It’s been said — no doubt by some self-important scribe — that journalism is the first rough draft of history. More and more, though, we’re unable to trust that first draft. Often that draft is written by partisans with no interest in the truth. And worse yet, those partisans often end up surreptitiously rewriting their flawed first drafts when the truth eventually rears its head.

But once in a while, they get caught.

Such was the case just yesterday with The New York Times, which “quietly deleted its assertion that an October article from the New York Post about the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son Hunter was ‘unsubstantiated.’”

Essentially, the Times used the word “unsubstantiated” to categorize the New York Post’s October bombshell in all of its reporting, and then tried to slink back in and remove that word when someone finally realized they were lying. The truth is, there’s nothing “unsubstantiated” about the Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden.

Apparently, the Times’s hacks must believe that every story is by definition “unsubstantiated” unless and until they say otherwise.

As we wrote at the time, the mainstream media went all in on protecting Joe Biden: “The Fourth Estate has its massive thumb firmly on the political scale, and at no time and in no place has this been more evident than its astounding indifference to the New York Post’s bombshell reporting on the influence peddling and self-enrichment schemes of the Biden Crime Family.”

But there’s more to this story than the mainstream media’s malfeasance. There’s also Big Tech’s malfeasance. Recall that last October, when the Post broke its story, Twitter and Facebook took the extraordinary step of blocking their users from sharing a link to the article in the final days before the November 3 election.

And now we learn from National Review: “After months of review, the Federal Election Commission determined that Twitter did not violate election laws by restricting access to a New York Post article alleging the president’s son, Hunter Biden, engaged in influence-peddling via shady overseas business dealings.”

As NR continues, “The agency ruled that the social media company did not act out of political motivation but for a commercial purpose and therefore did not break the law, according to an explanation of the decision acquired by The New York Times.”

Translation: Joe Biden’s FEC is exonerating Twitter for having protected him just prior to the election. Yep, it’s really that simple.

Folks, it takes some serious denial, and some serious mental gymnastics, to believe that Twitter had anything other than defeating Donald Trump on its mind when it willfully blocked its users from sharing a news story so deeply damaging to Joe Biden’s campaign.

This is an FEC cover-up, plain and simple, and in broad daylight. And we didn’t think Democrats and their Big Tech fellow-travelers could get any chummier and scummier.