The head of the Republican National Committee is claiming the “Biden White House” killed the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020, before Joe Biden was elected President. The embattled RNC chair, Ronna McDaniel, is again taking criticism, but her false allegations resurface events some may have forgotten.
“This is a Biden White House that was meeting with social media companies, dictating what they put on their platform before the 2020 election,” McDaniel told Fox News on Monday.
“That to me is suppression,” she continued. “This is a White House that killed the Hunter Biden story that we now know is true, that prevented voters from knowing that before the 2020 election.”
That is false.
But it’s also important to take a look back at reporting from 2020 which debunks McDaniel’s false statements.
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Just days before the 2020 election, NBC News reported that “Trump and his allies say there is evidence of corruption in emails and documents allegedly found on a laptop belonging to Democrat Joe Biden’s son. They say those and other documents show that Hunter Biden used his father’s influence to enrich himself through business deals in Ukraine and China, and that his father not only facilitated that, but may have benefited financially.”
“But the Wall Street Journal and Fox News — among the only news organizations that have been given access to key documents — found that the emails and other records don’t make that case. Leaving aside the many questions about their provenance, the materials offered no evidence that Joe Biden played any role in his son’s dealings in China, let alone profited from them, both news organizations concluded,” the NBC News report states.
Now, despite nearly a year of intense Republican investigations by three House committees and a GOP-majority House leadership that appears determined to make the case to impeach President Joe Biden, those findings in the NBC News report are just as true today as they were when they were published more than three years ago.
In that same report, NBC News also stated, “many questions remain about how the materials got into the hands of Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who has met with Russian agents in his effort to dig dirt on the Bidens.”
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“U.S. intelligence agencies have informed the White House that Giuliani has been in contact with alleged Russian intelligence agents. The FBI has been looking into whether the Russians played any role, and no official has ruled that out.”
At the time, that was the Trump White House, not the Biden White House. Bill Barr was the Attorney General.
One year earlier, in October of 2019, Politico reported, “2 Giuliani Ukraine associates indicted on campaign finance charges.” And just weeks ago, The Guardian reported, “Ukrainian authorities have arrested a controversial MP who was at the heart of efforts by Rudy Giuliani to dig up compromising material about Joe Biden, and placed him in pre-trial detention.”
McDaniel claimed Joe Biden dictated to social media companies “what they put on their platform before the 2020 election.”
Again, that is false. Nor does a presidential candidate have the power to do so.
What actually happened?
“The background here is that the FBI came to us,” Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan last year, as the BBC reported, “and was like ‘hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that’.”
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The BBC added, Zuckerberg “said the FBI did not warn Facebook about the Biden story in particular – only that Facebook thought it ‘fit that pattern’.”
The BBC also pointed to the New York Post report that it says “claimed that a laptop, abandoned in a repair shop by Hunter Biden, contained emails which included details of Hunter introducing a Ukrainian energy tycoon to his father and arranging a meeting.”
“There is no record on Mr Biden’s schedule that such a meeting ever took place,” BBC adds.
“More than a year after the story appeared, the Washington Post conducted its own analysis and concluded the laptop and some emails were likely to be authentic – but the majority of data could not be verified due to ‘sloppy handling of the data’.”
That New York Post “article remains controversial. The hard drive at its centre was provided to the Post by Donald Trump’s own lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.”
Watch McDaniel below or at this link.