CNN commentator Scott Jennings forcefully rejected journalist Kara Swisher’s argument that the censorship of The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden laptop was mere “politics,” telling her in a tense on-air exchange that the 2020 suppression campaign amounted to “one of the biggest lies told to the American people.”

Jennings appeared on Swisher’s “On With Kara Swisher” podcast Friday, where Swisher insisted that Twitter and Facebook’s throttling of The Post’s reporting, combined with the letter from 51 former intelligence officials framing the story as possible Russian disinformation, was simply part of the political rough-and-tumble.

“They were making their case, just like you would say Trump just did with whatever issue he had,” Swisher told him.

Jennings balked, saying: “Well, I don’t agree that it is a simple matter of ‘making your case’.”

“When you use your government title and you use your intelligence bona fides and you use all of your credentials to flat-out lie to the American people — they didn’t know that,” Jennings said.

“They were saying this is Russian disinformation. That what you’re reading is directly out of the Kremlin.”

Pressed by Jennings on whether she truly believed that was just normal politics, Swisher didn’t flinch.

“Yes, I do, actually.”

“Do you like it?” Jennings shot back.

“No,” Swisher conceded, adding that she had “a number of other problems” with then-President Trump, specifically his “meddling with tech companies.”

Jennings argued that the laptop episode, coupled with how dissenting COVID-19 views were labeled or removed on major platforms, created a “bad taste” that never went away.

“Turns out some of those people were right,” he said, “and the people who were censoring them were wrong.”

He continued: “There is a general feeling that if the elites make a decision about what the narrative is going to be, they can crush you. They can coerce tech companies into crushing you. They can coerce media into crushing you.”

Swisher pushed back by pointing to parallels she sees today under Trump, citing “lawsuits against media companies” like ABC and CBS as evidence the dynamic is hardly unique to Democrats or 2020.

“It’s the same exact playbook,” she said.

Weeks before the 2020 presidential election, The Post published emails and other materials recovered from a laptop that Hunter Biden had left at a Delaware repair shop.

Social media companies including Facebook and X, which at the time was known as Twitter, immediately restricted the story.

Twitter blocked The Post’s account while Facebook limited the article’s reach as the company waited for fact-checkers to review it.

Days later, 51 former US intelligence officials released a letter asserting that the laptop story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” a claim that shaped media coverage but was never substantiated.

Forensic reviews by The Washington Post and CBS News later confirmed that large portions of the laptop’s data were authentic and showed no evidence of tampering.

The laptop’s contents played a role in federal criminal cases against Hunter Biden, including his 2024 conviction on three felony gun charges and his guilty plea to nine federal tax offenses.

The FBI had already determined as early as 2019 that the laptop was genuinely Hunter Biden’s, and prosecutors used its contents as evidence during his trial.

In December 2024, then-President Joe Biden issued a full pardon for his son.