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Notes -
A quick summary...
Biden had long been suspected of being in the pocket of the Russian mob with rumors to this effect dating back to the late 90s.
Biden's son Hunter, leaves his broken laptop at a one of those "Geek Squad"-type repair places and forgets to pick it up.
The tech snoops around the hard drive and in addition to a lot of sex and drug stuff they find correspondences that appears to confirm that Biden had been accepting money from foreign (mostly Russian and Ukrainian) oil oligarchs in exchange for political favors during his time as VP with his soin the conten acting as the intermediary. (Whether it was legal for the tech to go snooping in the first place is part of "the scandal within the scandal")
The tech contacts the FBI with the above evidence sometime in the spring of 2020.
On October 14th 2020 the NY Post publishes an article claiming that the FBI has proof that Biden has been accepting bribes and is actively working to suppress this information lest it help Trump win reelection.
12 Hours later the NY Post's official Twitter account is suspended and the FBI raids the home of the article's author. Ostensibly for distributing illegally obtained documents. (see previously mentioned "the scandal within the scandal")
There's lots of talk in the moment about whether the FBI documents and alleged contents of the laptop's HD linked in the article are genuine and whether the NY Post violated journalistic ethics by publishing them, with the general consensus being "no", and "yes" respectively. The latest wrinkle is that it looks like that the FBI believed the documents and contents to be genuine and formally asked social media companies to suppress the NY Post story.
Edit to clarify: As to "why we should care" it's yet another instance in recent memory of the FBI acting as a partisan hit-quad. It also undermines the wider "Russian collusion" narrative by putting the media in the position of having to defend Biden against the very allegations that they had leveled against Trump.
This paragraph appears backwards, to me. My understanding is that the general consensus is that the FBI docs/HD contents are legitimate (as recognized by the WaPo last week), and that the NYPost did not violate journalistic ethics by reporting on them. Maybe I'm misreading but that appears to be the opposite of what the quoted paragraph implies.
Also, my read of the Taibbi release is that there was no official government pressure to censor the Hunter Biden story directly; instead, there were lots of internal Twitter T&S types running around desperately trying to backfill reasons for their own desire to squelch the story, and sticking by those reasons even when told by Comms that their reasons were wrong.
The Zuckerberg interview on Rogan, and now the Special Agent Elvis Chan deposition show that the FBI had told FB and other social media companies that they had reason to suspect a non-specific information op around the time they became aware of the Hunter Biden allegations, but I haven't yet seen any indication that the FBI specifically ordered the story in particular squelched. Instead, right now it appears to be yet more Moldbuggian effortless coordination, where the FBI could count on ideologically-simpatico T&S teams to squelch the Hunter Story if given any vague, non-specific excuse to cover their asses with.
[Edit: okay, so it appears that one of the Twitter people responsible for the decision to kill the Hunter Biden story was James Baker, former general counsel for the FBI, and who appears to have been key in keeping the Russiagate hoaxes going, including laundering the false Alfabank story through the press. I take it back; no particular coordination between FBI and Twitter was necessary. There was an inside man.]
The general consensus now may be that the laptop story is probably legitimate but back in October of 2020 is it was pretty much impossible to bring up the topic of the NY Post getting banned from twitter without someone linking some variant of this story in response.
FWIW there are a couple users here from whom I'm still waiting on an apology. Or at least an acknowledgement.
Ah that makes sense.
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This sounds about right. No idea if it reflects the consensus among media outlets. I think the OP was skewering them as dishonestly running damage control.
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