60 Minutes
While criticizing Donald Trump for canceling an interview with 60 Minutes, CBS reporter Scott Pelly claims, “We fact-check every story.”
IN FACT, 60 Minutes’ infamous “fact check” of Trump before the 2020 election was a blatant falsehood that materially helped Biden’s campaign. 60 Minutes has yet to issue a correction for this act of journalistic depravity:
In an October 2020 interview with Trump, Leslie Stahl of CBS’s 60 Minutes insisted that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop “can’t be verified,” even though 60 Minutes brags that it conducts “hard-hitting investigative” journalism. Demonstrating the absurdity of that claim:
- the listed recipient of one of the most incriminating emails from the laptop verified that same month that he was “the recipient of the email” and the “email is genuine.”
- the NY Post pointed out that they published an array of pictures and emails from the laptop with “an extraordinary level of detail” that supports their authenticity, such as a picture of Hunter in a bathtub and a picture of a Biden family meal, along with emails to friends and family all bearing dates and times.
- the New York Times slipped this statement about the laptop into the 24th paragraph of an article published 18 months after the 2020 election: “The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”
- CNN reported 18 months after the 2020 election, “We know the FBI has possession” of Hunter’s laptop, and “they believe it is his laptop — that the contents of it are his.”
- the Washington Examiner commissioned a forensic examination of a copy of the laptop’s hard drive which found that its contents are “indisputably authentic, and there is no evidence of any hacking or file manipulation, according to an examination conducted by a former Secret Service agent who has testified as a cyberforensics expert in over 100 classified, criminal, and civil matters at the state, federal, and international levels.”
- the Daily Mail commissioned a similar forensic analysis that arrived at the same result as the Washington Examiner.
- the Washington Post acknowledged in 2023 that it had “verified” the authenticity of emails from the laptop, which contained smoking gun evidence of Joe Biden’s bribery that the Post had buried for more than two years.
- the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed in a 2024 court filing that the FBI and IRS authenticated the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop years ago by matching them to his iCloud backups.
Pre-election misinformation and censorship of the laptop’s contents by media outlets, government officials, and big tech significantly boosted Joe Biden’s odds of winning the presidency.
The effect was estimated by a November 2020 online survey of Biden voters in swing states commissioned by the Media Research Center and conducted by the Polling Company. It found that 45% of Biden voters “were unaware of the financial scandal enveloping Biden and his son” and that:
“full awareness of the Hunter Biden scandal would have led 9.4% of Biden voters to abandon the Democratic candidate, flipping all six of the swing states he won to Trump, giving the President 311 electoral votes.”
