From our UK edition
Well, there you have it. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has confirmed that Facebook did indeed censor news of the New York Post’s 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story. But The Zuck had a rather curious tale to tell. Appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience, Zuckerberg was questioned by Rogan on Facebook’s approach to fake news and misinformation. In the discussion, the question of Hunter Biden’s laptop arose.
This morning, Cockburn's eagle eye was drawn to an exclusive in the Washington Examiner, which reports that the Delaware police considered Hunter Biden a victim in the infamous gun-in-the-trash incident from 2018. That episode involved Hunter's sister-in-law Hallie, with whom he had a romantic relationship after his brother Beau died, throwing out a gun in a public trash can near a grocery store. Hunter then asked Hallie to go retrieve the gun. A source in the Delaware Police Department said, “He was technically a victim of a theft of a firearm. But in Delaware, we don't prosecute unless a victim is willing to pursue prosecution, so that incident was cleared out with no victim cooperation...which means the victim does not want prosecution.
Trouble may be ahead for America's least favorite fortunate son. Department of Justice (DOJ) officials are reportedly discussing whether to indict Hunter Biden on charges relating to tax and foreign lobbying violations. This comes as an investigation into his finances is reaching a “critical stage.” While this might seem like yet another story the mainstream media would sweep under the rug, Cockburn is pleased to see that even CNN covered it. Clearly something is up here. Back in March, one of Cockburn’s pals, Charles Lipson, covered the media’s purposeful blindness into the Hunter Biden laptop scandal after the New York Times casually verified that the computer was real (a year and a half after the New York Post had verified it and been banned from Twitter for its efforts).
Several far-left Democrats are “extraordinarily disappointed” in the Biden administration. The Justice Department recently denied their request to de-schedule cannabis from its Schedule I classification within the Controlled Substances Act. “Schedule I” is applied to drugs with “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker led the charge on behalf of stoners back in November 2021, and last month, the DoJ told them that “cannabis has not been proven in scientific studies to be a safe and effective treatment for any disease or condition.
From our UK edition
Scandal is such a wonderful driver of human emotions. Just think of the number of things you get to feel in one go: horror, disgust, relief, superiority, guilt and glee, to name just a few. All these flooded through a portion of the American public again this week when a new video emerged of Hunter Biden. Hunter is the sole surviving son of President Joe Biden and it is uncontentious to say that he is a tortured soul. His mother and his one-year-old sister died in a car crash in 1972. Hunter and his older brother Beau were injured but they survived. Beau died of cancer at the age of 46, and soon afterwards Hunter started a short-lived relationship with his elder brother’s widow. In between he also developed a serious drug and prostitute addiction.
Another day, another deeply compromising story about America’s first son. This weekend, a hacker on the 4chan messageboard claimed to have cracked Hunter Biden’s iCloud password — and proceeded to dump what appears to be the contents of his phone and iPad online. The images and videos in question are more or less exactly what you’d expect: Hunter smoking crack, Hunter brandishing firearms, Hunter cavorting with sex workers, Hunter naked displaying his large appendage. For readers, such as Cockburn, who managed to sidestep the Big Tech-media effort to suppress the New York Post’s “Laptop from Hell” story in October 2020, the iCloud leak contains no new revelations, just more of the same.
“Fighting corruption is not just good governance,” Joe Biden once said. “It is self-defense. It is patriotism, and it’s essential to the preservation of our democracy and our future.” Going into the first term of his presidency, President Obama gave then-Vice President Biden one of the most important foreign policy portfolios: managing the US relationship with China. However, there is precious little to show for this prodigious assignment.
Who is the most intriguing political artist of the Biden era? Cockburn is happy to welcome a new contender to the fray: Thomas Richard Glazewski of Manor Township, Pennsylvania. Glazewski is part of a daring street collective who have been posting stickers of Joe Biden on gas pumps. They show the president pointing with the caption “I did that!” and are placed next to the price of gasoline — which has risen significantly in the past year or so. The vinyl stickers — available on Amazon — are manufactured in China. Just like the Biden presidency, right? But Glazewski took his piece to a whole new level: risking his freedom last month, he turned his sticker protest into performance art by getting himself arrested. A viral video shows the artist’s arrest.
From our UK edition
It was meant to be a kumbaya moment for the Democrats. Barack Obama, the still revered 44th President, would make his first formal visit to Joe Biden’s White House – and sprinkle some of his leadership magic over a struggling administration. Barack and Joe, the old duo, were to mark the 12th anniversary of what is thought to be their greatest legislative achievement: the passing of the Affordable Care Act. Unfortunately, last week’s event ended up reminding most Americans that the current President may be better off in an Expensive Care Home. The videos from the day were painful to watch: Biden bumbled around helplessly as his former boss worked the room. Obama looked still so charismatic, charming, confident. Biden was the opposite.
