveniently, whereas an active investigation could be affirmed or falsified by a paper trail, it is impossible to disprove what Shokin did or did not “plan” to do.

All of which is to say: On its face, the New York Post story was dishonest and misleading.

And at the time of its publication, it was far from clear that the story could be taken at face value. On its way from Hunter Biden’s custody to the New York Post’s, Biden’s data passed through several different hands, including those of President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, who had been on a crusade to generate incriminating information about the Bidens’ relationship with Burisma. Anyone in that chain of custody could have added files to the laptop. The primary author of the Post’s story refused to put his name on it out of concern that the tabloid had failed to confirm the veracity of the documents in question.

Subsequently, forensic analysts would confirm the authenticity of some of Hunter Biden’s documents, while concluding that much of the data lacked the cryptographic signatures necessary for verification.

In the summer of 2020, federal law enforcement had told Twitter executives to be on guard against possible foreign hacks aimed at influencing the U.S. presidential election. These concerns were, of course, informed by the fact that Russian agents had hacked Democratic Party emails in 2016 as part of a political interference campaign.

In this context, the Post’s Hunter Biden story raised red flags with Twitter’s content-moderation team. After all, that story consisted of ill-gotten emails fed to the Post by Donald Trump’s lawyer, who’d spent months consorting with Trump sympathizers in Eastern Europe. The platform responded by taking the extraordinary step of suppressing the story on its platform, marking it as unsafe and even preventing Twitter users from sharing it via direct message.

In “The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story,” Matt Taibbi sheds light on Twitter’s internal deliberations over this decision. Taibbi frames his findings as a demonstration of Twitter’s bias in favor of Democrats. But his reporting does little to support that claim.

In company email exchanges obtained by Taibbi, Twitter safety chief Yoel Roth and Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker explained that they had chosen to mark tweets linking to the Post story as “unsafe” on the grounds that such tweets disseminated “hacked materials,” a violation of Twitter’s terms of service. Both Roth and Baker acknowledged that they did not actually know that the Post’s piece was based on hacked materials. “Given the SEVERE risks here and lessons of 2016,” however, Roth explained, “we’re erring on the side of including a warning and preventing the content from being amplified.”

In the version of pre-Musk Twitter conjured by conservative rhetoric, one would expect universal assent to this judgment, if not, replies reading, “Yes! This is an excellent pretext for a coup against the bad orange man!” But Taibbi’s documents actually reveal internal skepticism of the decision, and expressions of ambivalence even from those who endorsed it. Taibbi quotes an anonymous former employee as saying, “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.” This makes it sound as though Roth’s avowed concerns about hacking were just a fig leaf for suppressing a story inconvenient for Democrats.

Yet despite having access to virtually all of Twitter’s internal communications, Taibbi produced no actual evidence that the decision was motivated by anything beyond concern that Twitter would find itself complicit in promulgating hacked materials.

The closest thing Taibbi has to evidence of untoward partisan influence is an email from the Biden campaign flagging several Hunter-related tweets for Twitter’s content moderators, who then “handled” them. But all of these tweets appeared to feature nude photos of Hunter Biden that were non-consensually shared, an unambiguous violation of Twitter’s terms of service. Taibbi, for his part, chose not to provide his readers with that context. The reporter did however acknowledge that there was nothing unusual about the Biden team’s outreach, and that the Trump White House also routinely sent Twitter content moderation complaints.

Regardless, Twitter recognized that it had overreached and ceased blocking links to the New York Post story after only one day. By suppressing it for such a short period of time, while generating a giant media controversy about the story, it is plausible that Twitter’s decision-making actually increased the Post article’s reach.

In sum: The New York Post published a story based on data that was apparently — but, at the time, unverifiably — Hunter Biden’s. That story falsely purported to offer “smoking gun” evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption, when it actually provided no such thing. Faced with warnings from federal law enforcement about impending foreign hacks, and a story based on apparently stolen emails sourced from Rudy Giuliani, Twitter’s content moderation team chose to suppress the Post article. That decision was internally controversial, and even those who supported it said that they wished they had more information about the source of the emails. Within 24 hours, Twitter reversed course. It is possible that this reduced the ultimate reach of the Post’s story, which, given that story’s mendacious content, probably would have been beneficial to public understanding of the Trump-Biden race (after all, there was exponentially more evidence that Donald Trump had used public power to advance his family’s private business interests than evidence that Biden had done so, yet the Post’s story conveyed the opposite impression). But it’s also possible that Twitter’s decision actually increased the story’s prominence by endowing it with an aura of forbidden knowledge. Separately, when the Biden campaign flagged tweets that featured pornographic images, Twitter responded by enforcing its own rules. ....

