Hunter Biden’s Laptop and America’s Crisis of Accountability

Gerard Baker?March 21, 2022 1:40 pm ET

"Now we can guess why so much U.S. intelligence has been so faulty all these years. Either these 50 or so grandmasters of international espionage are completely unable to distinguish Russian disinformation from real information, or they prostituted their credentials in a naked act of political hackery. I don’t have their experience or deductive skills, but I’m ready to go with the latter."

Harold Wilson, the British Labour prime minister in 1970, is said to have claimed for years afterward that England’s shock by West Germany in the soccer World Cup quarterfinal that year so depressed the national mood— and turnout—that it produced his surprise ejection from 10 Downing Street in the general election days later.

We’ll never know what effect the “October Surprise” of 2020, the New York Post’s reporting of the discovery of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden containing all sorts of embarrassing emails, might have had on the election that year if it had received wider circulation. Perhaps in a campaign dominated by Covid and characterized by chaos, it would have been another snowflake in the blizzard of news voters were being hit with.

But the allegations in the reporting—that the son of the man favored to become the next president had been selling his high-level family political connections to foreigners, including suggestions of a possible cut for his father—were worth pursuing. But enough influential people in and out of government—in the foreign- policy-intelligence complex, in the media, and in the big tech firms—were so alarmed that it would affect the outcome that they pulled off one of the greatest disappearing tricks since Harry Houdini made that elephant vanish from a New York stage.

It took its time, but last week the slipped the acknowledgment of the story’s accuracy deep in a about Hunter Biden’s mounting legal problems. The Times, along with most other mass-circulation news organizations, had essentially ignored the story in the days when it might have made a difference, but it now says it has “authenticated” the laptop’s contents.

The concession from the paper, which serves as a sort of unofficial licensing authority for reporting by most of the rest of the media, prompted a predictable rush to self-vindication by those who had also trashed the story at the time. The Washington Post its original decision not to touch it was justified because of uncertainty about its provenance.

Normally, when there is doubt about the provenance of an explosive story, news organizations consider it their job to ascertain the truth. Normally, it takes them less than 17 months to do so. But normally they don’t have the cover provided by technology companies that prevented people from reading the original story.

The media and tech companies that colluded in concealing this potentially critical information didn’t need any excuse to do so. But it surely helped that they were given validation for their actions by an august-sounding committee of concerned letter-writers who?moved quickly to discredit the story.

In that famous letter, more than 50 former national-security and intelligence officials polished their gleaming credentials and alleged that the New York Post was guilty of peddling a story that had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

The principal rationale for this, the letter laid out, was that the story might be helpful to?Donald Trump. Russia wanted Mr. Trump to win. The story helped Mr. Trump. Ergo, it was the work of Russia.

That’s quite a syllogism. Using that same logic, you might conclude that Russia was also responsible for any unexpectedly good economic data that helped the incumbent, or that?Vladimir Putin?was behind the crime wave that had gripped Democrat-run cities.

Now we can guess why so much U.S. intelligence has been so faulty all these years. Either these 50 or so grandmasters of international espionage are completely unable to distinguish Russian disinformation from real information, or they prostituted their credentials in a naked act of political hackery. I don’t have their experience or deductive skills, but I’m ready to go with the latter.

The deeper shame here is the lack of accountability across American institutions. No one who colluded in this conspiracy against truth has even been inconvenienced by it.

Contacted by the Post?last week, not one of the letter’s signatories expressed regret or contrition. The reporters and editors at news organizations and the employees and executives of tech companies who participated in the suppression continue to be lionized for their work.

This is what is so corrosive of trust and, in the end, of the system itself. The one way in which real accountability is supposed to work in a democracy is at the ballot box. But how can that even work when the people we want to hold accountable decide what information the voters are allowed to see?