Miranda Devine: New FBI chat logs reveal extraordinary gag order senior leadership used to shutdown any Hunter Biden laptop discussion
New chat logs released by the House Judiciary Committee this week show the extraordinary lengths the FBI went to behind the scenes to shut down any discussion of Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020 after The New York Post broke the story. The conversations, withheld by the FBI under Director Chris Wray, show that senior leadership issued an internal “gag order” on the laptop. The FBI had been in possession of the abandoned MacBook Pro for 10 months by that stage, after computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac handed it over and warned of the potential crimes and national security concerns he had found.The FBI’s forensic analysts quickly determined the laptop belonged to Hunter, had not been tampered with or altered in any way, and was suitable to be used in court. Sure enough, four years later, evidence on the laptop was cited in tax fraud charges to which Joe Biden’s son pleaded guilty, and the device was displayed to the Delaware jury that found Hunter guilty of gun felonies. Yet the chat logs show that senior FBI officials instructed agents to say “no comment” when asked about the laptop during regular meetings with social media companies before the 2020 election. The FBI had spent weeks warning Facebook and Twitter about election interference in the form of Russian disinformation and had told Twitter to be on guard for a “hack and leak” operation “likely” involving Hunter Biden.
In other words, the FBI “prebunked” The Post’s story so that the social media companies immediately censored it. The FBI knew The Post had received a hard-drive copy of the laptop from Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani because it had a covert surveillance warrant on the former mayor’s iCloud. On Oct.14, 2020, the morning the story was published, an FBI analyst confirmed to Twitter that the laptop was real but his bosses then “admonished” him and lamented in one message that “he won’t shut up.” Another message shows that an F...