Covering the Hunter Biden laptop story
The Hunter Biden laptop is the same, back in October of 2020 and now. All that has changed is the angle the media wants to take on it, and that depends utterly on politics. There is no truth; there is only politics.
When Biden was running for president, it was of the utmost importance to smother the story. That was done, and if necessary the media was more than willing to lie about things such as the provenance of the laptop. Former “intelligence” officers were enlisted to opine on the in-authenticity of a laptop they’d never examined or even seen. It was absolutely necessary to do this, and the MSM was willing to prostitute itself and violate whatever journalistic standards it still retained (very few) in order to cover for Joe Biden. Social media giants were all too happy to cooperate in this endeavor, as well.
And despite Biden’s terrible record as president, I doubt that many or perhaps even any of these people have had a moment’s regret or a pang of guilt about what they did. Anything to stop Trump. Anything to stop the right.
So now that they’re covering the story, I immediately thought it was because Hunter was about to be in big legal trouble and the MSM wanted to “get ahead of the story.” In the first post I wrote about that, I said this:
As for the question “why now?”, I think the answer might be found in that phrase “ongoing criminal investigation into Joe Biden’s son.” That investigation certainly doesn’t seem to have been fast-tracked, does it? But my guess is that the Times is now trying to get ahead of the story.
Others think it’s because the left is getting ready to dump and replace Biden. I don’t think so. I think they’d like to, but I don’t think they can because they’ve got an itty bitty problem: finding a replacement who would be even marginally acceptable, and what to do with Kamala Harris. I recently wrote about that dilemma in this post. I don’t think that has changed.
Now that the MSM is deigning to cover the Hunter laptop story, it’s significant that it’s only partially covering it. For example:
Of course, [those in the MSM] all avoid the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from evidence contained on the laptop that the president’s drug-addled son Hunter abandoned at a MacBook repair shop in Delaware in April 2019: that Joe Biden, when he was vice president, was aware of, and intimately involved in, a corrupt, multimillion-dollar, international influence-peddling scheme run by Hunter, and Joe’s brother Jim Biden, in the countries for which Joe was point man in the Obama administration, such as Russia, Ukraine and China…
But despite acknowledging that the material on the laptop showed that Hunter was “trading on his father’s name to make a lot of money,” as CNN White House correspondent John Harwood put it, both the Washington Post and CNN were at pains to absolve Joe Biden of any involvement in the scheme.
“There is zero evidence that Vice President Biden, or President Biden, has done anything wrong in connection with what Hunter Biden has done,” Harwood said…
…[T]he Washington Post curiously left out crucial facts in two detailed stories about the laptop on Tuesday that totaled a hefty near 7,000 words.
The rest of the article goes into quite a bit of detail about the important things that the MSM is still leaving out of its coverage.
See how it goes? Hunter, who is probably going to be indicted, is the guilty one – poor, troubled, drug-sodden Hunter. But Joe? Clean as a whistle.
If and when they start writing stories about Joe’s involvement in the corruption, then it will be time to conclude that the left has all its ducks in a row and that they’re ready to replace Joe himself.
They lied about the laptop being Putin misinformation, so why should we believe them that Bidum nevber knew Hunter was a crook. Right Big Guy?
Can’t even see the DOJ prosecuting Hunter and not digging in enough to convict him without incriminating Sundowner. My thinking is he will not see inside a court room and at best pleading lesser charges without jail time.
To take Skip’s comment a bit further. The FBI investigated Hillary Clinton’s server that she admitted was built to avoid FOIA requests. They found classified items that were stored on the server, which was enough of a premise to prosecute a US Navy enlisted submariner at the time. Yet the result was a decision by the law enforcement investigating agency to usurp prosecutorial authority to decide not to prosecute. This was called by the media “exoneration”.
I’d like to think this time is different, but I’m pretty sure it is still Lucy holding the ball ready to kick.
Obviously it’s patently absurd for the media to attempt to cordon off Joe Biden (aka “The Big Guy”) from any culpability in this whole affair. And obviously the media is filmsily attempting to do so anyway. But the larger question is what most voters know and what they believe and how that may effect things going forward.
Up until now, you could break groups voters into several different viewpoints on the Hunter Biden laptop story.
1.) Those who just had absolutely no idea at all about it.
2.) Those who knew something about it but chose to believe the Russia disnformation narrative.
3.) Those who knew or at least suspected it was likely all true but hated Trump and the Republicans so much that to them it didn’t matter. IOW, they’d prefer almost anything, even a corrupt and demented Joe Biden to Trump.
4.) And of course people who have always known it was true and never wanted Joe Biden as president for this and many other reason.
And now that people have a pretty good sense of what it’s like to have Joe Biden as president, it’s interesting to think about what these groups may be feeling and how it will effect things going forward.
