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What is the mysterious Aspen Institute and why did it hold a Hunter Biden ‘exercise’?
By Bruce Golding
Published Dec. 19, 2022
Updated Dec. 21, 2022, 2:08 p.m. ET
A US government-funded nonprofit known as “the mountain retreat for the liberal elite” sponsored a “tabletop exercise” intended to influence coverage of a leak of documents related to Hunter Biden, the latest installment of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” reveals.
In a series of tweets Monday, independent journalist Michael Shellenberger posted confidential documents from the Aspen Institute’s September 2020 event, which he said was attended by Twitter’s then-head of trust and safety, Facebook’s head of security policy and top national security reporters from The New York Times and The Washington Post.
The exercise by the “Aspen Digital Hack-and-Dump Working Group” involved an 11-day scenario in October 2020 that began with the imaginary release of falsified records related to Hunter Biden’s controversial employment by the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which paid him as much as $1 million a year to serve on its board when his father was vice president.
“The goal was to shape how the media covered it — and how social media carried it,” Shellenberger wrote.
But the drill was put into practical use weeks later, when The Post broke the news about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop — which was either ignored or downplayed by most mainstream news outlets and suppressed by both Twitter and Facebook.
While they derided the reporting as potential disinformation well after the story broke, some two years later major news organizations including the Times and The Washington Post chose to authenticate key emails from the laptop and both Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have since admitted it was wrong to crack down on The Post’s reporting.
In a message sent just three days after The Post’s Oct. 14, 2020, scoop, journalist and author Garrett Graff apparently reached out to fellow participants in the Aspen Institute exercise.
“Stephen was right!” he wrote.
Graff, whose latest book is “Watergate: A New History,” didn’t immediately return a request for comment and it’s unclear who “Stephen” is.
The exercise was organized by Vivian Schiller, a former top executive at National Public Radio, Twitter, The New York Times and NBC News, Shellenberger reported.
Since January 2020, she’s been the executive director of Aspen Digital, which its parent organization says “empowers policymakers, civic organizations, companies, and the public to be responsible stewards of technology and media in the service of an informed, just, and equitable world.”