Chicago City Wire

University of Chicago freshman Darren O’Schmidt asked The Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum  why she dismissed the Hunter Biden story when it surfaced in 2020.  

"I'm a freshman at the University of Chicago," O’Schmidt introduced himself to Applebaum and Democratic strategist David Axelrod serving on a panel on Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics. "My question is for Miss Applebaum. So in 2020, you wrote 'those who live outside the Fox News bubble do not, of course, need to learn any of the stuff' about Hunter Biden referring to his laptop, of course. A poll later after that found that if voters knew about the content of the laptop, 16 percent of Joe Biden voters would have acted differently."

Referring to a piece of mid-March news released by the New York Times, the freshman directly posted the question to Appelbaum. 

"Now, of course, we know," he continued. "A few weeks ago, the New York Times confirmed that the content is real. Do you think the media acted inappropriately when they instantly dismissed Hunter Biden's laptop as Russian disinformation? And what can we learn from that and ensuring that what we label as this information is truly disinformation and not reality?"

Appelbaum responded she found the story to be "irrelevant."  

"My problem with Hunter Biden's laptop is, I think it's totally irrelevant. I mean, it's not whether it's disinformation or I mean, I don't think the Hunter Biden's business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States. So I didn't find it to be interesting. I mean, that, that would be my problem with that is as a major news story," Applebaum replied.

Despite Applebaum’s insistence that she did not care about the story, in the editorial cited by O’Schmidt she argues against its importance in comparison to conflicts of interest by former president Donald Trump. "On the grand scale of misdeeds committed by politicians and their relatives, this kind of thing barely registers," Applebaum wrote in 2020.

The laptop story was also dismissed by 51 CIA operatives who allegedly investigated its contents under former CIA Director John Brennan. The GOP is said to be readying subpoenas for those former intelligence operatives if they do not provide information about their dismissal in the face of several major media outlets noting the importance of the laptop’s contents.

The New York Post followed the story after breaking it based on a hard drive given to them by Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. The drop in the material came right before the 2020 election. Seventeen months later, the New York Times has admitted it is able to "authenticate" emails in the cache.

Social media giants Facebook and Twitter both took what the Washington Post deemed "unusual steps" to suppress the story on social media at the time.  The story was number three in the top trending topics on Twitter before it was censored from the platform. Facebook similarly blocked the story. Facebook's top executives spent heavily on Democrat campaigns. Altogether, the same people who were limiting the spread of the story spent over $3.5 million on campaigns for progressive politicians.