CNN anchor Jake Tapper rejected complaints made by Republicans who suggest Big Tech’s censorship of the Hunter Biden scandal “rigged” the 2020 presidential election.
Tapper has long prided himself on banning GOP lawmakers and candidates who challenged President Biden’s electoral victory, who he has deemed “election deniers,” from his CNN programs.
On Friday’s broadcast of “The Lead,” Tapper cited analysis from The Washington Post that divided those Republicans into “two groups.”
“One is people who just lie about the election or they’re wrong and diluted and just say it was stolen or whatever,” Tapper said to his guest. “And then there is the ‘questioners.’ And these ‘questioners,’ these Republican questioners, to me, a lot of them are people who know better but are afraid that if they don’t at least come out with ‘oh, it was rigged in a different way because Twitter wouldn’t let the New York Post publish, you know, publicize the Hunter Biden story’ or whatever- but they go along with it in a way that makes them feel comfortable but they’re still playing along with the lie.
“I almost find them more cynical players than the deniers,” Tapper added.
Tapper was tapped by CNN president Chris Licht to fill the network’s 9 p.m. ET time slot, which has been vacant ever since last year’s firing of Chris Cuomo.
Licht reportedly wants Tapper to be “the face of his CNN” as part of the network’s rebranding effort to present itself as apolitical and nonpartisan after years of hyper liberal, anti-Trump coverage.
Meanwhile, Tapper’s commentary suggests he has yet to make the pivot. In fact, despite having four hours of programming between Thursday and Friday, CNN’s top anchor avoided mentioning the bombshell developments in the Hunter Biden probe, according to Grabien transcripts.
On Thursday, The Washington Post cited anonymous federal agents who say they have “sufficient evidence” to charge Hunter Biden with tax and gun crimes.
While other CNN programs addressed the Post’s stunning report, “The Lead” did not mention in each of the two-hour programs that have aired since the paper published its story.
Fox News reached out to CNN for comment.
Tapper wasn’t exactly onboard with the Hunter Biden scandal when the New York Post first broke its reporting on his infamous laptop.
“Bakari, the rightwing is going crazy with all sorts of allegations about Biden and his family. Too disgusting to even repeat here,” Tapper told his Democratic colleague Bakari Sellers in October 2020. “I mean, some of the ones I’ve seen from the president’s son and some of the president’s supporters are just wildly unhinged.”
Perhaps he was following orders as CNN’s top brass at the time were caught spiking the Hunter Biden scandal as it was emerging, according to audiotapes released by Project Veritas in December 2020, after Joe Biden was declared president-elect.
“Obviously, we’re not going with the New York Post story right now on Hunter Biden,” CNN political director David Chalian said during a conference call on Oct. 14, the same day the Post published its first story on Hunter Biden’s emails. Chalian later insisted the report was “giving its marching orders” to the “right-wing echo chamber about what to talk about today.”
“The Trump media, you know, moves immediately from – OK, well, never mind – the [Michael Flynn] unmasking was, you know, found to be completely nonsensical to the latest alleged scandal and expects everybody to just follow suit,” then-CNN president Jeff Zucker told his staff on Oct. 16. “So, I don’t think that we should be repeating unsubstantiated smears just because the right-wing media suggests that we should.”
Much of the media, including CNN, promoted the baseless narrative that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which shed light on his shady business dealings overseas that could implicate his father, could actually be the product of “Russian disinformation.”
Since the election, however, news outlets have slowly acknowledged that the laptop was authentic.
In August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg went viral for resurfacing what transpired between Facebook and the FBI in the weeks leading up the 2020 election during an interview with Joe Rogan.
“”Basically, the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us- some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert… We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that, basically, there’s about to be some kind of dump of that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant,'” Zuckerberg said.
“Did they specifically say you need to be on guard about that story?” Rogan later asked.
“No, I don’t remember if it was that specifically, but it basically fit the pattern,” Zuckerberg said.
