In late October 2020, just days before the presidential election, Joe Biden told Oprah Winfrey and the rest of the nation that his son Hunter was “the smartest guy I know.” In retrospect, we’re not sure whether this is a greater indictment of the father or the son.

Remember: This was a pathological liar who graduated 76th out of 85 students in his class at Harvard Syracuse Law School, and he was talking about a drug-addled wastrel of a son who simply abandoned a stunningly incriminating MacBook at a computer repair shop back in Delaware.

Either Joe needs to get out more, or his son needs to up his “smart” game.

We mention this because that laptop computer hasn’t gone away, despite the combined efforts of Big Tech and the mainstream media to memory-hole it. Indeed, in the aftermath of that deeply flawed, deeply suspicious presidential election, the real theft was hiding in plain sight: According to a survey of 1,750 Biden voters in seven swing states taken just days after the 2020 election, nearly 10% of them said they wouldn’t have voted for him had they known about the incriminating evidence on that laptop.

What’s more, Hunter’s laptop scandal was just one of eight stories being suppressed by the mainstream media in the run-up to the election. Taken together, 17% of Biden voters said they would’ve abandoned him had they known about at least one of these stories.

Suffice it to say: Electoral theft can take many forms.

“The national news media stole this election,” said Media Research Center President Brent Bozell, whose organization commissioned the poll. “As far as I’m concerned, they stole it from President Trump by deliberately censoring and keeping from the American people those stories which, had the American people known, would have led to his reelection unquestionably.”

Bozell leveled that charge back just a couple of weeks after the election, and recent admissions by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other leftist organs have borne out its veracity.

As for those co-conspirators, our Nate Jackson detailed the New York Times’s “authentication” of the contents of Hunter’s laptop a mere 17 months after its cross-town rival New York Post broke the story and authenticated its damning contents with verification by key participants such as former Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski.

But while the New York Post was doing the work of a free and honest press, the likes of the Times and The Washington Post and Politico were colluding with corrupt members of the intelligence services to tell us it was all Russian disinformation.

And just because The Washington Post is now, finally, calling its failure “an opportunity for a reckoning” doesn’t mean it’s learned a lesson. It only means its editors have moved on to another ice floe.

Absurdly, the Post’s editors ask, “What’s more compelling than the assorted accusations about the Bidens’ behavior is this question: Why is confirmation of a story that first surfaced in the fall of 2020 emerging only now?” Huh? As if WaPo was not among the original cabal of media colluders who buried the story. You tell us.

As the New York Post editorial board rightly replies:

Don’t be confused about why The Washington Post changed its tune [last] week, admitting that the Hunter Biden laptop is the real deal, or why The New York Times ‘fessed up last month: Reality forced their hand, and they can’t downplay the scandal’s impact on President Joe Biden without acknowledging the facts. Eighteen months ago, both papers (Mottos: “All the news that’s fit to print” and “Democracy dies in darkness”) joined in the drive to suppress The Post’s reporting off [sic] the laptop, playing up bogus, clearly partisan claims that it was somehow “Russian disinformation.”

Never mind that we had not only authenticated the info and produced confirming sources like former Hunter business partner Tony Bobulinski, but also openly reported how we got it — unlike both the other papers’ endless, anonymously sourced reporting on the Trump Russiagate “scandal,” which eventually proved to be utterly fake, the product of Clinton-campaign disinformation.

So the mainstream media promoted the “Russia collusion” nonsense while actively ignoring the New York Post’s bombshell reporting. If we’ve learned one thing about the Leftmedia, it’s that they behave like dishonest people: The higher the stakes, the greater the likelihood of lies.

Truth, though, is like water: It always gets through in the end. And like rust: It never sleeps.