We always knew that large swaths of the mainstream media were going to treat Joe Biden with kid gloves for much of his presidency. Part of this was the usual preference for Democrats over Republicans. A lot of this was the widespread belief among media elites that Donald Trump’s first term had been an unparalleled catastrophe, and Biden needed all the boosting he could get to keep Trump from coming back. And perhaps a bit of this was a naïve belief that Biden really was the kindly ice-cream-eating grandfather that his team wanted America to see.
Forgive the long except from our old friend Isaac Schorr, writing at Mediaite, but the whole exchange just gets more revelatory as it goes on.
“Politico did that terrible, ill-fated headline: 51 intelligence agents, or former intelligence agents, say that the Hunter Biden laptop was disinformation, or bore the hallmarks of disinformation. Turns out that story was closer to disinformation because the Hunter Biden laptop appeared to be true,” he observed.
“But then Facebook also pulled all stories down about the Hunter Biden laptop, and I think Twitter did at the same time, too,” jumped in Palmeri.
“Correct, they punished The New York Post, that didn’t help. I mean, Politico, my former employer and I knew at the time, didn’t do itself any favors,” said Caputo. “I was covering Biden at the time, and I remember coming to my editor and saying, ‘Hey, we need to write about the Hunter Biden laptop.’ And I was told this came from on high at Politico: Don’t write about the laptop, don’t talk about the laptop, don’t tweet about the laptop. And the only thing Politico wound up writing was that piece that called it disinformation, which charitably could be called misinformation, at the least.”
“Yeah, I mean, I had a hard time — you know I wrote some pretty serious reporting on Hunter Biden, which actually ended up getting him prosecuted — the story on the gun” replied Palmeri, delving into her own trouble to publish stories that could hurt the elder Biden’s political prospects.
On March 25, 2021, Palmeri and her colleague, Ben Schreckinger, wrote a story with the headline, “Sources: Secret Service inserted itself into case of Hunter Biden’s gun.” (That story is now behind a paywall.) On September 14, 2023 — nearly two-and-a-half years later — the U.S. Department of Justice charged the president’s son with making a false statement in the purchase of a firearm, making a false statement related to information required to be kept by Federal Firearms Licensed Dealer, and possession of a firearm by a person who is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance. He was convicted on all three charges on June 11, 2024. Hunter Biden was scheduled to be sentenced on December 12, 2024, but after emphatically promising for more than a year that he would not pardon his son, on December 1, President Biden pardoned his son for all crimes committed between January 1, 2014, and December 1, 2024, announced it via a brief written statement, took no questions, and then flew to Angola.
Back to the Caputo and Palmeri conversation:
. . . I spent three months on it, I went to the laptop shop, and I did all of the reporting in Delaware, and I did all of that. But yeah it had, it had to be like much, it had to be 100% nailed down. I had everything, you know, the police reports, every, like, you know, I’m a solid reporter. But I do wonder if it could have, if it would have been published a little quicker if it was a different type of story,” reflected Palmeri. “It was the beginning of his administration, it was a honeymoon period — you know what I mean?”
“Since we’re spilling tea about our former employer, I still have a copy of the story on my external hard drive. In 2019, a rival presidential Democratic campaign of Joe Biden’s gave to me the tax lien — the oppo research — the tax lien on Hunter Biden for the period of time that he worked at Burisma,” recalled Caputo. “And I wrote what would have been a classic story saying, you know, ‘The former vice president’s son was slapped with a big tax lien for the period of time that he worked for this controversial Ukrainian oil concern, or natural gas concern, which is haunting his father on the campaign trail.’”
“That story was killed by the editors, and they gave no explanation for that either,” he said. “So that general experience, you know, obviously the public doesn’t know about those things, but as a reporter having witnessed the way in which the two candidates-”“We just get called, like, ‘the terrible mainstream media.’ It’s like you don’t understand the process there,” interjected Palmeri.
“Well, you also don’t understand the dumb decisions of cowardly editors that are made above us,” agreed Caputo.
For what it’s worth, Politico called the accounts of Caputo and Palmeri “a case of false memory.” The fact that they both remembered editors at Politico either refusing to run or dragging their feet on running stories critical of the Biden family makes it hard to believe this was misremembered or an isolated case.
