The New York Post’s Oct. 2020 laptop story faced widespread backlash with media outlets, including NPR and CNN which dismissed the story as a “pure distraction” and a “manufactured scandal,” respectively. The New York Times quietly deleted and reworked its assertion that the Post’s article was “unsubstantiated.”
Big tech platforms Twitter and Facebook also suppressed the story, with Twitter locking the newspaper’s account and even blocking users from sharing the story.
“What I can’t live with,” Issa said during the podcast, “is the fact that when the New York Post, one of the oldest print newspapers in the country, founded in 1801, comes out with credible evidence, which they can show how they got it, what their sources were — there were no hidden sources on this — they not only got shut down by …Facebook and Twitter, but they got shut down by the New York Times, by public broadcasting, by virtually everyone.”
“And they were shut down by having more than 50 of the most informed people in the intelligence world all saying that they knew that this was false information. That is a conspiracy of monumental size.”
On March 16, in a report about the federal government’s investigation into the younger Biden’s tax filings, the New York Times admitted that the abandoned laptop was, in fact, legitimate.
“That is where we’re asking to have the evidence preserved,” Issa told Solomon. “And when we receive the ability to subpoena again …on the anticipation that the House will return to the [GOP] majority, this is an investigation that has to be done, because shutting down the First Amendment is now a pattern of new media. But it’s also becoming a pattern of old media.”
