Written by Hudson Crozier

In a nutshell: Aspen Institute is a powerful international organization that advocates for online censorship. A month before the New York Post published its Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020, the group held a “hack-and-leak” training with top employees from Twitter, Meta/Facebook, and news outlets such as NPR, The New York Times, NBC News, and The Washington Post.

Why it matters: This group’s influence, along with government officials directly pressuring Big Tech platforms, led to the Hunter Biden laptop story being discredited by legacy media and censored online, ultimately influencing the 2020 election.

The hypothetical scenario the Aspen Institute used in the training involved Russia releasing fake records about Hunter’s employment with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and his father’s alleged role in his foreign deals. It was strikingly similar to what the New York Post ended up reporting.

Big picture: A lot of elite interests were at play in the suppression of the story. The Aspen Institute receives funding from the U.S. government and progressive billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and George Soros and collaborates with pro-censorship federal officials. Considering the FBI allegedly knew the information in the laptop was true from the beginning, it raises questions about who else knew of the story's validity while working to conceal it from the public.