Anne Applebaum

It’s been almost twenty-four hours since President Joe Biden trotted out to the White House’s Diplomatic Reception Room to deliver remarks about Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on the president’s retention of classified documents. If you’d like a recap of how that went, you can read my piece here. It’s safe to say that, with the exception of a few shameless administration apologists, DC collectively saw the press conference as an absolute trainwreck. Now, journalists are trying to get to the bottom of who planned the ill-fated public appearance for the president. Was it the president himself, furious at Hur’s report, who demanded he appear in a previously unscheduled event that was announced fifteen minutes prior to its start time?

With the Energy Department joining the lab-leak party, will the apologies ever roll in to those so thoroughly excoriated for questioning the animal-human theory of Covid's origins? Cockburn has done a little digging and would like you to join him on a trip down memory lane, to revisit the litany of enlightened elites who proclaimed the lab-leak theory a conspiracy. From scientists to media talking heads, the condemnation of the lab-leak hypothesis was pretty universal in the early months of the pandemic, even going so far as to proclaim it racist.

Cockburn has accidentally left his laptop at plenty of bars in his day. Yet if you were to open it up and search it — as a PI hired by one of his loopy exes once did — you would not find extensive evidence of drug use or information potentially compromising to national security. Not so in the case of Hunter Biden. Even the New York Times admitted last month that his now-notorious laptop is real and under investigation by federal prosecutors. When the New York Post broke that story back in October 2020, the mainstream media took a pass and Twitter even suspended the Post’s account. Now that the crooked computer has been verified, those same alleged journalists are rushing to play CYA.