The NY Times published a story today titled "Hunter Biden’s Laptop, Revealed by New York Post, Comes Back to Haunt Him." It's an awkward piece that tries to simultaneously make the point that the laptop was real while also arguing that skeptics of the original NY Post story had a point.

The Post first reported on the existence of the laptop on Oct. 14, 2020, less than a month before the presidential election. In a front-page article, The Post wrote that the laptop contained emails that it described as a “smoking gun” showing corruption in the Biden family, including correspondence that appeared to describe a meeting that Mr. Biden had arranged between his father and a Ukrainian businessman when his father was vice president.

Questions were raised immediately after The Post published its article, including about the legitimacy of the laptop. Facebook and Twitter restricted the distribution of links to The Post’s article, saying fact checkers needed to verify the claims before they could be shared. Several days later, more than 50 former intelligence officials signed a letter claiming that the emails had “the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

This is a bit of a gimmick. The initial pushback to the NY Post story wasn't just skepticism of the story based on the laptop, it was skepticism of the source itself. The laptop was quickly judged to be possible Russian disinformation and Biden himself repeated this claim. 

In retrospect, all of that pushback looks extremely political not to mention inaccurate. Nearly four years later, nothing on the laptop has been found to be false or of Russian origin. Not that the partisan hacks who whipped up that story can admit they were wrong.

Fox News Digital reached out to all 51 individuals who signed the heavily scrutinized October 2020 letter, published just before the 2020 presidential election, asking if they regretted signing it now that the laptop is being used by the prosecution arguing Hunter committed a federal gun crime.

"No," former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper simply said, also declining to publicly remove his name from the letter or concede that those signing onto it should have waited longer for more information to develop.

If we're being really generous we could say they really didn't know how reliable the material was at the time, but at this point it's clear their suspicious were wrong. This was not Russian disinformation, it was Hunter's actual laptop. Whether or not all of the stories based on that material have been proven to the left's satisfaction is another question.

But the worst response this week comes, not surprisingly, from Philip Bump at the Washington Post. Bump has a habit of never letting go of a good talking point, even when the evidence no longer supports him. Here he is trying to argue that the laptop still isn't reliable and that the media and the skeptics were right.

Other news outlets were not given access to the material at the time of the initial report. (Giuliani told the New York Times he was worried its journalists would “spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.”) When The Washington Post finally got access to the material in 2022, we were able to verify some of it as authentic. There was also evidence, though, that the material on the hard drive that went from Giuliani to the New York Post was moved around with some information added. Even Mac Isaac warned that material being attributed to “the laptop” was not on the laptop when he undertook the file recovery process.

This is misleading. Bump writes about information being added to the drive and then goes directly to Mac Isaac warning things being attributed to the laptop weren't there when he saw it. The way this is written makes it sound like Mac Isaac was worried something false had been added to the drive.

But if you follow that link above it goes to a previous story Bump wrote in 2022. In that story, it's clear Mac Isaac was talking about things circulating online.

“I do know that there have been multiple attempts over the past year-and-a-half to insert questionable material into the laptop as in, not physically, but passing off this misinformation or disinformation as coming from the laptop,” he said. “And that is a major concern of mine because I have fought tooth and nail to protect the integrity of this drive and to jeopardize that is going to mean that everything that I sacrificed will be for nothing.”

In other words, Mac Isaac says that he has seen claims about what the laptop contains that don’t actually reflect what he saw on the laptop at the outset. Or, presumably, sees now, as one of the few people that might still have an unlittered copy of its contents.

He's not saying that people added things to the drive. He's saying some people were claiming things were on the drive that may not have been there. But the critical point is that those claims don't change the contents of the drive itself. And the contents of the drive have never been found to contain Russian disinformation. The worst he can say is that experts hired by the Post couldn't verify all of the contents.

The Washington Post was able to publish a report based on a copy of material that we obtained from a Republican activist named Jack Maxey who’d gotten it from Giuliani. We had multiple experts examine the contents of a hard drive that purported to contain the laptop’s contents, validating tens of thousands of emails as likely to be legitimate. But an enormous amount of the material on the drive couldn’t be validated as legitimate, in part because of the game of telephone that the material had undergone by the time it reached us.

Saying you can't confirm the contents isn't the same as proving the contents are Russian disinformation or even that they are different from the original drive in any way that actually matters. There's no evidence of that at this point. And here's where Bump shifts gears again. He's not exactly claiming the information was false per se, only that its leak might have been part of a dastardly campaign by Russia.

The issue at the time of the New York Post report was in part that the material might not be authentic. In part, though, it was that it was authentic — and being released in October 2020 as part of a foreign effort to influence the outcome of the presidential race.

After all, Russian actors had done precisely this four years prior...

Others went further in linking the New York Post story to Russia, including Biden. But it is not as though there was no precedent for such concerns in the moment.

It's four years later. It doesn't matter if there was reason for those concerns. Those concerns were not accurate. We know where the material came from. It came from Hunter's laptop that was just used against him in his gun trial. And we know how it got to Rudy Giuliani and how it got from there to the NY Post. Philip Bump knows all of this too. The only point of rehearsing all of these defunct arguments is to backstop the media's shameful handling of this story either ignoring it or going along with bogus claims it was a Russian op. 

But there's no excuse now for that now. The laptop was real. The material on it was real. There's no longer any reasonable doubt about it.