Decryption | A Quebecer at the heart of the Hunter Biden affair

(New York) Sitting at the witness table between a member of the Kennedy family and a Louisiana state official, Emma-Jo Morris pursued her singular destiny during a hearing in the United States Congress last week. This Quebecer based in New York had been invited to answer questions about the biggest “scoop” of her career as a journalist, which was also her first.

“Isn’t it true that your story about Hunter Biden’s laptop turned out to be 100% factually accurate? asked New York Republican Representative Elise Stefanik in a Capitol courtroom last Thursday.

“I was 27 when I published this story. She better be,” she replied, referring to an article advertised on the front page of the New York Post on October 14, 2020, less than three weeks before the presidential election. “Biden’s Secret Emails,” it read.

Flanked by Robert Kennedy Jr, Democratic presidential candidate, and John Sauer, special assistant to the Attorney General of Louisiana, the journalist of Montreal origin took part in a hearing of the special committee of the House of Representatives on the “instrumentalization” of the American government. The topic on the agenda: government and big tech censorship.

In a preliminary statement, Emma-Jo Morris was thus able to denounce “the unholy alliance between the intelligence community, social media platforms and traditional media” to bury or denigrate the story of “the computer from hell”, the content of which continues to fuel the investigations of House Republicans into the Bidens.

A call from Steve Bannon

His role in this affair stems in part from an affinity with the American right that preceded his arrival in the United States. She told the magazine last year new York that she watched Fox News as a youngster through an American decoder “that they got got from the Natives.” (She did not respond to interview requests from The Press.)

And it was in the service of Fox News that she found herself shortly after studying at Concordia University, where she was particularly interested in American politics. The one who had previously attended private establishments in Montreal in high school (Trafalgar School for Girls) and CEGEP (Marianopolis College) was hired as a production assistant for the show of star host Sean Hannity, where she worked from 2016 to 2020.

From there she moved on to New York Postas Associate Policy Editor.

One day, a collaborator of Steve Bannon with whom Emma-Jo Morris had become friends contacted her to inform her that the former adviser to Donald Trump would call her. A few minutes later, his phone rang. It was Bannon.

“I have Hunter Biden’s computer,” he told her.

In fact, Rudolph Giuliani — not Bannon — had in his possession a copy of a laptop hard drive that Hunter Biden had dumped at a Delaware repair shop.

The former mayor of New York had appealed to Bannon to guarantee the hard drive’s content on the affairs of Joe Biden’s son in Ukraine and China spectacular media coverage. And he didn’t want to go through the big media, too picky for his taste.

That’s how Emma-Jo Morris ended up with a copy of the hard drive. The first article that the New York Post printed bore his signature and that of another journalist who did not work there. According to an article from New York Times published on October 18, 2020, the main editor of the exclusive PostBruce Golding, refused to use his signature because of his doubts about the credibility of the story.

Credibility under attack

However, during last Thursday’s hearing, Emma-Jo Morris claimed to be the main writer of the article in response to a question from New York Democratic Representative Daniel Goldman.

The latter continued: “Isn’t it true that [Golding] decided to withdraw his signature because of the concerns he had?

“I wasn’t involved in that,” replied the journalist.

Before being elected to Congress, Representative Goldman served as legal counsel to the House Intelligence Committee during the first impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump for his role in the Ukraine affair. Last February, this former federal prosecutor described as “100% false” the beginning of the first article of the New York Post on Hunter Biden’s computer.

The teaser read: “Hunter Biden introduced his father to a senior executive at a Ukrainian energy company less than a year before [Joe Biden] pressure Ukrainian officials to fire a prosecutor who was investigating the company. »

Last Thursday, Goldman attacked the credibility of Emma-Jo Morris while addressing former prosecutors among his fellow Republicans present

“Censorship”

It is also a sign of the polarization of American politics that this same journalist has acquired heroine status in the eyes of members of the American right. The latter have no doubts about his allegations. During the hearing, Emma-Jo Morris notably claimed that the FBI knew that Hunter Biden’s computer was “real” as early as November 2019, 11 months before the first article of the New York Post.

In regular contact with the FBI, Twitter and Facebook should therefore not, according to her, censor or restrict access to the history of Hunter Biden’s computer on the pretext that it could be a Russian disinformation operation (Twitter censorship lasted 24 hours).

And Politico should have refrained from publishing shortly after, “uncritically,” a letter from former intelligence officials that the revelations about Joe Biden’s son’s emails had “all the classic hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation.”

“This elaborate censorship plot was not because the reported information was false. It is because this information was true and posed a threat to the centers of power in this country,” the journalist accused.

Emma-Jo Morris left the New York Post in October 2021. She now works for the conservative news site Breitbart.