Coverup: The FBI & Hunter Biden’s Laptop | 4.6.25

New details have emerged about one of the most egregious and high-profile censorship scandals in modern history, one that potentially altered the outcome of the 2020 election. Just weeks before the election, the New York Post published a report on the infamous Hunter Biden laptop.
But as we've now learned, within hours, the FBI was working to discredit the story and even spin a narrative

that the laptop was the product of a Russian disinformation campaign. In this episode, we sit down with a journalist who was at the post when the laptop story dropped and the cover-up and smear operation against the outlet began.
I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Sunday, April 6th, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.
Joining us now to discuss new revelations about the Hunter Biden cover-up scandal is John Levine, formerly with the New York Post and now with the Free Beacon. John, thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you for having me. Look, you were a reporter at the New York Post when that newspaper broke the Hunter Biden laptop story, a major moment.
Your outlet was immediately throttled by social media, even kicked off of what was then Twitter, which is really remarkable. Now we're learning from the House Judiciary Committee that the day the New York Post actually first reported on that story, the FBI told employees do not discuss the Biden matter and imposed a gag order on an analyst who tried to confirm the story's veracity.
This is a new detail we hadn't heard before. What do you know about this? Well, I will tell you, I just learned what you just said as well about the gag order, and if you believe Catherine Herridge reported on X that an FBI employee did actually confirm the authenticity of the hard drive in a call that same day before the gag order was instituted.
And it's, I mean, we already kind of knew the FBI knew it was real, but the sort of real-time details, like on the very same day they knew it was real, that's new. And it's extra insidious because if you go back to that time, which is now, you know, five years ago, the FBI was running around that same week saying, well, we're looking into this being a Russian information dump.
So on the same week, the same day, they knew it was real. They were counter-programming the narrative and they did it in this way.
You can look up the AP story, FBI reviewing if it's Russian disinformation, person familiar with matter tells AP. And that's how they do stuff.
They always do it as person familiar, but it's just them. And I've been a journalist long enough to know how that game works.
And that's how when you see person familiar, it's usually the person, but they don't want to say it's themselves. And they were actively casting doubt on it when they knew it was real.
And it's inescapable now that it was clearly so they could help steer the election towards Joe Biden, which is actually what happened. Yeah.
I mean, look, if you tried to defend the FBI with the DOJ, a lot of times they try to stay out of political matters right before an election. This would be your rationale for saying, well, they might not want to talk about this in public, but that's not actually what happened.
We saw a proactive effort to actually discredit this report, correct? No. I mean, if the FBI had just been like, look, you know, we're looking into this, but we're not going to comment, that would, I mean, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now.
It was their active effort to not just discredit, but to discredit when they were actually the ones who were speaking the falsehoods. We were trying to tell the truth.
They essentially ran an information operation on the American people. They spread us a bunch of BS because the truth was detrimental to Joe Biden.
They didn't want it out. I'm just curious, a little behind the scenes look, what was it like at the post during this time? This must have been a tumultuous, chaotic moment for you guys.
What was it like? Yeah, I mean, it was a crazy time. And it's almost like lore.
It's like canon now. But, you know, this was a weird thing that Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon brought up in October before the election.
And it's like, hey, guys, there's a laptop and the son left it at the repair shop. And oh, the computer repairman's blind.
And it's like it it was just, it was so crazy. So there was cause for skepticism.
And we spent a lot of time looking at it. And it was very wild stuff on there.
But at the end of the day, we verified it. And the laptop is full of numbers.
The laptop is full of billionaires, federal judges, everyone in the Biden orbit. And you can call these people up.
I myself have many experiences. So there's an email from a very pathetic federal judge emailing Hunter.
And he's like, hey, hi, it was so great meeting you at that party. Any chance you could put in a word to your dad? Because he's obviously looking at the next rung up.
Sure. And I called this judge and federal judges numbers are the hardest numbers to find.
You can never, ever get those. They're very tricky.
But I called his number. He answered, and I was like, hi, I'm going to read this email back to you now.
And it was just like, I'm not talking to you. Goodbye.
And I did this dozens of times to very important people, and not a single person ever said, I never sent that email. That's not real.
That's not, everyone's in there. President Biden's number was in there.
It has since been changed. So it was extensively authenticated.
And then we published it. And frankly, it was a huge story, but I think it was compounded by the fact that Twitter moved to censor it.
And this turned it into not just Hunter Biden, but a broader story about free speech and the First Amendment. Yeah, it really was exemplary of this convergence of the federal government and big tech colluding to censor people on the right.
It was remarkable. Everyone saw them crack down collectively on this right-leaning news outlet.
Now, the Foreign Influence Task Force played a leading role in pressuring social media companies to censor speech. What actions did they take? I mean, I don't know that we know the full extent of it, but they were working.
I mean, Mark Zuckerberg has talked about how they would call up and say, you need to take this down. You can't run this.
And you saw this institute of fact checkers brought in at Facebook. Famously, they were lowering the visibility of the story until a fact check could be performed.
Of course, we're a few years on that. I don't think we ever got a final fact check.
So the federal government, in violation of the First Amendment, I think, clearly pressured these companies to shut it down and to downplay the significance of the story and to not let it spread organically. And people always show you their true hands in an October before a presidential election.
Yeah, for sure. That's really when it's for all the marbles.
And I think that the various organs of the government decided that keeping President Trump out of the White House for a second term was more important than these institutional concerns or these constitutional issues that we're raising here. I mean, the government should broadly not be in the business of policing speech or being the arbiters of truth

about what American citizens can think or say. For sure.
It's a broad, simple principle. It's

not my principle. It's in the founding documents.
It's been around for a long time. It's not new.

