Washington Post quietly ‘updates’ Hunter Biden laptop story after Devon Archer testimony

The Washington Post’s fact-checking department has yet again quietly updated — rather than corrected — its most-read story, which contained glaring errors about first son Hunter Biden’s laptop and an infamous dinner involving then-Vice President Joe Biden and Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi.

Glenn Kessler, the paper’s chief fact-checker, has made six updates and authored an entirely new article about The Post’s bombshell reports in October 2020 and May 2021 that revealed Hunter Biden introduced his father to Pozharskyi at Café Milano in Georgetown months after joining the natural gas firm’s board.

The initial fact check relied on statements from Andrew Bates — then a spokesman for the Biden campaign and now deputy White House press secretary — and Michael Carpenter, a former Biden foreign policy adviser and now a permanent US representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

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Bates said there was no record of the 2015 dinner on the vice president’s public schedule. Carpenter said he did not recognize Pozharskyi’s name, except apparently from The Post’s reporting. Other Biden reps denied the event happened at all.

Throughout the 2020 campaign, Biden also denied he spoke with his son about any foreign business arrangements, a line his representatives parroted for years.

Devon Archer, Hunter’s former business partner, blew a hole in those claims earlier this month when he testified before the House Oversight Committee that the Biden/Kessler characterization of the matter was “not correct.”

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Biden was an expected guest, met Pozharskyi and stayed for the entirety of the dinner in a private room at the back of the restaurant, according to Archer.

“[T]here was no business-deals specifics discussed ever at any of these things, but it was — it was a nice, you know, conversation,” he added, later clarifying that such appearances sold his and Hunter’s associates on the Biden family “brand.”

No corrections have been made to either of Kessler’s stories, despite the Washington Post both correcting and rectracting portions of two articles from 2017 and 2019 based on the discredited Christopher Steele dossier.

Instead, several updates were made following Archer’s testimony following prompts from RealClearInvestigations, which first reported on the omissions.

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Kessler’s Oct. 14, 2020, article on Hunter’s abandoned laptop still uses the terms “alleged” and “purported” when talking about emails taken from its hard drive, even though the outlet confirmed its authenticity in March 2022.

One of those emails included an April 17, 2015, missive that Pozharskyi sent Hunter after the Café Milano affair, thanking the then-second son “for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father,” which formed the basis of The Post’s very first report on the laptop.

The fact-checker also implied the laptop was “part of a broader disinformation campaign” by Russia, adding that former President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani “regularly interacted with a Ukrainian lawmaker who was recently sanctioned by the US Treasury Department as being an ‘active Russian agent for over a decade’ and was engaged in an influence operation to affect the 2020 election.”

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That implication was echoed five days after the initial laptop fact-check in a letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials, who said the hard drive’s contents had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

On June 7, 2021, Kessler published an additional article that acknowledged Biden was present at the Café Milano dinner but downplayed his involvement, saying the vice president had “only dropped by briefly” to greet a Greek Orthodox priest with whom he had a longstanding friendship and “didn’t even sit down.”

The new fact-check, which was based partly on the priest’s testimony, did not take into account emails showing “Vadym” on the guest list that Hunter shared with Archer before the event, prompting The Post’s Miranda Devine to call the report “sloppy.”

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Kessler also cast doubt on Khazakh businessman Kenes Rakishev and former Kazakhstan prime minister Karim Massimov being present at the Cafe Milano meeting, but added a note following Archer’s testimony before Congress that Rakishev had attended a dinner there one year before and Massimov had been in attendance at the April 2015 dinner.

On March 30, 2022, the Washington Post updated the first Hunter piece to say security experts could only verify “some of the data on the portable drive appears to be authentic” and “concluded that nearly 22,000 emails among those files carried cryptographic signatures that could be verified using technology that would be difficult for even the most sophisticated hackers to fake.”

In May of this year, IRS supervisory agent Gary Shapley told the House Ways and Means Committee that the laptop had been authenticated by investigators all the way back in November 2019.

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Hunter earned roughly $1 million annually while serving on the board of Burisma from 2014 to 2019.

“Glenn’s story has been updated as new information emerged which you can see is clearly noted within the story,” Washington Post spokeswoman Kathy Baird told The Post. “We don’t have any comment to make on this.”

The homepage for the paper’s fact-checker lists various journalism awards and describes its efforts as “dispassionate and non-partisan, drawing attention to inaccurate statements on both left and right.”

“We will adopt a ‘reasonable person’ standard for reaching conclusions,” it states. “We do not demand 100[%] proof. The burden for proving the accuracy of a claim rests with the speaker, however.”