Will group 1 get smaller now? Will group 2 still continue to believe the media. Will group 3 change their thinking about Biden?
Here’s what is going to happen after the war is settled; probably in August. Biden resigns due to health reasons. After a decent interval, Harris pardons Joe, Jim and Hunter in order to end our long national nightmare.
Joe will resign because the Cabinet is going to turn on him and threaten to use the 25th Amendment. The Ringleader? Mayor Pete, my close personal friend. Pete, of course, will be named VP as part of the deal.
Mark this comment. It will go down this way.
There’s a line from the TV show Boardwalk Empire that fits here: “You can’t be half a gangster.”
The media completely trashed any ethical or professional standard it claimed to believe to beat Trump and install Biden. Now that they see Biden leading the Democrats to destruction (they don’t care about the country), they’re trying to reclaim their integrity and honor but it doesn’t work that way.
Do you know why the New York Times used to report so much on the scandals of Bill and Hillary Clinton? Because as liberal and pro-Democrat as the NYT might be, it also saw itself as an independent power in politics separate from any candidate or party. But there, by definition, cannot be any independent powers in a one-party state.
There’s going to be tremendous pushback from current audiences and internally to anything that deviates from Democratic establishment orthodoxy, while a new generation of Trump/DeSantis Republicans will NEVER interact with the media the same as in the past.
If the people in the media were smart, they’d be lying even more now to try and prop up Biden and the Dems as much as possible. But I don’t think they can acknowledge to themselves what Republicans getting back into power will mean for them.
Mike
The Democrats work through enforced unity.
Deposing Biden would break that — utterly — and lose the next election. It won’t happen.
Deposing Biden would break that — utterly — and lose the next election. It won’t happen.
It would be an admission by Democrats that they were in error. Down to the street-level, partisan Democrats just do not do that. So it will be emperor’s new clothes followed by specious excuses.
Chester Draws – Never thought it that way but fits rather well, do often say exposing it might bring down the house of cards.
neo points to the democrat’s itty bitty problem…
“Others think it’s because the left is getting ready to dump and replace Biden. I don’t think so. I think they’d like to, but I don’t think they can because they’ve got an itty bitty problem: finding a replacement who would be even marginally acceptable, and what to do with Kamala Harris.”
Absent decisive electoral fraud, either Biden or Harris as President ensures a Trump or De Santis Presidency in 2024. It’s a virtual certainty that the democrats are well aware of that certain consequence.
But no way in hell are they about to willingly give up power, so they have no choice but to do something… a purge or another stolen election would appear to be the only resolutions possible.
But however it’s achieved, the democrats simply can’t afford for either Biden or Harris to be residing in the WH in 2024.
Mayor Pete being chosen as VP makes sense since he’s a graduate of the WEF Young Global Leaders Program.
He may be Biden’s actual understudy, waiting in the wings for his time to play America’s ‘Trudeau’.
Just wait until they indict Hunter and dump Biden (and simians emerge from my colon), the Left will brag that they hold their own accountable, unlike those icky unpeople from the other party. Behold the virtue of the Democrat party!
Left unmentioned will be the massive propaganda campaign waged to get that corrupt guy in the WH, and their studious ignorance of said corruption until he was no longer needed.
And their bullpen has a geriatric socialist and a geriatric faux Indian. As lackluster as the GOP’s bench looks, it’s absolutely stacked compared to the Donks’.
Geoffrey Britain:
I’ve said, and I’ll say again, that I don’t think they will replace Biden and/or Harris voluntarily unless they have someone at least marginally better, and I don’t think they think Mayor Pete is better as a vote-getter.
However, it’s possible they could figure out some other candidate to run in 2024. Or else somehow cheat so massively it won’t matter who they run.
Chester Draws,
Voter satisfaction is not going to get better under either Biden or Harris. Absent decisive electoral fraud, either one running for President in 2024 will prove to be an act of political suicide for the democrats.
Here’s what is going to happen after the war is settled; probably in August. Biden resigns due to health reasons. After a decent interval, Harris pardons Joe, Jim and Hunter in order to end our long national nightmare. Joe will resign because the Cabinet is going to turn on him and threaten to use the 25th Amendment. The Ringleader? Mayor Pete, my close personal friend. Pete, of course, will be named VP as part of the deal.Mark this comment. It will go down this way.
No more implausible a scenario than any other. Not sure why it would be Buttigieg as opposed to Granholm or Vilsack or Raimondo. What hits you about his cabinet is that about 2/3 have been through law school (though politicians often have quite truncated careers as working lawyers). Of the exceptions, one’s the issue of an MPA program (employed as a congressional aide throughout), one’s a career school administrator, one is a soldier who does not impress, one’s an academician, one was a union official (in a union notorious for Sicilianate mafia influence), and one worked for McKinsey. You saw much the same with Obama’s cabinet.
