Prominent journalist Glenn Greenwald on Thursday resigned from The Intercept, a news organization he co-founded, after editors sought to “censor” an article he wrote about The Post’s exposé on documents retrieved from a Hunter Biden laptop.
Greenwald is best known for his 2013 reporting on leaked mass-surveillance documents from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. His work for The Guardian won the Pulitzer Prize.
“The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden,” Greenwald wrote in a blog post.
“[T]he brute censorship this week of my article — about the Hunter Biden materials and Joe Biden’s conduct regarding Ukraine and China, as well my critique of the media’s rank-closing attempt, in a deeply unholy union with Silicon Valley and the ‘intelligence community,’ to suppress its revelations — eroded the last justification I could cling to for staying.”
Greenwald, 53, lives in Brazil with his husband David Miranda, a socialist congressman, and their two children. He helped launch The Intercept in early 2014.
Greenwald posted the censored article and his emails with editors on the SubStack platform, which lets subscribers finance independent journalism.
The lede of the censored story says: “Publication by the New York Post two weeks ago of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, relating to Vice President Joe Biden’s work in Ukraine, and subsequent articles from other outlets concerning the Biden family’s pursuit of business opportunities in China, provoked extraordinary efforts by a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories.”
Peter Maas, an editor at The Intercept, rejected Greenwald’s draft, writing in an email that its “core problem is the connection it often asserts or assumes between the Hunter Biden emails and corruption by Joe Biden.”
Maas wrote that “[t]here are many places in which the explicit or implied position is a) the emails expose corruption by Joe Biden and b) news organizations are suppressing their reporting on it. Those positions strike me as foundations to this draft, and they also strike me as inaccurate, and that inaccuracy undercuts narrower points that are sound.”
Maas allows that “[t]here are a couple of published emails and texts in which Hunter Biden or his business partners suggest or hint that Joe Biden might be aware of, or involved in, their dealings with China. Those passages have gotten the most attention, justifiably, but they are vague.
“In one of the China emails, for instance, there is reference to ‘the big guy’ — who might be Joe Biden or might be someone else — and it’s unclear whether Joe Biden, even if he is the big guy, was aware of an ownership share being discussed for him. Some of the most serious accusations, and potential corroboration, come not from the hard drive but from Tony Bobulinski’s short press conference in which he didn’t take questions, before he turned up at the debate as Trump’s guest.”
Maas also wrote that news organizations may be avoiding the story because they don’t have a copy of the Hunter Biden hard drive to validate.
Greenwald replied: “you know that you can’t explicitly say you don’t want to publish the article because it raises questions about the candidate you and all other TI Editors want very much to win the election in 5 days. So you have to cast your censorship as an accusation — an outrageous and inaccurate one — that my article contains factually false claims.”
The Intercept’s editor in chief Betsy Reed said in a statement that Greenwald’s departure was the result of a “fundamental disagreement over the role of editors in the production of journalism and the nature of censorship.”
“Glenn demands the absolute right to determine what he will publish. He believes that anyone who disagrees with him is corrupt, and anyone who presumes to edit his words is a censor,” Reed wrote.
Greenwald wrote in his resignation announcement, however, that he could not stomach compliance with partisan censorship.
“Like anyone with young children, a family and numerous obligations, I do this with some trepidation, but also with the conviction that there is no other choice. I could not sleep at night knowing that I allowed any institution to censor what I want to say and believe,” Greenwald wrote.
Greenwald wrote that he was particularly disturbed that The Intercept — owned by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar — referred to the Hunter Biden hard drive as Russian disinformation, without evidence.
“The Intercept published some of the most credulous and false affirmations of maximalist Russiagate madness, and, horrifyingly, took the lead in falsely branding the Hunter Biden archive as ‘Russian disinformation’ by mindlessly and uncritically citing — of all things — a letter by former CIA officials that contained this baseless insinuation,” Greenwald wrote.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said last week that The Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden emails “is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo concurred.
On Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey were grilled by the Senate commerce committee on their censorship this month of The Post’s reporting. Facebook said it throttled The Post’s initial stories pending fact-checking. Twitter blocked distribution of URLs and locked down the account of The Post, journalists and officials who shared the stories.
Twitter censored The Post’s stories under a “hacked materials” policy, despite no evidence that the records were hacked, and The Post’s main Twitter account remains locked. “Our team made a fast decision. The enforcement action, however, of blocking URLs, both in tweets and in DM direct messages we believe was incorrect and we changed it,” Dorsey said.
Hunter Biden has not denied providing the laptop to a Delaware computer repairman, who in turn gave its contents to Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani who shared it with The Post.
The repairman, whose identity The Post confirmed before publication, says Hunter Biden never retrieved the laptop from his store and provided evidence of a contract saying the equipment would be legally regarded as abandoned after 90 days.
Last week Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, corroborated allegations that Joe Biden was aware of and involved in his son’s dealings, including a 2017 business proposal with a Chinese energy company. A document mentioned a 10 percent set-aside for “the big guy,” who Bobulinski says was Joe Biden.
Greenwald wrote that his critique of partisanship on information platforms was not unique to The Intercept.
“To the contrary: these are the raging battles over free expression and the right of dissent raging within every major cultural, political and journalistic institution,” he wrote. “That’s the crisis that journalism, and more broadly values of liberalism, faces. Our discourse is becoming increasingly intolerant of dissenting views, and our culture is demanding more and more submission to prevailing orthodoxies imposed by self-anointed monopolists of Truth and Righteousness, backed up by armies of online enforcement mobs.”