New chat logs released by the House Judiciary Committee this week show the extraordinary lengths the FBI went to behind the scenes to shut down any discussion of Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020 after The New York Post broke the story.
The conversations, withheld by the FBI under Director Chris Wray, show that senior leadership issued an internal “gag order” on the laptop.
The FBI had been in possession of the abandoned MacBook Pro for 10 months by that stage, after computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac handed it over and warned of the potential crimes and national security concerns he had found.
The FBI’s forensic analysts quickly determined the laptop belonged to Hunter, had not been tampered with or altered in any way, and was suitable to be used in court.
Sure enough, four years later, evidence on the laptop was cited in tax fraud charges to which Joe Biden’s son pleaded guilty, and the device was displayed to the Delaware jury that found Hunter guilty of gun felonies.
Say ‘no comment’
Yet the chat logs show that senior FBI officials instructed agents to say “no comment” when asked about the laptop during regular meetings with social media companies before the 2020 election.
The FBI had spent weeks warning Facebook and Twitter about election interference in the form of Russian disinformation and had told Twitter to be on guard for a “hack and leak” operation “likely” involving Hunter Biden.
In other words, the FBI “prebunked” The Post’s story so that the social media companies immediately censored it.
The FBI knew The Post had received a hard-drive copy of the laptop from Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani because it had a covert surveillance warrant on the former mayor’s iCloud.
On Oct. 14, 2020, the morning the story was published, an FBI analyst confirmed to Twitter that the laptop was real but his bosses then “admonished” him and lamented in one message that “he won’t shut up.”
Another message shows that an FBI attorney slapped a “gag order” on any discussion of the laptop.
“Please do not discuss Biden matter,” the lawyer tells one FBI employee whose name is redacted.
The attorney from the FBI’s Office of Counsel is believed to have worked under former FBI general counsel James Baker, who was conveniently parachuted into Twitter (now X) six months before the election.
According to the Twitter files, Baker played a crucial role in censoring The Post.
FBI Agent Elvis Chan at one point in the chat asked a colleague: “Actually, what kind of case is the laptop thing? Corruption? Campaign financing?”
The response is: “CLOSE HOLD.”
“Oh crap,” says Chan.
“OK. It ends here.”
“Need to talk,” replies the attorney.
“[REDACTED] messed up. We cannot comment.”
Laura Dehmlow, head of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, messages her boss, Section Chief Bradley Benavides, that day: “You guys are tracking the coverage of the laptop right?”
“Indeed,” he replies.
“I would love to know if a copy exists, and was it provided to anyone.”
(Benavides was involved in an earlier FBI effort to interfere with a Senate investigation into Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings. Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson say Benavides and another agent ambushed them with a “bogus” defensive briefing in August 2020, at the behest of congressional Democrats. The fact they were briefed was immediately leaked to The Washington Post, hampering their investigation.)
‘Not fully aware’
In the chat log, James Dennehy, boss of the Intelligence and Surveillance Division of the FBI’s New York Field Office, messaged Dehmlow, “I know [redacted] briefed you this morning on our NY Post matter. I intend on briefing [redacted] after this election security [secure video teleconference] which is ongoing now.
“I’m doing so because Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office William] Sweeney called John Brown [assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division] this morning and got the impression he was not fully aware of this matter.”
The deliberate silence of FBI senior managers allowed the false narrative to take hold that the laptop was Russian disinformation, and helped presidential candidate Joe Biden skate free of evidence in his son’s laptop that Joe had lied during the campaign when he repeatedly insisted he knew nothing about Hunter’s overseas business dealings.
That lie over the years of his presidency evolved into “was not involved” in Hunter’s business deals and then “did not profit.”
The FBI coverup was not the only undeserved gift the addled and corrupt former VP received to help him to win the presidency from Trump, and even run for a second term at 81.
The same Washington press corps that ignored the laptop also turned a blind eye to Joe Biden’s obvious cognitive deficiencies, benignly accepted his unusual unavailability, and actively helped the White House hide his decline.
They said nothing when this newspaper was frozen out and accused of peddling “cheap fakes” for truthfully reporting on Joe Biden’s state for four years.
Now the White House press is laughably giving itself awards for its “aggressive reporting” on Joe Biden’s descent into senility.
Reporters who showed zero curiosity about the state of the president’s brain now are cashing in by writing tell-all books on the scandal.
One of the upcoming books, “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” recounts a donors’ reception hosted by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy in June 2024, when Biden needed florescent tape stuck to the carpet to show him where to walk. Joe also spoke “haltingly” and needed a teleprompter for what were supposed to be unscripted remarks.
Hiding signs of aging
The book reveals that the White House took “extensive steps to cover up the signs of Biden’s aging and contingency planning if Biden chose to step aside or even died in office,” The Hill reported.
At the G7 summit in Italy before his disastrous debate performance, a makeup artist was employed to “cover up the physical signs of Biden’s aging . . . Biden consistently made these makeup appointments, but he sometimes canceled the briefings that were to follow.”
In another book, “Uncharted,” Ron Klain, a longtime Biden aide, is reported saying that Biden was “out of it” during debate prep and seemed to think he was president of NATO.
A few weeks later, Klain lied to CNN: “The idea that somehow people weren’t transparent about the state of his health and the state of his acuity I think is belied by the fact that the president does events all the time.”
A lot of people lied about Biden — although never quite as much as Biden lied about himself.
Now the media pretend it didn’t really matter, that it’s just a quirk of history to be gossiped about.
But you only have to read the latest leaked accounts of how close we were to nuclear Armageddon in the Ukraine war to see how dangerous the coverup was.
A demented commander in chief flirting with World War III was a story that needed to be told, but instead, leftist propaganda media pretended that “honest Joe” was “sharp as a tack,” and would never pardon Hunter.
