Former CBS News reporter Catherine Herridge, who was fired by the network in 2024 after refusing to divulge a source on a story she did on China for a separate network, said in a video Thursday that executives blocked her from reporting on details of Hunter Biden’s laptops even after the contents had been verified.
In a video posted on X, Herridge — who is now an independent journalist on Substack — said that her story on some of the messages found on the then-first son’s computer was delayed until after the 2022 midterms because of the damaging information on it.
As the Daily Caller News Foundation noted, even establishment news sources such as The Washington Post and New York Times had conceded that, far from being a disinformation operation, the contents of the laptop were valid at the time she said she was going to do the story.
In the video, Herridge said that the contents of the laptop still constituted a valid story, particularly given some of the racial slurs that Hunter Biden used in his messages.
Herridge, she said, had gone through “a lot of effort to get the cleanest copy” from the pivotal laptop to make sure that she had it “totally locked down.”
However, executives sat on it despite what she said was appropriate due diligence.
“When we did the story, we did it after the [2022] midterms,” Herridge said.
“I argued against that because it was ready before the midterms and my training is that you should always do the story when it’s ready to go. You should not be dictated by the political cycle.”
“Once we got the laptop story on the morning news, I felt that there was so much there that we could still do,” Herridge added.
“For example, in the text messages, there’s unfortunately, uh, the use of the N word — the liberal use of the N word.”
“And I thought this was worthy of a story,” Herridge explained. “But I was told that it was not something that interested CBS News.”
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“When we did the story, we did it after the (2022) midterms. I argued against that because it was ready before the midterms and my training is that you should… https://t.co/r0t2r7KO7n pic.twitter.com/QS31Ft8ujQ
— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) January 1, 2026
“Then I asked for a forensic review of the laptop and we found that there were more than half a dozen emails that were likely used by Joe Biden,” she continued.
“I thought that was a story. But the answer that came back was, ‘Well, we need to know what the content is of the emails.’ But that was going to be a years-long process.”
“So there were a lot of reasons I was told not to do it, not to pursue it,” she said.
Herridge, who came to CBS from Fox News, was let go in 2024 during a legal battle over whether she should be forced to reveal a source she used in an investigation into a federal probe into a Chinese-American scientist during her time at Fox News; Herridge held firm despite an order from an Obama-appointed U.S. federal judge.
However, in December of 2024, she told NewsNation that she thought her investigation of Hunter Biden and the contents of her laptop may have been the incident which led to her dismissal.
That interview took place shortly after Hunter was pardoned by his outgoing president father on federal tax and gun charges.
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