When the New York Post first reported in October 2020 that it had obtained the contents of a laptop computer allegedly owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter, there was an immediate roadblock faced by any other news outlet that hoped to corroborate the reporting, as many did: The newspaper wasn’t sharing what it obtained.
The national story quickly centered on the dubious provenance of the material, particularly given how, four years before, WikiLeaks had begun releasing material stolen by Russian hackers at about the same point in the presidential contest. But for news outlets interested in actually evaluating what the New York Post claimed it had, neither the paper nor its source for the material, President Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, were willing to share. (Giuliani famously told the New York Times that he was hoping to avoid having the material vetted before being published.) It therefore seemed wise to treat the New York Post’s claims with some skepticism.
Now, a new voice has joined those raising questions about the validity of the material that’s alleged to have been on Hunter Biden’s laptop: the guy who recovered that data in the first place.
Last month, The Washington Post was able to publish a report based on a copy of material that we obtained from a Republican activist named Jack Maxey who’d gotten it from Giuliani. We had multiple experts examine the contents of a hard drive that purported to contain the laptop’s contents, validating tens of thousands of...
A front-page article with the byline of veteran New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof is the latest poisonous example of what I call the NGO “halo effect.” Headlined “The Silence That Mee...