A former reporter for the Washington, D.C.-based news site POLITICO Marc Caputo was interviewed by Tara Palmeri on her Somebody’s Gotta Win podcast on Donald Trump’s inauguration day, 20 January.
A revelation by guest Caputo was picked up and heavily covered by right-wing media. Caputo was covering the Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign for POLITICO in the 2020 presidential election, and has now revealed that he had been told by his editors at the site not to write about the Hunter Biden laptop story, despite Caputo voicing his intention to do so.
In October 2020, the New York Post broke the story that Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s laptop was discovered after being abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop; and the device contains compromising information about Hunter Biden and his family. The mainstream media, based on the opinion of many former and active American intelligence agents, were quick to discredit the story as ‘Russian disinformation,’ but it later was proven to be accurate.
‘I was covering Biden at the time. And I was told this came from on high at POLITICO: “Don’t write about the laptop, don’t talk about the laptop, don’t tweet about the laptop,”’ Caputo told Palmeri, a fellow former writer for POLITICO, by the way.
A representative of POLITICO has since come out to dispute Caputo’s claims in a statement to Mediaite. However, what is undeniably true is that POLITICO published four articles about the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020, and none of them were written by Caputo.
On 19 October, they ran a piece with the headline ‘Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,’ written by Natasha Bertnard. The three other stories are also either sceptical, or outright dismissive of the claims originally made by Rudy Guiliani, former New York City Mayor and President Trump’s personal lawyer at the time. It was not until November 2023 that POLITICO covered a story obtained from the laptop with sincerity and not dismissal.
However, as Caputo also pointed out in his podcast appearance, the way social media sites handled the infamous laptop story was even worse.
Facebook restricted the sharing of any articles related to the story on the platform. Twitter, not run by Elon Musk at the time, went even further: they even banned the New York Post’s account from posting to the platform, as punishment for not removing their original tweets about the story. The New York Post has one of the biggest circulation of American newspapers, and was founded in 1801 by Founding Father Alexander Hamilton.
Caputo also told of another story of POLITICO killing an article damaging to Joe Biden even before the story about his son’s laptop.
‘In 2019, a rival presidential Democratic campaign of Joe Biden’s gave to me the tax lien—the oppo research—on Hunter Biden for the period of time that he worked at Burisma. And I wrote what would have been a classic story saying, you know, the former Vice President’s son was slapped with a big tax lien for the period of time that he worked for this controversial Ukrainian oil concern, or natural gas concern, which is haunting his father on the campaign trail.’ However, that story was never published by POLITICO, and Caputo was never given an explanation why.
‘Our readers don’t understand the dumb decisions of cowardly editors that are made above us,’ he added.
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