Online users shared this untrue rumor about the pair in the days before U.S. President Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration.

This came from on high,’ said reporter Marc Caputo. ‘Don’t write about the laptop, don’t talk about the laptop, don’t tweet about the laptop.’

He misrepresented the facts in that executive order because it said that we had suggested that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation,” Brennan said during an MSNBC interview.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday revoking the security clearance of 51 former intelligence officials who signed a 2020 letter arguing that emails from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden carried “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” and that of his former national security adviser John Bolton.

Your name was also on the list, but it's not clear to me that you had a clearance, because I thought that the president, President Trump, tried to cancel your clearances back in 2018, if you want to clear that up.

Hunter Biden received a “full and unconditional” pardon from his dad, President Joe Biden in December. But this gesture of love, one of President Joe Biden’s final acts while in office, came before Special Counsel Davis Weiss released the final report on his investigation into the president’s son.

The 51 former intelligence community officials claimed that a report about Hunter Biden's laptop had "the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation."

President Trump took executive action Monday to start revoking the security clearances of his former national security adviser, John Bolton, and dozens of intelligence officials who signed a letter in 2020 claiming emails found on a laptop owned by Hunter Biden bore the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.

Pardons were flying all over Washington on Monday like a flock of birds, or airplanes during peak hours at Reagan airport. Joe Biden was first, issuing “pre-emptive” pardons to five members of his family,

Bolton did, however, publish before getting permission to do so, and anyone who has had a security clearance knows that dodging the review is a violation not just of the letter of one’s clearance conditions but also of the norms and instincts inculcated by the culture of national security.

Lest anyone still have doubts, two ex-Politico reporters, Mark Caputo and Tara Palmeri, just confirmed how far the media went to protect Joe Biden prior to the 2020 presidential election.