A New York Post scoop based on emails from Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop, published three weeks before the 2020 election, immediately drew attention from the federal agency that helped set up a private consortium intended to squelch purported election misinformation.
It's not clear why from heavily redacted emails the Department of Homeland Security turned over to America First Legal among several productions under the Freedom of Information Act.
What's unambiguous, however, is the Mis-, Dis- and Malinformation (MDM) Team in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had settled on a narrative for the laptop by the following week: guilt by association with the Russian state and QAnon, and disinterest in its authenticity and integrity despite the FBI confirming it nearly a year earlier, according to a contemporaneous IRS memo.
Other legal groups are pulling on loose threads from similar disclosures about public-private collaborations that may involve policing purported misinformation.