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WaPo’s Philip Bump gets epically buried for dippy spin of initial Hunter Biden laptop coverup

March 20, 2022 | | Print Article

Now that the New York Times has confirmed that Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” is really a thing, the Washington Post’s Philip Bump has valiantly tried to explain away mainstream media’s lockstep efforts to bury the story ahead of the 2020 elections, and it seems Bump has spun himself into a particularly snarky corner of social media.

“There’s been a familiar effort to broadly rewrite the history of the response to the laptop story,” Bump tweeted Saturday. “Here’s the context that’s often ignored.”

In the lengthy article, entitled “The forgotten — and ignored — context for the emergence of the Hunter Biden laptop story,” Bump writes:

Even today, the full story isn’t clear. Is the story straightforward — Mac Isaac obtained a laptop, thought it might be relevant to national politics and then found only one taker, Giuliani, for the material? Was the material reportedly circulating in Ukraine the same stuff? Nonexistent? Obtained from an iCloud hack independently? Did Guo learn about the laptop from Bannon, with mentions of the material in September following from there? It is of course always easy to ask infinite questions when you’re skeptical, but that the answers to this aren’t known now reinforces the reasons for skepticism 18 months ago.

Yup. Lot’s of questions.

Questions a journalist may have wanted to ask before Joe Biden took the White House.

But that, of course, wasn’t how the New York Post story that revealed the existence of  Hunter Biden’s laptop — along with a trove of damning emails and sexually graphic videos and photos showing the now-first son romping with a gal and a meth pipe — was investigated when it was published in October of 2020.

No, instead all of the emails detailing Biden’s shady dealings in Ukraine and kicking 10% to “the Big Guy” were promptly dismissed by everyone from CNN to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki as “Russian disinformation.”

Anyone who thought there might maybe be something to the story was obviously either Russian President Vladimir Putin’s puppet or a gullible fool.

It wasn’t until the New York Times brought up the laptop a year-and-a-half later, midway through an article about Hunter Biden’s taxes, that it suddenly became okay to discuss the computer’s contents.

And now, media members like Bump are scrambling to wipe the egg from their face and find a plausible excuse for their complicity in covering it all up and potentially swinging the election in Joe Biden’s favor.

Thing is, as Bump has quickly discovered, no one is buying the BS.

“No,” tweeted one user in response to Bump’s story. “You covered it up, discredited it, and now you can wallow in the shame of being fake news forevermore.”

“This just shows y’all never stopped spinning,” wrote another user.

“Here’s some context for you,” tweeted a third user. “Every false story about Trump was amplified. Remember ‘suckers and losers’ and ‘Russian bounties’ and ‘Russian collusion’? All were pushed heavily by msm. Then a true story comes out about Biden and suddenly journalists need skepticism. Gtfoh.”

But it was a user by the Twitter handle of “sua sponte” who stuck a dagger in the spin: “You and the other media hacks will never understand why nobody trusts you…”

Melissa Fine
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