Two former POLITICO reporters are blasting their former employer for spreading disinformation and suppressing negative stories about Democratic Party leaders, especially former President Joe Biden. Marc Caputo and Tara Palmeri both point to numerous incidents where the corporate news outlet either slow-walked or outright suppressed news stories that were damaging to Biden or members of his family, including investigations into Hunter Biden and his infamous laptop.
“Another great example, when POLITICO did that terrible, ill-fated headline. ’51 intelligence agents—or former intelligence agents—say that the Hunter Biden laptop was disinformation. Or bore the hallmarks of disinformation,'” Caputo recalls, highlighting the most infamous media scandal during the 2020 election. “Turns out that story was closer to disinformation because the Hunter Biden laptop appeared to be true.”
Palmeri adds that social media giants Facebook and Twitter—armed with false stories by corporate media outlets like POLITICO—subsequently suppressed factual posts about Hunter Biden and the laptop’s contents.
“POLITICO, my former employer—and I knew at the time—didn’t do itself any favors. I was covering Biden at the time, and I remember coming to my editor and saying, ‘Hey, we need to write about the Hunter Biden laptop.’ 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 says. “The only thing that POLITICO wound up writing was that piece that called it disinformation, which charitably could be called misinformation, at the least.”
HUNTER, GUNS, AND TAXES.
Responding to Caputo’s experience, Palmeri recalls her own reporting on Hunter Biden’s illegal possession of a firearm, which ultimately saw him prosecuted by the Department of Justice (DOJ). However, she suspected that despite detailed reporting and a mountain of evidence she was able to uncover, her editors slow-walked the story for three months because it would anger the Biden family and jeopardize Hunter Biden specifically. “I do wonder if it would’ve been published a little quicker if it was a different type of story,” Palmeri tells Caputo.
“Well, since we’re spilling tea about our former employer, I still have a copy of the story on my external hard drive. In 2019, a rival presidential Democratic campaign of Joe Biden’s gave to me the tax lien, the oppo research, the tax lien on Hunter Biden for the period of time that he worked at Burisma,” Caputo responds. “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.”
“That story was killed by the editors,” Caputo states bluntly. “And they gave no explanation for that, either.”
Late last year, Hunter Biden was found guilty on both federal gun and tax evasion charges. Additionally, both the DOJ and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have publicly—in court filings—confirmed the authenticity of Hunter Bidne’s laptop.