In the Post’s telling, the emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop contained dispositive evidence that Joe Biden had used his power as vice-president in 2015 to advance the interests of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural-gas company that had employed Hunter Biden. In the conservative media’s account, meanwhile, Hunter’s “laptop from hell” proved that Joe Biden had engaged in acts of corruption so wanton that they made Donald Trump look like Ralph Nader.

In reality, neither the Post’s reporting nor any subsequent investigations of Hunter Biden’s laptop (or his relationship with Burisma) has documented a single instance in which Joe Biden used public power to aid his son’s private interests.

There is little question that Hunter Biden was an influence peddler who sought to monetize his access to the American vice-president. Burisma was not paying Hunter $50,000 a month for his expertise on the Eastern European natural-gas market. It was paying to be one degree of separation away from Hunter’s father.

This is sordid. But it’s also mundane. If influence peddling were illegal, K Street would house a sprawling penitentiary. Hunter monetizing his last name is not a noteworthy scandal. Joe Biden changing U.S. policy to aid that monetization effort would be. Thus, the key claim in the right’s narrative about the “laptop from hell” is that Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to oust its prosecutor general so as to protect Burisma from legal scrutiny.

The Post purported to substantiate that claim, but in reality did no such thing. The tabloid did uncover an apparent email that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, had sent to Hunter Biden in April 2015, wherein Pozharskyi thanked Hunter for “inviting me to D.C. and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.” Given unfettered access to 217 gigabytes of (what was ostensibly) Hunter Biden’s personal data, this was the closest the Post could come to evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption: an email that suggested that one of Hunter’s associates at Burisma had some unspecified form of contact with Joe Biden during a trip to D.C. The message does not indicate that Pozharskyi received a private audience with the vice-president, let alone one in which he got to lobby Biden for Burisma’s interests.

Nevertheless, the Post characterized this as a “smoking-gun email.” It proceeded to assert that after his meeting with Pozharskyi, the “elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.” This was false.

It is true that, as vice-president, Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. But Biden did so at the behest of a coalition of Western interests. In addition to the U.S. government, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and European Union all believed that Shokin was complicit in endemic corruption that was diverting development funds to oligarchs. And not without reason. Troves of diamonds, cash, and other assorted valuables were discovered at the homes of Shokin’s underlings, indicating that they had been taking bribes. Yet the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office declined to take the officials to court; individual prosecutors who tried to pursue the case were fired or resigned.

In truth, Shokin was not fired for investigating Burisma but for the opposite; one of the West’s complaints about his office was that it failed to pursue a corruption inquiry against Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky.

The Post claimed otherwise solely on the basis of statements that Shokin made after losing his job. Beyond the fact that Shokin is an unreliable narrator with a clear motive to disparage Joe Biden, even Shokin’s remarks themselves did not actually support the tabloid’s claims: While the Post reported that Shokin “was investigating” Burisma at the time he was fired, Shokin only claims that he had made “specific plans” to investigate the company. Conveniently, whereas an active investigation could be affirmed or falsified by a paper trail, it is impossible to disprove what Shokin did or did not “plan” to do.

All of which is to say: On its face, the New York Post story was dishonest and misleading.

And at the time of its publication, it was far from clear that the story could be taken at face value. On its way from Hunter Biden’s custody to the New York Post’s, Biden’s data passed through several different hands, including those of President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, who had been on a crusade to generate incriminating information about the Bidens’ relationship with Burisma. Anyone in that chain of custody could have added files to the laptop. The primary author of the Post’s story refused to put his name on it out of concern that the tabloid had failed to confirm the veracity of the documents in question.

Subsequently, forensic analysts would confirm the authenticity of some of Hunter Biden’s documents, while concluding that much of the data lacked the cryptographic signatures necessary for verification.

In the summer of 2020, federal law enforcement had told Twitter executives to be on guard against possible foreign hacks aimed at influencing the U.S. presidential election. These concerns were, of course, informed by the fact that Russian agents had hacked Democratic Party emails in 2016 as part of a political interference campaign.

In this context, the Post’s Hunter Biden story raised red flags with Twitter’s content-moderation team. After all, that story consisted of ill-gotten emails fed to the Post by Donald Trump’s lawyer, who’d spent months consorting with Trump sympathizers in Eastern Europe. The platform responded by taking the extraordinary step of suppressing the story on its platform, marking it as unsafe and even preventing Twitter users from sharing it via direct message.

