The Most Shameless Promoters Of The Bogus ‘Biden Emails’ Disinfo Campaign

TOPSHOT - US President Donald Trump holds a Make America Great Again rally as he campaigns at Orlando Sanford International Airport in Sanford, Florida, October 12, 2020. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOE... TOPSHOT - US President Donald Trump holds a Make America Great Again rally as he campaigns at Orlando Sanford International Airport in Sanford, Florida, October 12, 2020. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images) MORE LESS
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Since the New York Post dropped a whopper of an attempted hit job on Joe Biden, mainstream conservatives have circled together to create an echo chamber to promote the article.

Nothing in the story – from premise to conclusion – adds up, and it fails on its own terms. Even the person that Biden was alleged to have met with publicly said last year that he met with Kurt Volker, President Trump’s top envoy for the Ukraine crisis.

Separately, the New York Times reported on Wednesday that American spooks have been contacting people with knowledge of a hack attack on Burisma last year after “picking up chatter that stolen Burisma emails would be leaked in the form of an ‘October surprise.'”

All of this has since become mixed up in part with conservative faux concern around the legitimate question of whether massive platforms like Twitter and Facebook should be able to throttle access to the story.

That’s a complicated question worthy of discussion, none of which you will find on what’s below: a list of the most shameless promoters of the New York Post’s bizarre Ukraine disinformation dump.

President Trump

The biggest offender here is the big boy himself: President Trump.

As if on cue, President Trump called the story a “smoking gun,” though it’s not clear of what wrongdoing, and also promoted a Fox News segment that regurgitated the story’s allegations.

He also made the story a centerpiece of his Iowa campaign rally Wednesday night.

Trump used the article as the basis for a charge that Biden is “a corrupt politician who shouldn’t even be allowed to run for the presidency.”

The cronies

Other big promoters are the chief instigators of the story: Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon.

Remember, it was Bannon who tipped the Post off to the existence of the supposed hard drive, and Giuliani who gave the paper a copy.

The indicted Bannon has used his daily show – War Room: Pandemic – to relentlessly promote the story. The former Trump campaign chairman, who once derided Don Trump Jr. as “someone who believes everything he reads on Breitbart,” asked viewers with a slight grin whether they believed that the New York Post wouldn’t have gone through the story “with a fine-toothed comb before publishing.”

Giuliani, predictably, has hyped the story and played into the drip-drip notion of the reporting, saying that there’s “much more to come” with the election three weeks away.

The Congressional GOP

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), a chief promoter of disinformation that helps the President, told Fox News on Wednesday that his committee considered the source of the story a “whistleblower,” and said that his staff was “in the process of validating the information he provided.”

Separately, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has boosted the story online, including one comment saying that it reveals “graft in the Biden dynasty.”

But he has taken it a step further with complaints that Twitter blocked access to the link, vowing to keep the story alive by issuing a subpoena to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee next Friday.

Over in the House, the situation is much the same.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) of House Intelligence Committee fame retweeted the story, while Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) expressed outrage over Facebook limiting access to the story. In a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Jordan described the article as “explosive” and relevant to “the upcoming presidential election,” demanding answers from Zuckerberg over the decision to throttle access.

White House press shop

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany also latched onto the article, posting screenshots of the supposed emails on Twitter, in a tweet that has since been deleted.

McEnany has also used the social media platforms’ decision to limit access to the story as a way of keeping it alive, suggesting that it makes Silicon Valley look like Pyongyang.

Separately, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said on Wednesday that “there is plenty of evidence to suggest Joe Biden knew good and well what Hunter Biden was doing—using his connections to enrich himself and the Biden family” – a comment retweeted by White House communications director Alyssa Farah.

The Trump campaign

The Trump campaign immediately pushed outgot

a video encapsulating the story’s conclusions, asking the bogus (and un-premised) question of “Why did you let Hunter do it?”

Separately, Trump campaign comms director Tim Murtagh boosted the story in a somewhat subtler way, playing into Politico’s write-up to keep the story moving.

It remains unclear whether the emails in question are real or not and, if they’re authentic, what exactly it is that they prove.

Movement conservatives

But the cherry on the cake here are the D.C. professional conservatives who keep the whole show running: justifying the current administration while wielding it as a tool to achieve their judicial goals.

Take Hugh Hewitt, who anticipated the story’s path by initially promoting it as a question about how people reacted.

Similarly, National Review editor Rich Lowry appears to have commissioned a write-up of the story’s conclusions in part as a way around the platforms’ decision to throttle access. Here he is promoting it below:

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