EDITORIAL: ‘Russian misinformation’ now evidence in Biden trial

The Hunter Biden trial began last week in Delaware and included a cameo by his infamous laptop. Perhaps a Russian agent was responsible.

As part of the legal proceedings against the president’s son, who is charged with lying on a gun purchase form, prosecutors on Tuesday introduced the younger Biden’s laptop as evidence. The FBI acknowledged that its contents — which contain information related to the charges and his family’s foreign business dealings — were authentic.

This might not normally be worthy of much attention. But this was no ordinary laptop. Recall the great lengths to which President Joe Biden and his supporters — in the media and the political world — went to discredit reports about the discovery of the computer in 2020, just months before the election.

When the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story — the device had been abandoned at a repair shop — a Biden spokeswoman maintained that the story should be viewed as “Russian misinformation.” Others, hoping to minimize any potential damage to the elder Biden’s campaign for the White House, picked up the theme. NPR famously announced it didn’t find the laptop story worthy of attention. Twitter locked the Post out of its account and blocked users from linking to the story.

The damage control reached the height of its absurdity when 51 former intelligence officials — at the behest of the Biden camp — signed a letter insisting that the story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Mr. Biden soon after used this as cover during a debate with Donald Trump. “There are 50 former national intelligence folks,” he said, “who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan.”

That the “Russian misinformation” ruse was not remotely true doesn’t seem to bother many of those who eagerly gave credence to the lie.

The reporter behind the laptop story was the Post’s deputy politics editor, Emma-Jo Morris. She’s no longer with the paper but recalled the reaction. “I thought it was insane, and almost beyond parody what I was watching,” she told Fox News Digital last week, “as the entire political establishment, intelligence community, media establishment, big tech, everyone just made up a story that I knew wasn’t true.”

Irony of ironies that Mr. Trump now stands convicted in New York City of falsifying records eight years ago in an effort to cover up a sexual tryst with a former porn star in violation of an obscure state law making it illegal to “conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.” Surely Alvin Bragg, the creative Manhattan district attorney who pursued Mr. Trump, is now on the trail of the Biden laptop deception.

Or maybe not.