In “The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story,” Matt Taibbi sheds light on Twitter’s internal deliberations over this decision. Taibbi frames his findings as a demonstration of Twitter’s bias in favor of Democrats. But his reporting does little to support that claim.

In company email exchanges obtained by Taibbi, Twitter safety chief Yoel Roth and Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker explained that they had chosen to mark tweets linking to the Post story as “unsafe” on the grounds that such tweets disseminated “hacked materials,” a violation of Twitter’s terms of service. Both Roth and Baker acknowledged that they did not actually know that the Post’s piece was based on hacked materials. “Given the SEVERE risks here and lessons of 2016,” however, Roth explained, “we’re erring on the side of including a warning and preventing the content from being amplified.”

In the version of pre-Musk Twitter conjured by conservative rhetoric, one would expect universal assent to this judgment, if not, replies reading, “Yes! This is an excellent pretext for a coup against the bad orange man!” But Taibbi’s documents actually reveal internal skepticism of the decision, and expressions of ambivalence even from those who endorsed it. Taibbi quotes an anonymous former employee as saying, “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.” This makes it sound as though Roth’s avowed concerns about hacking were just a fig leaf for suppressing a story inconvenient for Democrats.

Yet despite having access to virtually all of Twitter’s internal communications, Taibbi produced no actual evidence that the decision was motivated by anything beyond concern that Twitter would find itself complicit in promulgating hacked materials.

The closest thing Taibbi has to evidence of untoward partisan influence is an email from the Biden campaign flagging several Hunter-related tweets for Twitter’s content moderators, who then “handled” them. But all of these tweets appeared to feature nude photos of Hunter Biden that were non-consensually shared, an unambiguous violation of Twitter’s terms of service. Taibbi, for his part, chose not to provide his readers with that context. The reporter did however acknowledge that there was nothing unusual about the Biden team’s outreach, and that the Trump White House also routinely sent Twitter content moderation complaints.

Regardless, Twitter recognized that it had overreached and ceased blocking links to the New York Post story after only one day. By suppressing it for such a short period of time, while generating a giant media controversy about the story, it is plausible that Twitter’s decision-making actually increased the Post article’s reach.

In sum: The New York Post published a story based on data that was apparently — but, at the time, unverifiably — Hunter Biden’s. That story falsely purported to offer “smoking gun” evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption, when it actually provided no such thing. Faced with warnings from federal law enforcement about impending foreign hacks, and a story based on apparently stolen emails sourced from Rudy Giuliani, Twitter’s content moderation team chose to suppress the Post article. That decision was internally controversial, and even those who supported it said that they wished they had more information about the source of the emails. Within 24 hours, Twitter reversed course. It is possible that this reduced the ultimate reach of the Post’s story, which, given that story’s mendacious content, probably would have been beneficial to public understanding of the Trump-Biden race (after all, there was exponentially more evidence that Donald Trump had used public power to advance his family’s private business interests than evidence that Biden had done so, yet the Post’s story conveyed the opposite impression). But it’s also possible that Twitter’s decision actually increased the story’s prominence by endowing it with an aura of forbidden knowledge. Separately, when the Biden campaign flagged tweets that featured pornographic images, Twitter responded by enforcing its own rules. ....

When he took the helm of CNN, in May 2022, Licht had promised a reset with Republican voters—and with their leader. He had swaggered into the job, telling his employees that the network had lost its way under former President Jeff Zucker, that their hostile approach to Trump had alienated a broader viewership that craved sober, fact-driven coverage. These assertions thrust Licht into a two-front war: fighting to win back Republicans who had written off the network while also fighting to win over his own journalists, many of whom believed that their new boss was scapegoating them to appease his new boss, David Zaslav, who’d hired Licht with a decree to move CNN toward the ideological center.

One year into the job, Licht was losing both battles. Ratings, in decline since Trump left office, had dropped to new lows. Employee morale was even worse. A feeling of dread saturated the company. Licht had accepted the position with ambitions to rehabilitate the entire news industry, telling his peers that Trump had broken the mainstream media and that his goal was to do nothing less than “save journalism.” But Licht had lost the confidence of his own newsroom. Because of this, he had come to view the prime-time event with Trump as the moment that would vindicate his pursuit of Republican viewers while proving to his employees that he possessed a revolutionary vision for their network and the broader news media.