“I was shocked by that,” Bill Barr told Fox News’ John Roberts. Really? No one who’s watched Joe Biden for any length of time could be surprised by Biden lying, especially in self-promotion. Even before becoming president, Biden has made a lifelong hobby of collecting Pinocchios.

Nevertheless, Barr declares Biden’s lie about Hunter Biden’s laptop being nothing but “Russian disinformation” a particularly noxious example, and he’s right … at least about the media’s complicity in it:

“I was very disturbed during the debate when candidate Biden lied to the American people about the laptop.”

“He’s squarely confronted with the laptop, and he suggested that it was Russian disinformation and pointed to the letter written by some intelligence people that was baseless — which he knew was a lie,” Barr said.

“And I was shocked by that.”

Again it hardly seems shocking that Biden would lie to cover his butt. The wonder, however, is why the media was so intent on lying to cover Biden’s butt as well. Barr notes that both the FBI and the DNI at the time (Richard Grenell) disputed Biden’s characterization of the laptop and its data based on its own look at the evidence, but the media didn’t bother to give that much coverage. Instead, media outlets obsessed over the letter from 51 “intelligence professionals” who had never looked at it but said it had all the “hallmarks” of a Russian disinformation operation.

Now that their narrative has fallen apart, most of the 51 signatories can’t be bothered to explain themselves. Neither can their media outlets, even those for whom they work. For instance, CNN hired former DNI James Clapper despite his track record of dishonesty in testimony before Congress, and Clapper was one of the drivers of this letter and the media disinterest in the Hunter Biden laptop story. Clapper at least responded to the New York Post, but only by pointing to a single weasel-worded paragraph crafted to provide cover if their narrative fell apart. And CNN hasn’t even bothered to report on the Hunter Biden story since the New York Times’ “scoop” late last week.

Biden lied because he knew he could get away with it. He’s still lying because he knows the American media will still let him get away with it. They can’t afford to cover it now, at least not unless the Department of Justice actually does indict Hunter on corruption charges. The corruption extends much farther than Biden Inc — it extends right into the media’s executive suites. Jeff Zucker was only one example of it.