How The New York Times sketched Team Biden’s evidence-free 'Russian disinformation' tale
The seed was planted in January.
The campaign to delegitimize newly surfaced emails that implicate the Biden family in a massive foreign corruption scheme was a year in the making, and the seed for Team Biden’s “Russian disinformation” rebuttal was first planted in The New York Times.
Last week, the New York Post released a series of bombshell articles highlighting Hunter Biden’s corrupt business practices and dealings with America’s greatest adversaries. Hunter Biden’s emails, which were acquired by The Post, appeared to reveal that he was leveraging his father’s political prestige to acquire financial riches for his family from adversarial regimes in China, shadowy companies in Eastern Europe, and elsewhere around the world. The emails also reference the possibility that Joe Biden, who appears to be referred to as “the big guy” and other monikers, was personally aware of Hunter’s activities, and even took a cut of the money.
Almost immediately after the emails surfaced, countless legacy media outlets and democrat surrogates suggested that the emails were not authentic. Twitter and Facebook blocked the stories from getting out. We were told that this was not the work of terrific research and reporting, but instead, a “Russian disinformation” campaign.
The New York Times published a piece claiming that “United States intelligence analysts” had “picked up chatter that stolen Burisma emails would be leaked in the form of an ‘October surprise,’” claiming the Biden emails may have been the result of a previous hack of Burisma, a Ukraine-based gas company that gave Hunter Biden a seat on their board, until he resigned in April of 2019.
This was enough for the rest of the legacy media to run wild with the story. Countless publications were citing The New York Times piece, in bolstering the claim that the Biden emails were in fact part of a sophisticated Russian disinformation.
There is one major problem with this origin story involving Russian hacking. There’s no proof any of it ever happened.
On January 13, 2020 (less than a month after the FBI took possession of Hunter Biden’s emails), The New York Times reported that Burisma was hacked by the Russians. The story was reported as fact, but there is no reported evidence for the story, which cites “security experts” (they only cited a single democrat-tied security firm) in making the authoritative claim.
The article gets straight to the point. The first paragraph reads:
“With President Trump facing an impeachment trial over his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, Russian military hackers have been boring into the Ukrainian gas company at the center of the affair, according to security experts.”
“The attacks were very successful,” Oren Falkowitz, who was the source for the hacking claim, told The New York Times.
Falkowitz, who openly disdains President Trump (check out his Twitter page), runs a company called Area 1 Security. He has provided business services for several democrat contenders for president during the primaries. Public records show Falkowitz donated to both Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker during the primaries. An NSA employee under the Bush and Obama administrations, Falkowitz founded Area 1 with a man who used to be a top executive at Crowdstrike, which authored the infamous report claiming the DNC was hacked by the Russians in 2016.
The Times also got in contact with an unnamed “American security official,” who told the “Paper of Record” that the “the Russian attacks on Burisma appear to be running parallel to an effort by Russian spies in Ukraine to dig up information in the analog world that could embarrass the Bidens.”
As for the “evidence” that the GRU (a Russian military intelligence agency) hacked Burisma, The Times did not supply anything. Even The Washington Post did not report on the story as if it was verified. The Washington Post reached out to Fireye, another cybersecurity firm, which “could not validate” the claim that Burisma was in fact breached by the GRU.
Area 1’s 5 page report on the purported hack of Burisma does not actually deliver any verifiable information to conclude that the Russians hacked the organization. The report summarized that the supposed phishing attack involved “tactics, techniques and procedures” used by the GRU, and that was enough to identify this apparent intrusion as evidence that Russia was behind it.
There are many reasons why — besides the fact that there is zero evidence for the hack — the story is incredibly sketchy.
First, as noted above, The New York Times piece was published just one month after the FBI reportedly seized the materials on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which occurred in December, 2019.
Also, the timeline doesn’t add up. Hunter Biden resigned from the board of Burisma in April of 2019, months before his former company was allegedly hacked.
Additionally, Burisma is not exactly an anti-Kremlin outfit. In fact, the shadowy energy company has several ties to Moscow. Burisma was founded by Mykola Zlochevsky, who was a top Ukrainian official under ex-president Viktor Yanukovych, who is widely considered a stooge for the Kremlin. Yanukovych has since fled to Moscow.
The “Russian disinformation” angle concerning the Hunter Biden emails was sketched by The New York Times. It has absolutely zero supporting evidence and no basis in reality.
Wonder what happened to DRUDGE not a word about this,wonder who,s pocket he,s in now?
Good story. Now I know why Sean Hannity refers to the NYT as "toilet paper." I never could read it, same for the smug little New Yorker; why is that old rag considered a source?