One piece of Rudy Giuliani’s most recent grotesque smear job is the role of the NY Post and its willingness to pass on what may very well be foreign propaganda in order to help that dying whale known as Donald Trump. The NY Times takes a look:
The New York Post’s front-page article about Hunter Biden on Wednesday was written mostly by a staff reporter who refused to put his name on it, two Post employees said.
Bruce Golding, a reporter at the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid since 2007, did not allow his byline to be used because he had concerns over the article’s credibility, the two Post employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
Coming late in a heated presidential campaign, the article suggested that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had used his position to enrich his son Hunter when he was vice president. The Post based the story on photos and documents the paper said it had taken from the hard drive of a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden.
Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents, said five people with knowledge of the tabloid’s inner workings. Staff members also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing, the people said.
The article named two sources: Stephen K. Bannon, the former adviser to President Trump now facing federal fraud charges, who was said to have made the paper aware of the hard drive last month; and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, who was said to have given the paper “a copy” of the hard drive on Oct. 11.
Mr. Giuliani said he chose The Post because “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.”
Seriously. He said that. Good lord…
Top editors met on Oct. 11 to discuss how to use the material provided by Mr. Giuliani. The group included the tabloid veteran Colin Allan, known as Col; Stephen Lynch, The Post’s editor in chief; and Michelle Gotthelf, the digital editor in chief, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting. Mr. Allan, who was The Post’s editor in chief from 2001 to 2016 and returned last year as an adviser, urged his colleagues to move quickly, the person said.
As deadline approached, editors pressed staff members to add their bylines to the story — and at least one aside from Mr. Golding refused, two Post journalists said. A Post spokeswoman had no comment on how the article was written or edited.
Headlined “BIDEN SECRET E-MAILS,” the article appeared Wednesday with two bylines: Emma-Jo Morris, a deputy politics editor who joined the paper after four years at the Murdoch-owned Fox News, and Gabrielle Fonrouge, a Post reporter since 2014.
Ms. Morris did not have a bylined article in The Post before Wednesday, a search of its website showed. She arrived at the tabloid in April after working as an associate producer on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, according to her LinkedIn profile. Her Instagram account, which was set to private on Wednesday, included photos of her posing with the former Trump administration members Mr. Bannon and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, as well as Roger J. Stone Jr., a friend and former campaign adviser to Mr. Trump. (In July, the president commuted the sentence of Mr. Stone on seven felonies.)
Ms. Fonrouge had little to do with the reporting or writing of the article, said three people with knowledge of how it was prepared. She learned that her byline was on the story only after it was published, the people said.
The article goes on to outline the “charges” in the Post which amounts to showing some emails that purport to prove Hunter Biden introduced someone to his father, which Joe Biden’s calendar disputes and means nothing anyway, but mostly seems like an attempt to show Hunter Biden is a man with a serious drug problem, which we already knew, and Biden as a loving father who expressed love and support for his troubled son. That’s it.
It’s gross, public humiliation but it’s very much on brand for Trump, Bannon and Giuliani. These are the lowest of low lives. And, as the Times throws away in the last paragraph, “last month, two Republican-led Senate committees investigating the matter said they had found no evidence of wrongdoing by the former vice president” so it’s just a smear for smear’s sake. And the trio of Murdoch, Bannon and Giuliani were happy to get it out there.
Meanwhile, in case you haven’t heard, the US Intelligence services warned Trump last winter that Giuliani was almost certainly a Russian useful idiot, if not worse, and he should stay away from him. This happened during the Ukraine shenanigans last December. You’ll recall that Trump was being impeached at the time — for attempting to extort Ukraine to collude with him to smear Joe Biden.
They are still doing it. You cannot make this stuff up. It is insane.