Yeah. Now, we're really seeing the Trump administration tackle this very directly.

And in Congress, Jim Jordan has really taken the lead on this issue. We've talked to him a lot about these issues because, of course, we've had our own experiences from Daily Wire's perspective with these entities under the guise of fact-checking really being censorship operations.
Now, as far as the 51 intelligence officials and former intelligence officials, we've seen Trump take action. What do you think about the fallout as it relates to them? I mean, it's all part of the deep state web of intelligence.
You know, there's like 15 intelligence agencies. They all know each other.
They all collude with each other. And what we learned later was that Anthony Blinken, who became later secretary of state, he was instrumental in organizing this effort among those 51 officials.
And some of them have sort of walked it back. Some of them have never apologized for it.
Clapper, to this day, remains the most stubborn. I know that the Post has reached out to him several times, and he'll never back down from it.
And I think it's just pride. And obviously, Trump revoked all their security clearances, which is good.
I don't see any reason why they're not currently in government anymore. They should have that.
And especially if they're going to use their security clearances and the good names that that gives them to do partisan politics. Yeah, I want to actually address the issue of good name in a second.
First, the media fallout, the media response to the revelations over the last few years, the idea of slow walking, things that we actually knew at the time, so that maybe the impact is lessened over time. you can see this media trick playing out.
Do you feel like there's any sort of come to Jesus moments for any of these outlets in the legacy media? No, really no. And the problem is all of these people would rather light themselves on fire than admit that the New York Post was right.
And they'll burn their institutions to the ground rather than admit that they were wrong and that conservative media had a point about something. Whoa, whoa, whoa, can't say that because we're running around saying this is fake news, they're disinformation, cheap fakes.
Remember cheap fakes? Oh, yeah, that's a... Way back.
You can't suddenly be like, oh, actually, the Post was right and we were the ones lying to you. I mean, come on.
They can't. So what you've actually seen is like there's been no apology.
No institution, no editor-in-chief has ever been like, look, we were wrong. The post was right.
We're sorry, which is all really anyone has been asking for. So instead, you just see this gradual we're going to move away from the coverage we had.
We're just going to not cover it as much. Maybe we'll, like, at a certain point, you had these legal filings from the special prosecutor where they were, like, forced to cover it.
But it's just, when they can't discredit it, they just ignore it. You know, when you break an incredible story at the Daily Wire, the highest honor you can get from these people is they ignore it.
Because you know, if you even put an Oxford comma out of place, they're going to say to you, oh, the Daily Wire is spreading fake news. Oxford commas don't go there.
The whole story's fake. So if they ignore you totally, it means they saw it, they couldn't discredit it, so they just ignored it.
And that is ultimately how they mislead their audience. It's not necessarily outright lies in the copy.
It's sins of omission.

Absolutely.

Where they tell you everything, the full story.

Yeah, where you turn the camera, right?

Exactly.

Now, final question about trust.

Trust in the media.

Obviously, they're in a crisis.

This is what you see, a full-blown crisis mode panic amongst them.

We also have trust in the FBI and intelligence officials in general at an all-time low. We now have Kash Patel coming in saying he wants to restore that trust.
Do you think he can? What kinds of steps does he have to take to do so?

Yeah, I mean, I think none of these things are irreversible. But I mean, the FBI piece, you've got to obviously fire the top leadership.

It's not the rank and file people.

They're very good.

It's it's just the mid-management, mid-level people.

And you see it all the time in the correspondence, in the Twitter files you would see when they released all that information. These FBI people are these graduates from these woke colleges.
They've all got pronouns in their email signatures. It's not Hoover's FBI anymore.
They're not G. Gordon Liddy.
These are essentially like woke bureaucrats, as you might find in any deep state institution in the federal government. So that level of FBI needs to be doged away, if you will.
Maybe you replace them with better people or maybe you don't. I mean, I don't know.
I think we maybe should get a slimmed down FBI because obviously we've seen how they abuse their power. And then Democrats will be in charge at some point again.
And I don't want a giant FBI in the hands of Democrats. And we have to think about this.
But as for the media, it's never too late. But I don't know.
Again, they'd rather lose the credibility. They'd rather speak to a smaller audience, because when you look at what happened in the Washington Post, where they're trying to reverse course now, and they're trying to be like, guys, maybe we were a little bit overboard.
And you're seeing hundreds of thousands of people cancel their subscriptions. It's a phenomenon you call audience capture.
A lot of podcasts have this, too, where when the audience becomes regularly used to a certain crack hit of the liberal talking points, it's very, very difficult to

give them information that they're not going to want to hear. Yeah, for sure.
It can be susceptible

to this. Right.
Quite the conundrum many of these legacy outlets find themselves now in,

and it's of their own making. John, thanks so much for talking with us.

Thank you. That was journalist John Levine, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.