You probably never heard of the Aspen Institute but they were all over the damage control strategy used to counter Hunter Biden laptop leakage. They “war-gamed” the whole thing ahead of time.
Damage control experts
Damage control strategy to cover Biden family crimes came from well paid experts. It’s supposed to be a “non-profit” think-tank but the Aspen Institute gets their money from federal funding. They definitely aren’t “non-partisan.” The “mountain retreat for the liberal elite” sponsored a little “tabletop exercise,” the latest dump of Twitter Files reveals.
The whole event was focused on brainstorming ways “influence coverage of a leak of documents related to Hunter Biden.” It was held in September of 2020, before the Washington Post published their bombshell report. Apparently, Democrats knew it was coming.
On Monday, December 19, Michael Shellenberger released copies of “confidential documents” from the damage control retreat. Twitter sent Yoel Roth as their delegate. Also there were “Facebook’s head of security policy and top national security reporters from The New York Times and The Washington Post.”
Top corporate media editors & national security hacks were convened at the Aspen Institute and programmed on how to frame disclosures from Hunter Biden's laptop as a Russian hack-and-dump operation, and were given instructions on how to be effective anti-Trump/Putin infowarriors https://t.co/eE8Ft8l62b
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 21, 2022
That last listing is rather interesting, considering what the Post was about to reveal. The little game they played was “an 11-day scenario in October 2020.” Coincidentally, the leaks came on schedule during the upcoming month.
The exercise was hosted by the “Aspen Digital Hack-and-Dump Working Group.” That means they were already using the “hack” defense. That was firmly debunked because everyone knew the laptop had been “abandoned” in a repair shop.
They also were expecting a “dump” of leaked information. Documents clearly confirm that the whole gathering of insiders was focused like a laser to control damage from “the imaginary release of falsified records related to Hunter Biden’s controversial employment by the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.” They paid an unqualified addict “as much as $1 million a year to serve on its board when his father was vice president.”
Shape the media coverage
The main goal of the damage control strategy was “to shape how the media covered it — and how social media carried it.” We know now exactly what they came up with because we saw it in action.
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.”
Following the damage control plan explicitly, the network media “derided the reporting as potential disinformation.”
— Kilgore Trout (@Kilgore73862013) December 20, 2022
They kept insisting it was Russian disinformation for two full years until “major news organizations including the Times and The Washington Post chose to authenticate key emails from the laptop.” Since then, both Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg have “admitted it was wrong to crack down on The Post’s reporting.”
The public finds it interesting that the damage control exercise was “organized by Vivian Schiller, a former top executive at National Public Radio, Twitter, The New York Times and NBC News.”
Another interesting fun fact is that the “Center for International Policy ranked the Aspen Institute No. 5 on a list of US think tanks that receive foreign funding, with more than $8 million coming from primarily Western democracies, as well as undemocratic regimes in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.“
