A pair of former reporters for Politico have come forward to reveal that the outlet instructed them to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 presidential election.
Remember all that talk about the “free press” and how Trump was “too mean” to the journalists? Yeah.
To be fair, most of the rest of the media at the time did the same thing, so it’s not just a Politico problem. But now we have confirmation from the reporters themselves.
Marc Caputo, now of Axios, and Tara Palmeri, who reports for Puck these days, said editors would not only bristle at any reporting seen as negatively impacting the Biden family but would flat-out kill such stories.
The two began a conversation on the podcast “Somebody’s Gotta Win” by reminiscing how Politico went on the offense to sway the election, famously publishing a letter signed by 51 prominent intelligence community officials indicating the laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
That, obviously, turned out to be blatant propaganda.
Politico Instructed Reporters Not To Cover Hunter Biden Laptop Story
It was at this point that Caputo bagged his own former employer.
“I mean, Politico, my former employer and I knew at the time, didn’t do itself any favors,” he said. “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 said the letter from the 51 spies who lied was about it in terms of what Politico reported regarding the Hunter Biden story.
Palmeri went on to say she had the report on Hunter and his gun issue ready but wasn’t sure how to get it through editors when the media was supposedly engaged in a “honeymoon period” with the new President.
Caputo further stated he had a story on the former First Son’s tax issues as well, but that story was “killed.”
“That story was killed by the editors, and they gave no explanation for that either,” he said. “So that general experience, you know, obviously the public doesn’t know about those things.”
RELATED: Promises Made, Promises Kept: Most Important Executive Orders Signed By Trump on Day One
Looking For Sympathy
It’s funny to hear these two reporters, who kept Politico’s journalistic malpractice under wraps for four years – four years! – complain that the public doesn’t understand their struggles.
“We just get called, like, ‘the terrible mainstream media.’ It’s like you don’t understand the process there,” Palmeri whined.
“Well, you also don’t understand the dumb decisions of cowardly editors that are made above us,” Caputo added.
An editor killed legitimate stories. If any of these journos had a shred of dignity, they would have outed the censors at the time for trying to suppress information before the election. This is precisely why people consider them “the terrible mainstream media.”
It took four years to find a spine.
