Employees from the New York Post have revealed that the reporter who authored explosive front-page Hunter Biden "smoking-gun email" story on Wednesday refused to put his name on the report because of concerns regarding its credibility.
Two employees working at the New York Post told the New York Times that the primary reporter who penned the explosive Hunter Biden report, whose veracity three news organizations have been unable to independently verify, refused to be cited in the article.
The story published alleged emails exchanged between Hunter and a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm about a meeting with his father, Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden.
The report said the files were recovered from a computer that belonged to Hunter and was dropped off at a computer-repair shop near the Biden family's home in Wilmington, Delaware, last spring. The shop's owner, a Trump supporter, gave the files to the President's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who finally delivered them to the NY Post.
Concerns Over Article's 'Credibility'
Bruce Golding, a reporter at the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid since 2007, did not allow his byline to be used because he had concerns over the article's credibility, the two Post employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Many staff members apparently questioned whether the publication had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive's contents, according to five people familiar with the tabloid's inner workings. They also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing, the people said.
As the deadline to publish the story approached, the publication's editors pressed staff members to add their bylines to the article and at least one other reporter aside from Golding, refused, the sources revealed.
Whose Names Were Mentioned in the Story?
Headlined "BIDEN SECRET E-MAILS," the article was finally published with two bylines: Emma-Jo Morris, a deputy politics editor who joined the paper after four years at the Murdoch-owned Fox News, and Gabrielle Fonrouge, a Post reporter since 2014.
What's interesting is that Morris did not have a byline in the newspaper until Wednesday and her Instagram profile, which was set to private on the same day the article was published, includes photos with former Trump advisers Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Steve Bannon, who is also cited as a source in the Hunter Biden report.
Fonrouge also had little to do with the reporting or writing of the article, according to three people with knowledge of how it was prepared. Fonrouge also had no knowledge that her byline was on the story until after it was published, the sourced said.
Giuliani told the Times that he chose the Post because "either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out."
