Miranda Devine: Joe Biden is not the man voters thought they were getting

A coordinated censorship of America’s oldest newspaper was tantamount to US election interference, but now the paper has been vindicated, writes Miranda Devine.

The President’s plummeting popularity, especially among independents, reflects a growing realisation among voters Joe Biden is not the man they thought they had voted for.

There’s a good reason for their disenchantment.

They were denied the normal due diligence the media is supposed to conduct on presidential candidates. It’s been more than a year since the New York Post published the first of a series of damning stories about then-candidate Biden, based on material on his son Hunter’s abandoned laptop.

It’s been more than a year since Facebook and Twitter colluded with Democrat-friendly media to censor a story which reflected badly on their preferred candidate less than three weeks before the 2020 election.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey now says locking the New York Post’s account for two weeks was a mistake. Picture: AFP

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey blithely admitted after the election that locking the Post’s account for two weeks, on the basis of a non-existent “hacking” offence, was a “mistake”.

Facebook has never revealed the results of the “fact check” it used as a pretext for blocking the Post. That fact check likely never occurred because Facebook has never contacted key recipients of emails we published from the laptop, including Tony Bobulinski and Chris Heinz.

But the damage was done.

The coordinated censorship of America’s oldest newspaper — with more than 80 million readers online alone — amounted to election interference.

If the full story of the Bidens’ international influence-peddling scheme had been told before the election, polls indicate it may have affected the result.

Almost 50 per cent of Biden voters knew nothing about Hunter’s laptop scandal, according to polling conducted after the election by the Media Research Center, and almost 10 per cent said they would not have voted for Biden had they known.

Joe Biden was an international influence peddler in his time as vice president. Picture: AFP

With fewer than 45,000 votes in three states deciding the outcome, it’s not unreasonable to suggest suppression of the Post’s stories won Biden the election and denied voters the truth about his character.

This is the importance of Hunter Biden’s laptop and why it refuses to be shoved down the memory hole, where other inconvenient truths go to die.

It provides a rare window onto the corruption that is Washington’s original sin, as conducted on a global scale by one of its most skilled and calculating practitioners.

The sordid secret vices of a son of political privilege are an incongruous backdrop to the monumental oil and gas deals Hunter was mixed up in around the world, a drug-addled neophyte bumbling through geopolitical minefields, with the Secret Service in tow.

Hunter’s encounters with cutthroat oligarchs in Monte Carlo, Lake Como, Hong Kong and Shanghai are documented in vivid detail on his laptop.

It takes us from a billionaire’s beach villa in Acapulco to the desolate oil fields of Kazakhstan, from a judo competition in Budapest with Vladimir Putin to dinner in Beijing with Xi Jinping.

Here Hunter Biden is pictured in self-imposed exile in Hollywood.

A Chinese tycoon cooks Hunter dinner in his new $50 million penthouse in Manhattan’s “Limestone Jesus” building, a Ukrainian oligarch flies him to his fishing shack in Norway.

Beautiful Russian escorts and thieving drug dealers float through his self-imposed exile on Sunset Boulevard, amid slapstick scenes as crack-head Hunter comes seriously unstuck and his hapless Uncle Jim Biden rides in to the rescue.

Text messages chronicling the disintegration of Hunter’s love affair with his brother’s widow, Hallie Biden, are laced with flashbacks to the pain of a troubled childhood.

Eye-popping financial windfalls are shaded by the grim fate of Chinese business partners who wind up missing, presumed dead.

It’s a life of greed and luxury in a shadowy world of kleptocrat oligarchs that law enforcement can’t touch.

Despite his secret debaucheries, Hunter was acutely aware of what he brought to the table: access to his powerful father.

This was the Biden family business and it is documented in eye-popping detail in the 11-gigabyte trove.

Miranda Devine’s new book Laptop from Hell

Over nine years from 2010 to 2019, the laptop shadows Joe’s life as the globe-trotting vice president of the Obama administration, the favour-trading senator from Delaware who would go on to become leader of the free world.

Much of the Post’s reporting over the past year has been quietly accepted as accurate and even was admitted by Hunter, in his 2021 addiction memoir, Beautiful Things.

The White House confirmed our reporting when it admitted to a Washington Post fact-checker that then-VP Biden did go to a dinner attended by Hunter’s business associates from Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan on April 16, 2015, in a private room at Café Milano in Washington DC.

The White House admitted Joe went to the dinner but only briefly, and not for any nefarious purpose.

You would think reporters at organs such as USA Today and The Washington Post might be miffed about being lied to by Biden’s campaign, which categorically denied any such meeting had taken place.

“I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” candidate Biden said angrily, as if it were an affront to question his integrity.

But few in the media showed any interest in holding the candidate to account and simply ignored the Post’s reporting.

The killer blow came five days after the Post’s exposé, from 50 former senior intelligence officials led by the former Obama administration’s CIA director, John Brennan, and director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Using the institutional weight of their powerful former roles, they published a letter in Politico, which claimed the material on Hunter’s laptop, “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” although not one of them had seen any of it.

This was partisan political propaganda designed to disparage the Post’s reporting and dissuade the media from looking deeper.

The Brennan letter was a lifeline to Joe Biden, three days before his final debate against a fired-up President Trump. “Joe, they’re calling you a corrupt politician,” said Trump. “Take a look at the laptop from hell.”

Biden relied entirely on the Brennan letter to dismiss the laptop reports as “garbage”.

Miranda Devine's new book: The Laptop from Hell, is out this week.

“There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan. They have said this is… a bunch of garbage”.

But the Post’s reporting has held up.

Corroborated from multiple angles, Hunter’s laptop tells an alarming story of the national interest sold out for personal gain at the highest level, in particular to Communist China, America’s greatest strategic foe.

The conclusion is inescapable.

The president cannot extricate his family’s moneymaking schemes from America’s foreign policy imperatives.

*Miranda Devine’s book “Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide” is out this week. Read our exclusive extracts:

PART ONE

PART TWO