Catherine Herridge on How Hunter Biden’s Laptop Was Dismissed by CBS News

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As you probably remember, investigative reporter Catherine Herridge was laid off by CBS News earlier this year. At the time, her superiors kept her confidential files related to her investigation of Hunter Biden and his laptop. The files were eventually returned to her after her union got involved.

All of that seems relevant as Herridge now has her own site reporting news called Catherine Herridge Reports. Yesterday, she wrote about her experience trying to vet the Hunter Biden laptop at CBS News back in 2020.

I had been tasked with vetting the laptop and its contents after multiple platforms had suppressed the story. Due diligence included working the phones, reaching out to people on the Hunter Biden emails for corroboration and cross-referencing court records.  The vetted documents I collected also indicated the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden.

I told [CBS News executive Ingrid] Ciprian-Matthews the vetted materials included a million dollar retainer from a Chinese energy firm, emails with Hunter Biden’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski as well as Hunter Biden text messages.

Asked by Ciprian-Matthews if there was a “Hunter connection,”  I responded, “Yes, all of them.”

I then provided some of the vetted records directly to Ciprian-Matthews.  We did speak briefly on the phone. I don’t know at this point what happened next.

What she does know is that “the CBS News investigative unit was not tasked in October 2020 to develop more reporting on the laptop.” Instead, Herridge said she felt sick when she watched a 60 Minutes interview with President Trump in which Lesley Stahl said of the laptop, “It can’t be verified.” Herridge knew that wasn’t true and that at least some elements had already been verified through her effort. By contrast, in an interview with Joe Biden, Norah O’Donnell asked if Biden believed the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation effort. Biden suggested it was and got no pushback for saying so.

It would be a long, long time before CBS decided that the facts about the laptop were fit for airing.

It took an additional two years for the network to broadcast a forensic review of the Hunter Biden laptop data.  I advocated for the report which determined that both the data belonged to Hunter Biden and it had not been tampered with.  Our report was broadcast in November 2022, after the midterm elections.  I may have more to say about the delay in the future.

Having belatedly concluded that the laptop was real and not tampered with, you would think CBS would be more interested in Hunter’s story, especially once his plea deal blew up in court. But Herridge found it was quite the opposite. “I found, after the July 2023 plea deal for Hunter Biden fell apart and he faced felony gun and tax charges, that the network’s interest waned,” she wrote. Herridge contacted Norah O’Donnell and  Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews for comment about all of this but of course they didn’t respond.

It’s worth noting that CBS/60 Minutes has a history of sitting on information that would hurt a Democrat in the final weeks of a campaign. In the 2012 race, Barack Obama had a bad first debate with Mitt Romney, He went into the 2nd debate needing a win. During the debate, Romney accused him of not declaring the attack in Benghazi a terror attack for nearly 2 weeks. Obama responded that he’d done so the day after the attack in the Rose Garden. The media jumped on this with both feet, proclaiming Obama right based on the transcript of his comments in the Rose Garden the day after the attack. This is from a CNN fact check at the time.

On September 12, the day after the attack that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Obama said in comments in the Rose Garden that he had learned about the attack on the consulate the night before.

“Our country is only as strong as the character of our people and the service of those both civilian and military who represent us around the globe,” he said. “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.”

To the media this looked open and shut and it was considered a big point scored by Obama in the debate. He got his much needed win in part thanks to this one exchange. What we didn’t know until the day before the election is that 60 Minutes had been sitting on an interview with Obama from the day after the attack in which he said it was “too early to tell” if the attack was terrorism. This completely undermined his claim during the debate.

On the eve of the presidential election CBS News program 60 Minutes released a transcript of an interview with President Obama in which he said it was “too early to tell” whether the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya was an act of terrorism.

The statement appears to contradict Obama’s claim in a second debate with GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney that he identified the Sept. 11 attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans as a terror attack the day after it happened.

Romney had criticized Obama at the Oct. 17 debate for refusing to accurately call the assault “terrorism” and pointed to instances where Obama referred to it several times as a spontaneous protest of an anti-Islam video for weeks afterward.

CBS News could have released the clip undermining Obama’s claim immediately after the debate when it was a hot topic. Instead they sat on it until literally the last moment before the election and let Obama claim the win in public. It was clearly intentional. They took sides in the election.