Maybe My Son Hunter was a little more cinema verité than I appreciated at the time. In the film, Hunter tells Joe that he lost track of two laptops, not just one. Last night, Andrew Rice of New York Magazine told CNN’s Erin Burnett that people close to the Bidens think there may be a second laptop to be found, with potentially “devastating” revelations:

People close to President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, suspect there is another laptop, according to a reporter.

Andrew Rice, a contributing editor for New York Magazine who just wrote about the laptop saga, made the assertion during an appearance Monday on CNN after being shown a clip of the younger Biden telling CBS last year that the discarded device often associated with him could be his while saying he does not know for sure.

“I think that, you know — I think that if you accept the fact that Hunter Biden was a person who was addicted to drugs, alcohol, other substances who was going on a sort of journey of self-destruction during this time period, you know, it’s fully plausible to think that he might’ve misplaced an object and not necessarily know what happened to it,” Rice said. …

“In fact, people close to him have propagated the idea that perhaps actually there’s a second laptop out there that it might actually trace back to,” he continued, “which goes back to the general point that Hunter Biden was capable of losing more than one laptop that potentially contained devastating information about himself in this time period in his life.”

Well, yeah. Hunter Biden has struggled with addiction and the destructive cycles it creates, fueled by access to too much money and protected by his father’s political power. If Hunter lost one laptop, then he can certainly lose another. In fact, one has to wonder whether Hunter and Biden Inc can account for all of his smartphones over the years too, which also might contain a wealth of information. Those are a lot easier to lose than laptops.

This raises some interesting questions, though, especially regarding the Biden Inc spin — and the way the mainstream media amplified it. Rice refers to “people close to” Hunter believing that a second laptop may be out there. That’s odd in itself, since the same people insisted two years ago that the idea that one laptop had been found was a political hit job, and then “Russian disinformation.” Joe Biden himself flogged that line until well after the election. Social media platforms blocked any discussion of the New York Post exposé of the first laptop and its contents, to the point of blocking the NYP’s access to social media at all.

Burnett, to her credit, plays back Hunter’s attempt to dodge the question of the authenticity of the laptop, but never mentions the New York Post’s reporting at all. Neither do Burnett or Rice note the firehose of denials and accusations from Biden Inc for months in attempting to discredit that reporting, claims of “Russian disinformation” from the Bidens and allies in the intelligence communities, nor the media and social-media blackouts that took place in 2020-21 on the story. Instead, Burnett credits Rice and New York Magazine for doing a “six month investigation” into a story that the NY Post reported in depth 23 months ago.

Come on, man.

So what happens if someone actually turns up this second missing laptop? It’s probably when rather than if given that Biden Inc is engaging in pre-emptive leaking about it. Will we get another round of Big Tech and mainstream media silencing of not just the story but any discussion of it? I’d love to think otherwise, but this report’s whitewashing of the Hunter laptop story doesn’t generate warm fuzzies about any objective reporting on the issue in the future.

For decades, the liberal media has attacked conservatives and provided cover for democrats and their big-government, pro-abortion, gun-grabbing, culture-destroying allies. Now, they have big-tech helping them censor conservative viewpoints on behalf of the Biden administration. HotAir must redouble its effort with more writers, more insightful commentary and analysis, and full-throated defense of conservative American values.

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