Media Coverup of Hunter Biden’s Laptop Incident Impacted Election Outcome: Investigative Journalists

Jeff Carlson (L) and Hans Mahncke (R) co-hosts of Truth Over News on Epoch TV. The Epoch Times

When a story about a laptop abandoned by President Joe Biden’s son at a computer repair shop was broken by The New York Post, it was blocked on social media platforms and discredited by mainstream media as Russian disinformation.

The reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop surfaced in October 2020, days before the presidential election, and revealed that emails found on the laptop indicated the involvement of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, his brother James, and son Hunter in various overseas business ventures, in countries such as Ukraine, Russia, and China, Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke wrote for The Epoch Times.

Two years later, the media acknowledged that the laptop was real and verified much of the information stored on the laptop related to the Biden family’s involvement in foreign businesses and payments received in connection with this involvement.

People are now really beginning to see the role that the media played in shaping the narrative about Hunter’s laptop incident, Carlson, an investigative reporter and Epoch Times contributor told EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program.

In this screenshot from the Democratic National Convention Committee’s livestream of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, Hunter Biden, son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, addresses the virtual convention on Aug. 20, 2020. Handout/DNCC via Getty Images

When the story about the forgotten laptop was first published by the New York Post, it was censored and suppressed by Big Tech.

The Post said it obtained a copy of the laptop’s hard drive from former President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and provided materials showing that the FBI had seized the computer. Hunter Biden has avoided answering direct questions about the laptop.

The mainstream media published at that time a statement from a group of more than 50 former intelligence officials, including former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who all claimed—with no evidence—that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation, Carlson and Mahncke wrote for The Epoch Times.

The letter enabled then-presidential candidate Biden to claim during the second debate that the story about his son’s laptop was Russian disinformation, Carlson said.

“[Recent] polls indicate that if the media had just been honest about what was going on with Hunter’s laptop, and hadn’t just suppressed the story, then we might have had a different election outcome,” Carlson said.

WATCH THE FULL ‘Crossroads’ Q&A With Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke here:

“A poll by Media Research showed that 45 percent of the Biden voters were unaware of the allegations against Hunter and Joe Biden and that 16 percent of Biden voters–well over the margin of victory–wouldn’t have voted for him had they known this crucial information,” Carlson and Mahncke wrote for The Epoch Times.

The story about Hunter’s laptop and the story about Russia gate–the allegation that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in its effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election–both have one thing in common: federal government corruption that can be also called deep state corruption, said Mahncke, a researcher and author of numerous books.

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In the Russiagate case, the FBI opened its investigation into the Trump campaign even though it has since been found that the information underlying the investigation “was fake information in various ways,” Mahncke said on EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program.

In Hunter’s laptop case, without the letter signed by more than 50 former CIA officials, Trump would not have lost, Mahncke asserted. “It was just such a seminal moment in that whole election cycle [when] that story was dismissed.”

One of the letter signatories, John Sipher, who served for decades as a senior operations officer at the CIA, wrote in March on Twitter: “I take special pride in personally swinging the election away from Trump. ”

As they had placed the blame on Russia in 2016, elements of the FBI and the CIA again placed the blame on Russia in the 2020 election. Then-presidential candidate Joe Biden and the same CIA officials that backed the Clinton campaign in 2016 “fundamentally structured our national security focus, our foreign policy,” Carlson pointed out.

“Not only did it impair our international relations with Russia, but it took our eyes off our far larger adversary that’s the Communist Party of China.”

‘Smoking Gun’

A piece of information found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which Carlson and Mahncke call “the smoking gun,” is an email from November 2015 sent by the head of the board of directors of Burisma–a Ukrainian energy company that Hunter Biden was appointed as a board member–requesting that Hunter Biden stop the investigation into the company’s owner, Carlson said.

A few weeks later, then-Vice President Joe Biden reached out to then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko asking him to remove the prosecutor that was involved in the Burisma investigation, Carlson said.

Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin holds a press conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Nov. 2, 2015. Genya Savilov/AFP/Getty Images

Burisma’s owner was being probed by Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin who was removed from his post in March 2016, about four months after the email to Hunter Biden was sent, Carlson said.

In January 2018, then-Vice President Biden explained during his appearance at the Council of Foreign Relations how he pressured Ukrainian leaders to remove the prosecutor from office.

In September 2019, House Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry into Trump over a whistleblower’s accusation claiming that Trump pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden’s son.

The transcript of Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president, that triggered the impeachment inquiry, shows no evidence of a quid pro quo, nor was there any mention of the United States withholding aid to Ukraine, Carlson wrote for The Epoch Times.

Some say that Trump was impeached for what VP Biden had done and ”there is a lot of sad truth to that,” Carlson said. But at that time, the corporate media could not afford to acknowledge the veracity of Hunter’s laptop, he added.

“There was this willingness to do anything to stop any kind of serious investigation of the Biden family or Democrat involvement in general.”

Narrative Change

In October 2020, legacy media, Big Tech, and the CIA were colluding together to make sure that the Hunter Biden’s laptop story got suppressed, Mahncke said. Otherwise, many people would not have voted for Joe Biden, he added.

Mahncke believes that it was planned at a higher level “because the most important thing to those people at the time was to get rid of Trump.”

“[Now], it seems like whoever’s pulling the strings doesn’t want to be stuck with Biden anymore,” Mahncke said. There’s a reason that legacy media, such as the New York Times and The Washington Post, suddenly come out around the same time saying that the story about Hunter’s laptop was ”totally true,” Mahncke explained.

Then-Attorney General William Barr participates in a news conference at the Department of Justice in Washington on Dec. 21, 2020. Michael Reynolds/Pool via Reuters

Former Attorney General William Barr admitted in March that after the letter signed by a group of former intelligence officials came out, he knew that the laptop was real and that it was in the FBI’s possession. However, Barr did not speak publicly of his knowledge on the matter in his role as attorney general.

“As soon as this letter came out from these so-called intelligence specialists, the DNI John Ratcliffe at the time, and the FBI, which worked for me, both came out and said this was not the result of disinformation, Russian disinformation,” Barr told Fox News.

But according to Mahncke, these comments needed to come from Barr. If the AG had come out on Oct. 23, 2020, the day after the presidential debate and confirmed to the American public that the laptop was real, not a Russian plot, and that the FBI had it in its possession–Trump would have won, he said.

The Department of Justice did want to get involved and insert itself into elections, Carlson said. “But this was an incredibly unique situation and their decision not to insert themselves into an election, altered the outcome of an election. So it’s kind of like lying by omission.”

Jack Phillips and Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.