[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
In a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan on Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for yielding to the Biden White House’s pressure to censor information about COVID. This is the angle that made the headlines. The secondary story, involving the Hunter Biden laptop, was at least as important, arguably more.
In researching my book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, I began with the question of why did as many as a million Americans come to Washington on January 6, 2021. The answer is simple: they knew more about the current state of America than their fellow citizens, and they cared more.
For several of the women with whom I spoke, the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was the last straw. They watched the FBI collude with the intel community, Big Tech and Big Media to steal the election and would not submit to the theft in silence.
In the course of Ashli I profile ten women, eight of whom survived the day. Ashli Babbitt and Rosanne Boyland did not. Each died as a result of police action. At least nine of ten women openly resisted the tyranny engendered by what Ashli called the “controla virus.” Said Dr. Simone Gold, one of the women profiled, “The real agenda was to shift us to a people that would accept government control over our daily lives.”
That control was on full display in the final few weeks of the 2020 presidential race. Confident to a fault, a conspiratorial elite asked America to accept the most flagrant disinformation campaign in anyone’s memory. There was nothing spontaneous about it. On October 14, when they saw the New York Post headline, “Smoking-Gun Email Reveals How Hunter Biden Introduced Ukrainian Businessman to VP Dad,” their apparatchiks were ready to roll.
The conspirators had known since December 2019 that this story might drop. That was when Mac Isaac alerted the FBI to a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned at his computer repair shop in Delaware. Before handing it over, Isaac made a copy of its contents. Had he not done so, we would still be unaware of the role the “Big Guy” played in the Biden family’s seamy global enterprises.
In an August 2022 interview with Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg casually shared the inside scoop on how Facebook came to defuse the New York Post bombshell. Fearing the story might break at any time, the FBI reached out to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms well before the 2020 election and warned them of a potential Russian “hack and dump” operation.
On the day the Post story broke, representatives from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force met with Facebook execs. As would later be confirmed at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing, the FBI knew the laptop was, in fact, Hunter Biden’s.
Zuckerberg did not need to have his arm twisted. He and his wife, Priscilla Chan, had already invested $300 million, in CNN’s words, toward “enhancing access to voting in the United States.” (In his letter, Zuckerberg all but admitted to being duped into supporting a partisan effort.)
Without protest from the FBI, Facebook promptly “deamplified” the Post story, dramatically reducing its circulation. On the same day the story broke, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force also leaned on Twitter. The Twitter people needed little persuasion—some 98 percent of their political donations went to Democrats. They were all in for Biden, and Twitter blocked not only the Post story but also the Post itself.
A May 2023 report by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Intelligence spelled out the details of the plot’s master stroke. The scheme was hatched on October 17, 2020, when Biden campaign advisor—now secretary of state—Antony Blinken contacted Michael Morell.
Morell had served as acting director of the CIA under Obama. At Blinken’s request, Morell began assembling the draft of a statement that would dismiss this epic October surprise as more of the same old Russian disinformation. “Thereafter,” reads the subcommittee report, “Morell contacted several former intelligence officials to help write the statement, solicit cosigners, and help with media outreach.”
On October 19, Morell emailed Nick Shapiro, his former deputy chief of staff, asking him to place the statement in major publications. “On background,” Shapiro was to tell reporters that Morell, in talking to Russian intel experts, “was struck by the fact that all of them thought Russia is involved here.” In truth, Morell had talked to no Russian intel experts before organizing the draft.
Politico bit first, running a story on October 19 under the bold headline, “Hunter Biden Story Is Russian Disinfo, Dozens of Former Intel Officials Say.” As Morell testified to the House subcommittee, one major purpose of the statement was “to help Vice President Biden in the debate.”
In an October 19, 2020, email, Morell told former CIA director John Brennan he wanted to “give the [Biden] campaign, particularly during the debate on Thursday, a talking point to push back on Trump on this issue.”
During the October 23 debate, when Trump played the laptop card, Biden countered with the Russia card as planned. “Look, there are fifty former National Intelligence folks who said that what this, he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan,” said a well-rehearsed Biden. “They have said that this has all the characteristics—four—five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him, his, and his good friend Rudy Giuliani.”
In an estimate more conservative than many, Trump pollster John McLaughlin found that 4.6 percent of Biden voters would not have voted for Biden if they had known about the contents of Hunter’s laptop. Even if those people had simply not voted, their absence at the polls would have handed several swing states to Trump.
Kept purposefully in the dark, too many Americans chose to believe Biden and his co-conspirators. “On November 3, 2020, the American people went to the polls to elect the president of the United States with the false impression that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation,” the House subcommittee concluded three years too late. “The American people cannot get back the 2020 election.”
The women I profiled knew all about the laptop scam, but when they voted on November 3, 2020, they did so with muted optimism. They were sure Trump would do better than he had done last time. They all knew people who did not vote for Trump in 2016 but would in 2020, and almost none who would do the opposite. They would be proved right. Trump would beat his 2016 numbers by nearly twelve million votes.
Yet in the last few weeks of the campaign, Trump supporters saw—if their liberal friends and relatives refused to—just how ruthless was the opposition. They watched a massive story be deep-sixed in real time, right in their faces. This fraud was unprecedented in boldness and in scope. So, too, they feared, would be the fraud on Election Day. The real question is not why these women went to Washington on January 6. The real question is why the rest of us did not.
A Zuckerberg apology is a useful first step, but restitution for those January 6 families whose lives he helped ruin would do a lot more good.
Jack Cashill’s new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is available in all formats.