Glenn Greenwald’s Big Lie Campaign To Tout A Book About Joe Biden, Part 1
No one could attend the Emmy Awards without showing proof of vaccination as of September 11. So to gin up a narrative — that Hollywood elites are hypocrites — the New York Post printed, “Twitter lashes out over celebrities at 2021 Emmys going maskless,” which used snarky quotes that never mentioned the vaccine requirement. These days, indoor gatherings of vaccinated people without masks — whether at the Emmys or at New York City restaurants — are not exactly big news. But the Post found a clever way to exclude a critical fact that would muddy its anti-Hollywood message.
This inconsequential story about the Emmys set off Glenn Greenwald, who went on a tirade:
You can say it every day and it still won’t be enough: the liberal discourse and policy-making around COVID has no relationship whatsoever to science.
It has a lot to do with culture, politics, hierarchy, psychology and control. But science and health are totally absent:
This is classic Glenn Greenwald. He’ll use any pretext, no matter how flimsy, to go on a rant about some vast left wing conspiracy. Don’t bother with a discussion about unmasked but vaccinated strangers gathering indoors, because, “policy-making around COVID has no relationship whatsoever to science.” Didn’t get the message? “You can say it every day and it still won’t be enough.”Which begs the question of how people should respond to something that causes 1,500 deaths a day.
He may seem like just another crackpot on the internet, but Greenwald was once a bona fide lawyer and respected journalist who maintains a large following. In the wake of 9/11, his reporting on the dangers and implications of the war on terror was informative and insightful. But Obama failed to dismantle the national security apparatus set up by his predecessor, and Obama-friendly media, MSNBC and CNN, stopped inviting him to appear. So in Greenwald’s eyes they all became part of the problem. He became a fixture on Fox News where he can be relied upon to skewer the liberal media, while holding off on any criticism of Fox.
There’s a reasonable case to be made about media complacency, so long as you remember what went wrong in the first place; reporters failed to show skepticism and apply rigorous fact checking. These days, Greenwald shows contempt for fact checking that interferes with his agenda, especially when it comes to stolen emails.
Which was always the problem with the Hunter Biden laptop story that emerged in October 2020. If you respect fact checking, the story was unpublishable. If you don’t care about fact checking, the newsworthiness was very flimsy. But if you don’t care about fact checking or newsworthiness, the story was a pretext to let your imagination run wild and allege nefarious things that the Bidens might have done. Greenwald got in a row with his editors at The Intercept over the Hunter Biden story because Greenwald didn’t care about fact checking or newsworthiness and wanted to let his imagination run wild. He quit and said they were all corrupt, in bed with the Democrats, big tech and big media.
So on September 21, 2021, a Politico reporter came out with a new book on the Biden family, and demonstrated some fact checking on a key element of the laptop story. So Greenwald immediately went to town with a Big Lie campaign on Twitter, which was amplified the next day with an hour-long video on Rumble. If you’re a practitioner of The Big Lie, you know about the power of first impressions and the need to repeat, repeat, repeat. And you accuse those who you challenge of lying and being corrupt.
The Big Lie is a claim so audacious people presume you wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true. Before the votes were counted on election night, Donald Trump declared himself the winner. Before anyone could read the words printed in Politico or Ben Schreckinger’s book, The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power, Greenwald launched a series of lies that were easily debunked by the text.
In his book, Schreckinger confirmed that one incriminating email was bona fide. A Ukrainian businessman thanked Hunter for arranging a meeting with Vice President Joe Biden. Given that Joe said he never had anything to do with his son’s business, this looked suspicious. But, in and of itself, it was not terribly consequential. Here’s how Schrenkinger describes it:
[Messages] included an April 2015 email from a Burisma advisor thanking Hunter for arranging a meeting with Joe. The vague email was not exactly a bombshell. But, if it was genuine, it undermined Joe’s insistent claims that he remained totally insulated from his relatives’ business dealings in general and threatened to renew scrutiny of Hunter’s relationship with Burisma in particular.
Which is why the newsworthiness was always flimsy. That was it. Schreckinger noted that the laptop story came to the attention of the New York Post by way of Trump dirty trickster Steve Bannon. But his reporting uncovered no other evidence tied to the notorious laptop that would implicate Joe in any way.
Schreckinger did confirm another email that may have referred to Joe’s prospective stake in a prospective joint venture that never closed, but the deal’s final documentation showed that Joe had no part of it. Other emails remained suspect. “While the leak contains genuine files, it remains possible that fake material has been slipped in,” noted Politico.
