On October 14, the New York Post began publishing what it touted as a series of blockbuster articles on emails and photos obtained from a laptop mysteriously abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop—emails and photos that, the Post announced, belonged to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. The materials had been provided to the tabloid by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani. And from there, it only gets weirder.

In the eyes of many commentators, this looked like a continuation of Giuliani’s 2019 efforts to smear Joe Biden by claiming falsely that, while vice president, Biden had intervened to protect a Ukrainian company for which Hunter was working from investigation by Ukrainian law enforcement. That didn’t add up then, and it doesn’t now—the elder Biden’s work in Ukraine was aimed at combating corruption, not enabling it. But nevertheless, Trump and other Republicans are seizing on the Post’s stories—and complaining about efforts by social media companies to limit distribution of the stories on their platforms.

To get some perspective on what’s been going on, Quinta Jurecic spoke with Thomas Rid, a Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and the author of the book “Active Measures,” and Evelyn Douek, cohost of Lawfare’s Arbiters of Truth podcast series on disinformation and a lecturer at Harvard Law School.

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