FBI admits they knew Hunter Biden’s laptop was real when they killed the story
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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After the Twitter Files revealed last December that the FBI communicated over a back channel to Twitter the night before the New York Post published its now infamous reporting into the Hunter Biden laptop, I asked whether the FBI intentionally initiated a catch-and-kill scheme: issuing a subpoena to catch the laptop with the intention of trying to kill a potential story about then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.
According to newly released testimony from a senior FBI official, the answer to that question increasingly seems to be yes.
Laura Dehmlow, head of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, said during a hearing with the House Judiciary Committee that top officials on foreign interference “certainly” knew that the hotly debated laptop did indeed belong to the first son. Although Dehmlow testified that the FBI can and did warn private social media companies about hack-and-leak operations by foreign adversaries such as Russia, the FBI went silent when asked about the authenticity of the laptop after the New York Post report.
Let’s game out the timeline here. The FBI issued its subpoena for the laptop and verified its authenticity in 2019 while the younger Biden, unbeknownst to the public, was the center of a criminal investigation related to his alleged financial crimes. For nearly a year, the FBI was in contact with social media giants and conducting “tabletop exercises” with Twitter to plan specifically for how to handle a “Burisma leak” about Hunter Biden before the 2020 election. Then when the New York Post story drops in October 2020, the FBI goes silent.
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To translate: Once the FBI knew a damning laptop that could doom the likely Democratic presidential nominee was circulating, the agency seized it and pursued zero criminal leads into it for nearly a year. After spending that year telegraphing to Twitter and the likes that Russia would likely dump an October surprise that would be pure disinformation, it went silent when Twitter wanted to double-check that the New York Post story was actually bogus.
The conspiratorial possibility here is that the FBI wasn’t trying to protect the Bidens and was actually just incompetent.