Drew Holden Profile picture
Sep 21, 2021 21 tweets 15 min read Read on X
🧵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? ImageImage
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? ImageImage
@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. ImageImageImage
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. ImageImage
Might be a good time to update this fact check, @washingtonpost Image
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? ImageImageImageImage
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? ImageImage
How about from @EvanMcMullin and @DavidCornDC? Care to follow up? Image
Never change, @brhodes ImageImageImageImage
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. ImageImage
Wherever Russian conspiracy theories go, the Never Trump crowd is rarely far behind.

This was the case here as ever. @davidfrum @MaxBoot ImageImage
And this from @kurteichenwald is unhinged, even for him. Image
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: ImageImage
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.” ImageImage
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. ImageImage

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More from @DrewHolden360

May 29
🧵Thread🧵

The new book “Original Sin” from Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson recounts the effort to cover up Biden’s cognitive decline ahead of the election. The authors point to many guilty parties.

The one glaring omission? Their colleagues in the corporate press. Follow along ⤵️ Image
There are numerous dramatic reveals. The Biden team considered condoning him to a wheelchair? Maybe in his fog he forgot about the border?

But as I worked on a review for @commonplc, the one thought that I kept coming back to was that you can’t tell this story without the press.
Perhaps no one was more vital to the continued fiction that Biden had it together than the media.

Tapper and Thompson even highlight some of the telling moments.

Did they forget what the media reported?
Read 21 tweets
May 20
🧵THREAD🧵

Biden’s cancer diagnosis is a tragedy I know first-hand.

But our sympathy can’t silence questions about Biden’s cognitive decline, clarified just days ago by the Hur tape.

The media tried to bury the story then. They’re trying again now.

I’ve got the receipts. ⤵️
When the report first came out in 2024, outlets rushed to demean Hur, accusing him of serving as a Republican hatchet man.

Just look at this take from @USATODAY, who assembled sympathetic voices to make the case that Hur “crossed the line.” They found an expert to call it a “disgrace” and then featured the obviously unbiased Eric Holder to lead a section titled “Way too many gratuitous remarks.”

The audio makes clear that Hur, if anything, played down how alarming the claims were.Image
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(If you haven’t listened to the Hur audio yet, you should.)
Read 26 tweets
May 15
It should go without saying, but the media cultivating this type of baseless hysteria about an admin for partisan reasons is much more of a threat to the underpinnings of our democracy than anything Trump has actually done.

Quick 🧵⤵️ Image
A couple quotes:

“If you think that there’s this thing out there called America, and it’s exceptional, that means you don’t have to do anything” to stop fascism.

What? What does that even mean??

That if you, like millions of Americans!, believe in American exceptionalism…you’re a fascist?

Really?
“The powers that be can do whatever they want to you”

Trump can’t even deport people who have deportation orders against them without a federal judge stepping in.

This is firmly out of touch with reality.
Read 13 tweets
May 13
Wow what a potentially valuable insight worth sharing with the American people when it mattered rather than saving for your book!
This conversation started in June *2023* so if you believe the media wasn’t aware of it before the election I have a bridge to sell you.
I’m going to write a book about this book.
Read 5 tweets
Apr 29
🧵Thread🧵

Many in the media are trying to claim that the press was merely duped by Biden’s White House about the former president’s cognitive decline.

That simply isn’t true. The media actively took part in the coverup.

Don’t let them forget. I’ve got screenshots. ⤵️
I’ve done a number of threads on this but putting some of the most egregious stuff in one place.

Perhaps the most damming: Two weeks before the debate made Biden’s cognitive decline inescapable, @washingtonpost gave “Four Pinocchio’s” to allegedly edited videos showing Biden clearly displaying cognitive problems, dismissing them as “pernicious” efforts “to reinforce an existing stereotype” while quoting the White House to say the videos were “cheap fakes” — all to defend Biden against criticisms about his age and well-being.Image
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That story came four days after a previous effort from @washingtonpost to write off these videos as Republican efforts to mislead voters: proof, the Post claimed, that “the politics of misinformation and conspiracy theories do not stop at the waters edge.” Image
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Read 24 tweets
Apr 15
🧵Thread🧵

I’m not sure people realize just how egregious some of NPR’s “journalism” has been. Amid the debate about defunding the network, I wanted to walk down memory lane to revisit some of its worst coverage.

There’s a lot. ⤵️
First, perhaps the most egregious display of activist journalism: their response to the Hunter Biden laptop story of corruption involving a major party candidate on the eve of the election.

Not only did @NPR not cover it, they bragged about refusing to do so. Image
Insofar as @NPR did cover the Hunter Biden scandal, they actively tried to cover it up.

They applauded Facebook & Twitter strangling the story as part of a push against “misinformation and conspiracy theories.”

The story, of course, turned out to be far from invented. Image
Read 23 tweets

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