On the eve of the 2020 election, FBI agents discussed an active money-laundering case against Hunter Biden just hours after casting doubt on the authenticity of his incriminating laptop during meetings with social media companies, according to newly redacted chat logs obtained by Sen. Chuck Grassley.
The FBI’s refusal to confirm the laptop’s existence and instead allow a false narrative to take hold that it was Russian disinformation came on the same day that The Post published bombshell emails from the device revealing Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s lucrative influence-peddling schemes when he was vice president.
“Actually what kind of case is the laptop thing?” FBI agent Elvis Chan asks FBI analyst Peter Courtney at 5:28 p.m. on Oct. 14, 2020.
“Corruption? campaign financing?”
Courtney replies: “CLOSE HOLD ‐ its a money laundering case on hunter biden.”
“oh crap,” says Chan. “ok. it ends here.”
Truth silenced
Earlier that day, during an FBI meeting with Twitter (now X) about election interference, a Twitter employee had asked about the authenticity of the laptop in light of the Post story. Courtney began to respond that the laptop was real, when an FBI lawyer interrupted to say that the FBI had “no further comment,” according to later congressional testimony by Laura Dehmlow, then the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force section chief.
“Courtney messed up,” an attorney from the FBI’s Office of the General Counsel messages Chan half an hour after his exchange with Courtney. “We cannot comment.”
The FBI lawyer is believed to have worked under former FBI general counsel James Baker, who was conveniently parachuted into Twitter six months before the election, where he would be instrumental in discussions about censoring The Post.
Later that evening the FBI lawyer told FBI agent Brady Olson that Courtney had been “admonished . . . but he wont shut up . . . Nobody on call is authorized to comment upon NY Post story . . . i’ve told Courtney. twitter is treating as disinformation.”
Yes, indeed, Twitter did treat The Post’s true and factual story as “disinformation” and censored it within hours of publication that morning, citing its “hacked materials” policy. Facebook did the same. The malign actions of the social media companies were a direct result of months of concerted prebunking of the story by the FBI, which had taken possession of the laptop in December 2019 and knew full well the political damage it would do to the presidential campaign of Joe Biden, because it put the lie to his claims that he knew nothing about his son’s overseas business dealings.
In dozens of meetings leading up to the 2020 election, the FBI had conditioned social media companies to recognize information about the laptop as Russian disinformation, according to the Twitter files and later congressional testimony.
Yoel Roth, then Twitter’s chief censor, disclosed in a sworn statement that, during these meetings, the FBI “communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors . . . likely in October [that potentially] would involve Hunter Biden.”
But after all that, on the very day that the accurate story about the laptop appeared in The Post, the FBI suddenly clammed up. It allowed the social media companies to conclude that the story was Russian disinformation that needed to be censored for “election integrity” purposes.
Still fighting
This bizarre conduct by the FBI’s legal department and multiple agents and analysts has to be seen as an election interference operation to protect Joe Biden and help him win the 2020 election. There is no possible innocent explanation.
And yet the people involved have been allowed to evade accountability.
Despite the fact that Donald Trump is back in the White House and his ally Kash Patel is FBI director, there has been little progress on unraveling one of the most egregious abuses of FBI power: coercing social media companies to censor The Post and cover up evidence of Biden corruption before the 2020 election.
It’s the cover-up no one is talking about, drowned out by supposedly tell-all books about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.
How convenient for bad actors that we dwell on the lies told about Biden’s mental and physical health while ignoring the institutional cover-up of his corruption.
But Sen. Grassley isn’t letting go. In this case, the Iowa Republican demanded that the FBI remove redactions on the chat log that hid the fact they were investigating Hunter for money laundering back in October 2020.
“I first began investigating the Biden family’s questionable financial conduct in 2019 based on allegations of impropriety and conflicts of interest, “ says Grassley. “So it’s no shock to me the FBI was apparently quietly looking into a money laundering case against Hunter Biden.
“Yet, during the same time period, the FBI provided me and [Wisconsin] Senator [Ron] Johnson a bogus briefing in August 2020 at the behest of Democrats, and later leaked its contents to the partisan media in an effort to falsely label our Biden family investigation as Russian disinformation.”
It was two months before The Post’s story, while Grassley and his Republican colleague Johnson were in the middle of their seminal inquiry into Biden corruption, that they were ambushed with a defensive briefing delivered by the FBI’s then deputy assistant director of the Counterintelligence Division, Bradley Benavides, since retired, and Nikki Floris, currently the intelligence analyst in charge of the Washington Field Office.
Getting away with it
The chat log from Oct. 14, 2020, shows Benavides communicating with his underling, agent Laura Dehmlow, about The Post’s laptop story that day: “You guys are tracking the coverage of the laptop right?” Dehmlow asks.
“Indeed,” he replies. “I would love to know if a copy exists, and was it provided to anyone.”
The FBI clearly had not anticipated that repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac would retain a copy of Hunter’s laptop contents on his hard drive, and then provide a copy to Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who gave it to The Post.
“The real scandal,” says Grassley, “is the way the DOJ and FBI colluded with the media to cover for the Biden family and tried to sweep it all under the rug with a sweetheart plea deal, until Hunter Biden was ultimately pardoned.”
Agent Chan is just one Biden-era official who defied subpoenas issued by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee to testify in 2023 and 2024. Members of Biden’s White House “politburo” who covered up his cognitive decline also defied subpoenas from House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer last year.
They all got away with snubbing their noses at Congress, unlike Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, who were jailed for not complying with congressional subpoenas from Nancy Pelosi’s Jan. 6 committee. It’s time Republicans got equally tough.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