Let’s count Greenwald’s lies. First he tweeted:
POLITICO reporter @SchreckReports has a new book *confirming* the emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop about Joe Biden’s business deals in China & Ukraine are genuine.
People complaining about pre-election censorship by Google in Russia cheered Big Tech’s censoring this reporting.
Anyone who read the Politico piece he linked could see instantly that Greenwald was lying.
1. Neither Politico nor the book ever suggested that Joe Biden had business deals in China or the Ukraine.
2. Nobody ever contemplated a business deal IN China. In 2017, when Joe was out of office, Hunter Biden and Joe’s brother, James, courted a Chinese energy conglomerate about a venture to make investments OUTSIDE of China. But that deal never closed.
3. As was known for years, Hunter, a lawyer and former corporate executive, was paid handsomely to sit on the board of a Ukraine gas company, but calling that a business deal is a bit if a stretch.
4. Big Tech never censored “this reporting,” if by this reporting he means Schreckinger verifying some emails that were unverified in October 2020. The subject emails first emerged because a computer repair guy, who was legally blind and couldn’t confirm that Hunter dropped off his laptop, had gone perusing the emails and wanted to disseminate the contents to the media after giving them to the local U.S. attorney, who had failed to announce anything public. So anyone would be highly suspicious about the source, the provenance of the laptop, and the veracity of the data on the laptop. (Few knew at the time that Steve Bannon was the chief go-between.) And anyone who cares about fact checking would try and authenticate the evidence before publishing it. The New York Post didn’t care. Eleven months later, Schreckinger was able to confirm what was unknown before the election, that a few of the email messages were bona fide. In late October 2020, Twitter and Facebook elected to not to disseminate the Post story, which was easily accessible to anyone on the internet and was plugged endlessly on Fox. So Twitter’s “censorship” was in no way analogous to the censorship in Russia.
And then Greenwald repeated and amplified The Big Lie:
As a reminder, this is what happened:
It was obvious from the start the Hunter docs were authentic.
(5. Schrenkinger’s reporting disputes that. Anyone who ever worked in an office knows that email chains can become like epistolary novellas, which can be easily altered. Which is why no honest reporter would say it was instantly obvious the Hunter docs were authentic.)
They concerned *Joe’s* activities, not Hunter’s.
(6. A flat out lie that is obvious to anyone who read Schrenkinger’s book.)
CIA lied, saying it was “Russian disinformation.”
(7. False. The CIA didn’t comment on the laptop. Former intelligence officials said the story had the trappings of Russian disinformation. But as it turned out, the real disinformation came from media shills like Greenwald who embellished the suspect emails.)
Big Tech & media united to *censor* the reporting to protect Biden.
(8. False. The story was dismissed because of a respect for minimal fact checking standards, for which Greenwald has contempt.)
And there’s more:
I was on Joe Rogan’s show the week Big Tech and the corporate media were using the CIA lie about the Hunter docs to censor. This was a few days before I quit the Intercept because they wouldn’t let me write about it. It was so clear what was going on:
9. Anyone who read the editor’s email correspondence posted by Greenwald can see this is a bald faced lie:
Glenn, I have carefully read your draft and there is some I agree with and some I disagree with but am comfortable publishing. However, there is some material at the core of this draft that I think is very flawed.
And then the editor went into detail why, taken on its face, all the evidence impugning Joe Biden is at best flimsy if not nonexistent . He suggested limiting the length to 2,000 words. Read the correspondence for yourself.
True to form, Greenwald responded that the editors who challenged him were corrupt:
What’s happening here is obvious: you know that you can’t explicitly say you don’t want to publish the article because it raises questions about the candidate you and all other TI Editors want very much to win the election in 5 days. So you have to cast your censorship as an accusation — an outrageous and inaccurate one — that my article contains factually false claims, all as a pretext for alleging that my article violates The Intercept’s lofty editorial standards and that it’s being rejected on journalistic grounds rather than nakedly political grounds.
Greenwald is a smart guy who got to the crux of the matter. The impasse was over his desire to raise questions in a 4,800-word magnum opus about something for which there can never be any answers, because it never happened. Hunter’s prospective business deal with a Chinese billionaire never happened. Anyone can ask “When-did-you-stop-beating your-wife?” questions to insinuate something that has no factual basis. How can those questions be informative? Or Greenwald could ask questions about something that may have happened, a meeting between Joe and a Ukrainian executive, but how do we know it was anything more than a two-minute meet and greet? Proponents of Trump’s Big Lie say they are just asking questions about election integrity, or just asking questions about Big Pharma’s push to sell COVID vaccines.
Greenwald may be right about some issues and wrong on others. But no one should trust him to show respect for fact checking or the truth.
