The New York Times falsely claimed Sunday that Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” was “stolen,” when in fact it was abandoned at the computer repair shop to which he had taken it and which had tried to contact him.
As Breitbart News and others have reported for years, citing repair store owner John Paul Mac Isaac, “Hunter Biden dropped the computer off at his shop on April 12, 2019, to conduct a ‘data recovery.’ He says he called Biden the next day to inform him the recovery was completed, but Hunter never picked it up.”
The laptop was never “stolen.” It was abandoned, and the store took legal possession of it, in accordance with documents that Hunter Biden signed himself when dropping off the laptop for repairs. He never reported it stolen or missing.
However, the Times‘ Michael M. Grynbaum, reporting on last Friday’s report by Matt Taibbi about the internal deliberations at Twitter (now owned by Elon Musk) that led to news about the laptop being censored in October 2020, wrote:
Mr. Musk and Mr. Taibbi framed the exchanges as evidence of rank censorship and pernicious influence by liberals. Many others — even some ardent Twitter critics — were less impressed, saying the exchanges merely showed a group of executives earnestly debating how to deal with an unconfirmed news report that was based on information from a stolen laptop.
Readers picked up on the false claim:
Hey @grynbaum & all the editor at the @nytimes: the laptop was not stolen. You know this, you know exactly how it came into the possession of the repair shop. The only reason to continue to lie about this is cover up their complicity in burying the original story. This ran today: pic.twitter.com/QCjCaiR5JZ
— Derek Hunter (@derekahunter) December 5, 2022
The discussion at Twitter had nothing to do with the laptop being “stolen,” but rather the unfounded claim that the materials on the laptop had been “hacked,” which was used as a pretext for censoring the story.
The “paper of record” is and always has been nothing more than a far-Left propaganda outlet.