A Tale of Two Laptops
As threatened, Elon Musk has released his “Twitter Files” via respected journalist Matt Taibbi, revealing a successful campaign by forces loyal to Joe Biden to suppress the Hunter Biden Laptop story in the waning days of the 2020 Presidential election.
But while these intriguing revelations of alleged “election interference” in the 2020 election by the Democrats have the newly empowered GOP salivating over Hunter Biden’s laptop like a bone-in Ribeye at Mastro’s, let’s not forget how another infamous laptop was exploited by the GOP to gain an advantage in the previous election: Anthony Weiner’s.
On October 28, 2016, after sitting on Weiner’s laptop for weeks, the FBI suddenly informed the public—eleven days before the presidential election—that the device contained “new” evidence which might force them to reopen their controversial investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.
This half-baked bombshell devastated Hillary’s poll numbers, and by the time the FBI concluded the information was irrelevant, the damage had been done. In fact, when she’s not blaming Russia—or Bernie Sanders—Clinton cites the FBI’s suspicious handling of Weiner’s laptop as one of the main reasons she lost to Donald Trump.
All of which raises the question: was the last-minute reveal of Weiner’s laptop a classic GOP “October Surprise” designed to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump? It certainly smells like it, especially since former FBI Director and lifelong Republican James Comey admits he exposed Weiner’s laptop so close to the election to keep others in the FBI, presumably those friendly to the GOP, from leaking the information and making him—and the FBI—look bad.
Fast forward to October 2020. GOP operatives had been slow-roasting Hunter Biden’s laptop for over a year, waiting for just the right moment to release its salacious contents in the New York Post to cause maximum damage to the Biden campaign while leaving Biden little or no time to respond.
In short, GOP dirty tricksters had yet another classic “October Surprise” all cooked up and ready for public consumption.
There was only one problem: Trump’s presidency had been such a disaster that those in the so-called “Deep State” (I simply call them “The State”) and the media—social and otherwise—who might otherwise have joined in the feeding frenzy weren’t about to let another laptop throw another election, and certainly not in favor of Donald Trump.
What’s more, the Biden campaign did what any campaign worth its salt would do: they leaned on their connections to kill a potentially negative media story. To do otherwise would have been political malpractice.
So, was there a conspiracy, as many on the right claim, to suppress the Post’s laptop story to help, i.e., not hurt Joe Biden in the 2020 election? Possibly. At least Musk’s Twitter Files make it look that way.
But here’s the thing. Any actions Biden and his team took to suppress the story were simply a defense against Trump World’s ongoing conspiracy to release the story at just the right time to hurt Joe Biden. And using one dirty trick to fight another isn’t election interference—it’s Politics.
That’s not to say that efforts by those within the government to suppress speech on social media platforms are not insidious and reprehensible violations of the First Amendment. They most certainly are. But when it comes to the Biden Campaign, that’s not what happened here. Why? Because Trump was in power, not Biden.
Unlike Weiner’s laptop, however, Hunter’s is the gift that keeps on giving. So now the GOP plan to milk it for everything it’s worth over the next two years so they can achieve the goal in 2024 they failed at so miserably in 2020: defeating Joe Biden.
Should Biden and his fellow Democrats be worried? Who knows? Maybe “The Big Guy” referred to in Hunter’s emails really is Joe Biden. On the other hand, who can believe anything Joe’s sex and drug-addicted scion wrote on a laptop he didn’t care enough about to pick up from the repair shop?
But everyone knows the Benghazi Hearings were never about Benghazi. They were about hurting Hillary Clinton. And, when the GOP’s fishing expedition ultimately snagged her home server, we all know what happened next.
Likewise, the Hunter Biden investigations won’t be about Hunter Biden or his laptop. They will be about hurting Joe Biden. And I’ll bet you two 7-Eleven hot dogs and a Slurpee they’re going to find something in or around the laptop to impeach Joe Biden with, even if it means criminalizing political crisis management and public relations.
Still, wouldn’t it be nice if the GOP learned another dirty trick? This whole laptop thing is getting old.
Morty Shallman is an LA-based novelist, singer-songwriter, and political consultant. His latest novel, The Tyranny of Desire, will be released on January 25, 2023. For more information, please visit www.morty.org