Politico reporter verifies authenticity of Hunter Biden emails after outlet claimed they were Russian disinformation

A new book from Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger reportedly confirms the authenticity of at least two emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, vindicating the New York Post's reporting from last October on the Biden family's business dealings with Ukrainian partners.

Politico's Playbook newsletter reports that in Schreckinger's new book, "The Bidens: Inside the First Family's Fifty-Year Rise to Power," an independent source who had access to Hunter Biden's emails confirmed that he received a 2015 email from a top executive at Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company, thanking him for a meeting with Joe Biden, who was vice president at the time.

A 2017 email detailing a "lucrative" deal with a Chinese energy company that included a proposed equity breakdown for the parties involved and included the line, "10 held by H for the big guy?" was also verified.

"Emails released by a Swedish government agency also match emails in the leaked cache, and two people who corresponded with Hunter Biden confirmed emails from the cache were genuine," Politico reported.

The contents of Hunter Biden's laptop were reported by the New York Post last October, ahead of the 2020 presidential election. At the time, the Donald Trump campaign alleged that Joe Biden had misused his office as vice president by pressuring government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma. His son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the company's board.

The emails reported by the Post suggested that Joe Biden had repeatedly lied about not being involved in Hunter Biden's overseas business dealings and raised questions about Biden's conduct as vice president.

However, the Post's reporting was censored by social media companies like Facebook, which suppressed the articles distribution, and Twitter, which outright banned users from sharing the article. Facebook claimed that its fact-checkers needed time to review the accuracy of the Post's report while Twitter said the news story violated its Hacked Materials Policy.

Meanwhile, many mainstream media news outlets either refused to discuss the Post story or attacked the story as Russian disinformation. Politico in October 2020 reported a letter from more than 50 senior intelligence officials who accused the Hunter Biden emails of having "all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation."

After that report, Joe Biden's campaign insisted that videos, text messages, and emails from Hunter Biden's laptop were a Russian hoax. Biden claimed during one presidential debate that "50 former national intelligence folks" told him it was a "Russian plant."

Anything else?

Journalist Glenn Greenwald blasted "Big Tech's censoring this reporting" in a Twitter thread condemning journalists who had ignored the story because they wanted Joe Biden to win the election.

"People complaining about pre-election censorship by Google in Russia cheered Big Tech's censoring this reporting," Greenwald said.

He took his former employer, The Intercept, to task for writing articles that supported the claims from intelligence officials denouncing the Hunter Biden email story without investigating the accuracy of their assertions.

He also criticized Facebook for suppressing the Hunter Biden story, noting that "life-long Dem operative" Andy Stone serves as the company's policy communications director.

Greenwald also called out NPR's Public Editor for refusing to publish news stories on Hunter Biden's emails and CNN's Christiane Amanpour for claiming it wasn't a journalist's job to verify the emails.

"The pre-election joint censorship campaign by the media, Big Tech & CIA was always a gigantic story. The CIA spun an outright lie about these docs that helped these platforms censor the docs while *journalists* cheered that," Greenwald said. "In light of this new book, it's time to re-visit it."