From our UK edition
Hunter Biden reportedly paid over $1 million in back taxes for income he never claimed, but which was found in his emails — the ones from his laptop that had been dismissed by the mainstream media as Russian disinformation. The FBI is conducting an ongoing investigation into Hunter’s business activities based on the contents of the laptop. It was only the Bureau's use of the laptop as evidence that finally forced the New York Times this month to admit that what it said last year was false.
Americans are about to get what they desperately need: another book from the Biden family! Valerie Biden Owens isn’t just the president’s little sister; she's also the author of Growing Up Biden: A Memoir. The book’s cover features a photo of a young Valerie and her siblings sitting on a couch with their mother. According to Amazon, the book "details Valerie’s decades-long professional career in politics, and the central role she played in her brother’s life as an insightful adviser, an ever-loyal advocate and best friend.” The timing of the book’s release — it will hit shelves next week — is almost as terrible as Joe Biden’s recent poll numbers. Almost.
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.
More news is breaking daily on America’s favorite pipe artist. But if you looked at Hunter Biden’s inner circle, you wouldn’t see a group of people bracing for impact. In fact, you would see photos of Hunter Biden’s wife Melissa Cohen frolicking with friends on the beach in Rio de Janeiro and sipping out of coconuts. You would see the president in the fake White House set rolling up his sleeve for his second televised booster shot. But don’t let the Biden family’s schedule fool you: Hunter is in trouble — and they know it. The Washington Post published a piece this week titled, “Inside Hunter Biden’s multimillion-dollar deals with a Chinese energy company.” The company in question is CEFC China Energy conglomerate.
Last week, the New York Times decided that now might be a good time, amid the cacophony of war abroad and soaring inflation at home, to come clean about the Hunter Biden laptop story. On March 16, the Times published a report on the junior Biden’s messy tax affairs in which, a full twenty-four paragraphs in, they acknowledged the authenticity of the emails and files contained on the now-infamous laptop.
Take Cockburn's hand and let him whisk you back to the halcyon days of fall 2020. The presidential campaign was in full swing and the New York Post had just gotten its hands on a scoop: Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, had left his laptop at a repair shop in Delaware. On its hard drive was a treasure trove of damning emails and pictures, including one that appeared to show Hunter passed out in bed with a crack pipe in his mouth. The Post published its story, the Biden campaign yelped, and the establishment duly lost its mind. The Post's Twitter account was suspended. And perhaps most damningly, fifty-one intelligence "experts" signed a letter warning that the laptop story could be Russian disinformation.
Democrats are obsessed with the idea that when they lose elections it must be because of outside forces, usually some sort of Russian. But what we know now is that if anyone has been manipulating our once precious democracy, it has been the Democrats. The latest findings by the Durham investigation make clear that the 2016 Clinton campaign paid for and implemented a massive disinformation strategy to falsely link Donald Trump to Russia, and then worked the intelligence services of the United States and the mainstream media to drive that narrative deep into the American psyche. When Trump won, Democrats used that same strategy to try and drive him from office.
President Joe Biden often likes to tout his involvement in passing the Violence Against Women Act. So, naturally, the president was on hand to speak about the issue this week at an event marking the bill’s reauthorization. With his trademark eloquence, Biden emphasized how the reauthorization took aim at revenge porn, which he described as “a new civil rights cause of action for those whose intimate images were shared on a public screen.” “I bet everybody knows somebody,” the president explained, “that in an intimate relationship, what happened was the guy takes a revealing picture of his naked friend, or whatever, in a compromising position and then blackmails.” True enough, Mr. Biden.
From our UK edition
It’s now a familiar pattern – a sensational news story is dismissed by serious journalists as bogus right-wing agitprop. You’d have to be a swivel-eyed conspiracy theorist to believe that. You don’t want to be one of those. Then, a year or so later, the same important media organs, the same authorities who made you feel crazy for thinking that the story might be credible, turn around and tell you that, yep, it was true all along. It was just politically awkward to say so at the time. We saw it in the Covid years with the Wuhan lab-leak theory. We saw it to some extent with Jeffrey Epstein. And now we see it with the Hunter Biden laptop story.
From our UK edition
‘He has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.’ So once said Robert Gates, the former US defence secretary, of the now president Joe Biden. We don’t yet know if Biden is wrong about the current Ukraine crisis. We may be about to find out. His speech on Tuesday was at least competent, if not entirely coherent. ‘Who in the Lord’s name does Putin think gives him the right to declare new so-called ‘countries’ on territory that belongs to his neighbours?’ asked the president, in one of his now all-too-familiarly infirm attempts to sound firm.
A throwaway line item in an otherwise innocuous spending package unveiled one way the Biden administration and the Democratic party sees "racial equity." The Washington Free Beacon revealed a week ago that the Department of Health and Human Services would be distributing free crack pipes to drug users to promote hygiene and advance racial equity. The cost was around $30 million and the program is similar to what left-wing fiefdoms like Seattle and San Francisco already do. The story had all the elements of tabloid gold — even better in clickability than the last Biden crack pipe story: Hunter’s laptop.
