Thread by @DrewHolden360

🧵THREAD🧵

I don’t know if folks remember how bad the smear campaign was about NY Post’s Hunter Biden laptop reporting was, so quick trip back down memory lane.

Beyond the full-court press from Twitter & Facebook, the media & Dems worked overtime to shut down the story. Look ⤵️

It’s worth starting with @CNN. They brought on James Clapper to call the scoop - confirmed today by Politico - “textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft.” @brianstelter had a program about how it was obviously fake. @apbenven had an “anatomy” of it.

Where’s the follow up, guys?

I mean, for crying out loud, @NPR went through the trouble of explaining why they weren’t going to report on the story!

Can we revisit that?

@MSNBC went all in on this. They had a member of Congress, @CongressmanRaja, on to spread misinformation about it being a “Russian influence operation.”

@JoyAnnReid called it a “Russian hatchet-job”

@kylegriffin1 said it “appears to contain disinformation”

All lies.

A lot of the original narrative was framed up by @politico, who ran a story that a bunch of former intel types disputed the findings (without seeing them, of course).

Today Politico announced that they had confirmed two of the key underlying details.

Might be a good time to update this fact check, @washingtonpost

There were a bunch of elected officials who repeated this bogus allegation. Here are just a few.

Obviously we had chief Russia conspiracy theorist @RepAdamSchiff. But we also had @davidcicilline, @BillPascrell and @ChrisMurphyCT, among others.

Where’s the accountability?

I want to pause to drive a point home: in the weeks leading up to an election, big tech, the Democrats and the corporate press worked together to bury a damaging story about one of the candidates, and they succeeded.

If you can shrug that off, I don’t know what’s wrong with you.

There were a ton of the usual suspects pushing this false narrative. I don’t have room for all of them but I wanted to point out some of the more egregious ones.

@joelockhart and @ThePlumLineGS, anything more from you guys? Still convinced it’s Russian disinformation?

How about from @EvanMcMullin and @DavidCornDC? Care to follow up?

Never change, @brhodes

And you, @McFaul? Do you still stand by your belief that this is a “hit piece so false that Twitter won’t even post it”? Or might there be something else afoot?

And I suspect @TVietor08 is right that folks haven’t learned the lessons of 2016, just wrong about what the lesson is.

Wherever Russian conspiracy theories go, the Never Trump crowd is rarely far behind.

This was the case here as ever. @davidfrum @MaxBoot

And this from @kurteichenwald is unhinged, even for him.

So, where is the follow up? Where are the fact checkers? Where are the social media warnings about these lies being disinformation?

Not a peep.

A fundamentally shameful episode. And one we aren’t likely to see any of the perpetrators of it revisit.

There are a lot more examples from a thread I did back when the story first broke, linked here:

Also worth pointing out: the smear here worked in both directions. Not only was Biden the blameless victim of supposed disinformation, but Trump was the reported bad guy pushing the (supposed) conspiracy theory.

Days before the presidential election between the two.

Quick addendum. @McFaul reminded me of a long thread he had on this subject, part explanation, part apology. Some of that is below.

A couple points:

First, I certainly don’t dispute that Russia actively uses disinformation to target the US. Or that Rudy Giuliani has proven himself an unreliable narrator, to put it mildly, when it comes to just about anything.

But he elides an important distinction here. It wasn’t that he “automatically questioned the veracity of [Giuliani’s] claims,” as he says.

He wrote those claims off completely as a malicious lie, helping feed into an effort to bury a real news story as “disinformation.”

As I’ve told him, I don’t expect I’ll be able to change his mind now that he‘s “MOVING ON FOREVER ON THIS!” but it’s obvious that he hasn’t actually taken any responsibility for helping to bury a since-verified, damaging story about the now-president days before his election.