It’s been a long, slow process to get to the truth about the Hunter Biden/Burisma affair, but every so often, another piece of the puzzle comes out.

On Friday, The New York Times reported on a letter that the younger Biden sent on Burisma letterhead to our ambassador to Italy seeking assistance with Italian regulators regarding proposed geothermal energy projects. By itself, this wasn’t really a big deal; at least not in comparison to Hunter’s dealings with the Chinese.

Yet there are two facets to this story that deserve a little more scrutiny and comment.

First of all, the letter completed reporting that the Times only started to reveal last summer once Joe Biden had withdrawn from the presidential race. As noted by Hot Air’s John Sexton, “Essentially, this was proof that Hunter had been acting as an unregistered foreign agent while his father was VP.” Yet, thanks to the pardon handed down by Hunter’s dad before he left the scene for events occurring after 2014, it was no harm, no foul.

The Times, though, was one of a phalanx of media outlets that determined that the entire Hunter Biden laptop story was a nothing burger back in 2020, just weeks before the election. “We’d say the Times’ willingness to at long last cover this comes better late than never, but it only published the story now that it doesn’t remotely matter anymore,” wrote the editors of the competing New York Post. “Other publications (including and especially this one) did all the real work uncovering Hunter’s sleaze when it was still relevant; back then, the Times was busy ‘debunking’ our reporting.”

It wasn’t just debunking, but a campaign of suppression we’ve discussed before — particularly when Hunter’s infamous laptop was finally “authenticated” 17 months too late.

“So the Times did finally get some incriminating documents related to Hunter’s outreach to the US ambassador, but those documents were released one week after Joe Biden announced he was stepping down as the Democratic nominee,” Sexton added. “The State Department claimed that timing was just a coincidence, but let’s just face it, they were lying. It’s definitely not a coincidence that evidence that showed Hunter Biden was trading on his father’s name was hidden for three years and finally revealed a week after he left the race. Sorry, no one is going to ever believe that.”

That’s the other part of the equation: the slow-walking of the Times’ FOIA request by the State Department. As the Gray Lady explained last year, “The request was initially filed under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, in June 2021. After nearly eight months, the State Department had not released any records, and The Times sued. About 18 months later, the department moved to close the case after releasing thousands of pages of records — none of which shed light on Hunter Biden’s outreach to the U.S. government.”

It’s telling that the most recent letter came after a change of leadership at the State Department, leading one both to speculate whether they have other information that will be coming out and contemplate what level of stonewalling would have occurred had November’s result been different.

It wasn’t just the folks over at the State Department who were covering up, though. “The House Judiciary Committee revealed that after the New York Post published the Biden laptop story in October 2020, the FBI instructed its agents not to discuss it and even scolded one agent for confirming the story’s authenticity,” The Daily Wire reports. “According to chat logs released by the House Judiciary Committee, an FBI analyst confirmed the Biden laptop story to Twitter and was promptly ‘admonished’ by higher-ups who lamented that ‘he won’t shut up.’”

Obviously, all of us in our humble shop have talked about this matter until we were blue in the face, and it was because of two things that eventually came to pass. We learned that not only was Hunter’s laptop not “Russian disinformation,” but we also found out about the effort made by our government to hide the facts about the case, beginning with the shadowbanning of the New York Post story in October 2020. “When they were actually the ones who were speaking the falsehoods, we were trying to tell the truth. They essentially ran an information operation on the American people,” said Washington Free Beacon reporter Jon Levine in an interview with the Morning Wire. “They spread a bunch of BS because the truth was detrimental to Joe Biden. They didn’t want it out.”

The Biden laptop story has a long, sorry list of conspirators that continues to grow as the years go by. While the change at the top is refreshing and is helping us complete the puzzle, what would be the most helpful to know are the names of those in government who kept the truth from us and why. Those are the people who should never be trusted with a public position again.