"Real Time" host Bill Maher blasted the widespread suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election.
During Friday night's panel discussion, Maher highlighted the controversial comments made by liberal podcaster Sam Harris, who openly approved of the "conspiracy" to bury the brewing scandal that implicated then-candidate Joe Biden in order to defeat President Trump on Election Day.
"Is it okay to have a conspiracy to get rid of Trump?" Maher began. "They were talking about Hunter Biden's laptop, which was a story and now all the mainstream press has finally admitted it was a real story. It was a real laptop."
Maher went on, "Now look, let's not pussyfoot around this; he was selling the influence of his father, Joe Biden. I mean, most political sons do, but let's not pretend at least that was going on… so Hunter Biden's laptop was buried by the press. Even the head of Twitter Jack Dorsey said that was a mistake… So Sam Harris says it was appropriate for Twitter, and the heads of Big Tech, and the heads of journalistic organizations to feel that they were in the presence of something that is a once-in-a-lifetime moral emergency, meaning Trump. So he's saying it's okay to have a conspiracy, to get rid of somebody as bad as Trump."
"It's a little bit of a thorny question because once you go down this road- this is sort of where we are in this country, the other side is so evil, anything is justified in preventing them from taking office. Is it?" Maher asked.
Director and liberal activist Rob Reiner responded by completely dodging the question, telling Maher, "You know what's not justified? Using armed violence to try to kill people in the Capitol. That's not justified."
"Answer this question!" Maher exclaimed. "The question is- was it appropriate to bury the Hunter Biden-"
"You talking about the press doing that?" Reiner asked.
"He's saying that's what they did and that is what they did," Maher said. "They buried the Hunter Biden story before the election because they were, like, 'We can't risk having the election thrown to Trump. We'll tell them after the election.'"
"And we know for a fact that that's what they did?" Reiner responded.
"Of course!" Maher double down. "You don't follow this?"
"I don't know what they did," Reiner replied.
"I know because you only watch MSNBC," Maher quipped.
Not mentioned in the discussion what Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's shocking comments on "The Joe Rogan Experience" where he revealed that the FBI approached Facebook to warn about a "dump" of "Russian propaganda" going into the election.
"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 told host Joe Rogan.
Zuckerberg insisted that Facebook users were "still allowed to share" the Post's reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop even as their "third-party fact-checking program" was looking into whether it was misinformation, but acknowledged that the "ranking in [the] news feed was a little bit less" and that "fewer people saw it than would've otherwise."
"By what percentage?" Rogan asked.
"I don't know off the top of my head, but it's- it's meaningful," Zuckerberg responded. "But we weren't sort of as black and white about it as Twitter. We just kind of thought hey look, if the FBI, which I still view is a legitimate institution in this country, it's a very professional law enforcement- they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something then I want to take that seriously."
"Did they specifically say you need to be on guard about that story?" Rogan followed.
"No, I don't remember if it was that specifically, but it basically fit the pattern," Zuckerberg said.
Meta issued a statement saying "None of this is new. Mark testified before the Senate nearly two years ago that in the lead up to the 2020 election, the FBI warned about the threat of foreign hack and leak operations… We took that seriously, and as Mark said when he testified, we didn't block the New York Post story, we temporarily reduced its distribution to give fact-checking partners time to review it."
