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Substack journalist Glenn Greenwald took a swipe at Washington Post national correspondent Philip Bump for declaring the Hunter Biden laptop scandal a "conspiracy theory" despite the reporting that verified the emails that emerged during the 2020 election.
On Monday, Bump shared his "analysis" tackling "5 conspiracy theories that remain unproven, despite what you might have heard," which listed disputes over the FBI's alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 riot, claims of voter fraud in Arizona as well as the Russia investigation's ties to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign.
Wrapping up his piece was the "conspiracy theory" over the younger Biden's laptop that surfaced nearly a year ago, which was declared by much of the media as "Russian disinformation" despite any evidence and reporting from the New York Post suppressed by Big Tech.
"If the laptop was seeded by Russian intelligence, for example, should it be elevated in the national conversation? That question is a difficult one to answer, but there was good reason to ask it," Bump wrote. "Had Russia managed to hack Hunter Biden’s online accounts to obtain material? Was Giuliani being duped? That he picked the Post to report on the laptop out of concern that other outlets might ‘spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out’ didn’t engender confidence."
Bump then acknowledged Politico's reporting backing up some of the emails first published by the New York Post, but still defended the media's hesitancy of giving the laptop coverage last year.
"The question wasn’t simply one of misinformation but one of Russian intervention. The release of material by WikiLeaks in 2016 was similarly accused of being fake, but the broader issue that emerged was whether an effort already linked to Russia at that point should have been incorporated into election coverage. Much of the response last year centered on that same question," Bump said. "That some of the emails were legitimate doesn’t actually prove that initial response to have been unwarranted, nor does it prove that the genesis of the information wasn’t dubious."
"In the meantime, pretending that unrelated details prove a conspiracy theory to be true is more revelatory about those making that claim than about the theory itself," he added.
It wasn't until Friday that Bump's piece caught the attention of Greenwald, an outspoken critic of the media, particularly in its handling of the Hunter Biden story.
"The WPost's 'fact-checker' @pbump continues to classify the Biden laptop as a ‘conspiracy theory’ even after a new book from POLITICO's @SchreckReports proves the key emails are real," Greenwald reacted. "The actual 'conspiracy theory' is the media & CIA's lie that it was ‘Russian disinformation.’"
Greenwald continued, "This entire ‘fact-check’ reads like a DNC press release. Like the ‘anti-disinformation’ industry, this new media title ‘fact-checker’ is a huge fraud, designed to disguise liberal media activism as something more elevated, noble and trustworthy, like they're neutral or whatever.
Bump fired back, telling Greenwald, "I'm not a fact-checker and the point of the piece is precisely that the validity of the emails is largely beside the point, but otherwise good stuff."
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To which Greenwald replied, "The dominant media claim -- copied from CIA -- was the laptop was Russian **disinformation**. Many still believe this bulls---. But you can't call that a conspiracy theory because your job is to protect liberal media conspiracy theories, not debunk them."
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