Cornhead predicts: Biden resigns [in August] due to health reasons. After a decent interval, Harris pardons Joe, Jim and Hunter in order to end our long national nightmare. Joe will resign because the Cabinet is going to turn on him and threaten to use the 25th Amendment.
Joe might not need to resign if . . . he’s Kennedy’d, as one of the commenters at Small Dead Animals expressed it. Given his age, a judicious amount of ketamine (or some other sedative/anesthetic that produces dissociative symptoms and is known to induce hallucinations) added to his pudding cups on a daily basis just might push him over the edge. Maybe I’ve been reading too much Roman history lately, but according to one historian, at least 33 of 82 Roman emperors were murdered, 13 of them by the Praetorian Guard that was supposed to protect them. Even in our own history, there were rumors that Warren Harding did not die of cardiac arrest (as is now thought) but had been poisoned by his wife as an act of revenge for his extramarital affairs. Florence Harding refused consent for an autopsy, which is one reason why the rumor has persisted.
OTOH, maybe Hunter will just let his dad borrow his fully loaded crack pipe.
neo,
Who could they replace Biden and Harris with that would be a worse Presidential ticket in 2024?
OK… shudder, Adam Schiff and Maxine Waters might be worse 😉
I don’t think Mayor Pete’s vote getting ability as a VP will be a determinative factor for the democrat leadership. It’s a candidate’s ‘connections’ that is the primary determinate.
I tend to agree that the political costs of getting rid of Biden/Harris would outweigh the benefits. On the other hand, the laptop is great leverage for anyone who has Justice Department connections and might want to use them against Biden. I’m pretty sure that any truly motivated investigation of Hunter would produce enough evidence to put him in prison for a very long time. So I suppose it’s possible that there are anti-Biden Democrats who who could use the threat of Hunter’s imprisonment to influence Biden administration policy. Who knows?
Even in our own history, there were rumors that Warren Harding did not die of cardiac arrest (as is now thought) but had been poisoned by his wife as an act of revenge for his extramarital affairs. Florence Harding refused consent for an autopsy, which is one reason why the rumor has persisted.
You read about her and you get the impression that that marriage was a business for her. Not the most persuasive candidate for jealous revenge.
She and her husband were under the care of a pseudophysician who’d attended a homeopathic school. Wagers that made their bad situations worse.
I’ve said, and I’ll say again, that I don’t think they will replace Biden and/or Harris voluntarily unless they have someone at least marginally better…
neo:
I don’t see it happening either.
Equally important I would say Democrats lack leadership to pull off such a complicated maneuver.
They are fractured into various factions — Biden/Jill, Obama/Michelle, Pelosi, Bernie/youth, Hillary/Bill, the Squad/BLM/youth, Harris/Willie Brown(?), Buttigieg/gay, Elizabeth Warren (maybe) — with different and often competing interests. They can’t all be pleased, so probably none of them will.
I don’t believe this problem has a practical solution for Democrats. Events will determine how the cookie crumbles.
I’m pretty sure that any truly motivated investigation of Hunter would produce enough evidence to put him in prison for a very long time. So I suppose it’s possible that there are anti-Biden Democrats who who could use the threat of Hunter’s imprisonment to influence Biden administration policy.
He completed law school, landed a patronage job in the Clinton administration, then embarked on this influence peddling and money laundering business. He’s been at it for 20+ years, never subject to investigation. I think that’s a piece of evidence toward the proposition that the Department of Justice has been the lawfare arm of the Democratic Party for quite a long time.
[The Hardings] were under the care of a pseudophysician who’d attended a homeopathic school. Wagers that made their bad situations worse.
Well, if homeopathy is good enough for the House of Windsor, it was good enough for the Hardings. If their personal homeopath had graduated from his school prior to the 1910 Flexner Report on medical education in North America, he would have been licensed to practice in the state of Ohio.
The Democrats and their billionaire enablers have hit us with the perfect duo. Biden is senile and is being run by his staff, all Obama retreads. Harris is such an idiot that no one is happy about dumping the senile Joe. What to do? The Democrats have no “bench” of experienced minor leaguers. Obama cleaned that bench with his misrule. Mayor Pete has no support except the gays (Disney).
Bloomberg tried the ploy of being a candidate but that experience should discourage people like Zuckerberg. I anticipate a huge row after the 2022 election about “insurrection” and trying to bar Republicans from office. Ginni Thomas is a test case.
@PA+Cat:Well, if homeopathy is good enough for the House of Windsor, it was good enough for the Hardings.
There are valid, controlled, double-blind, peer-reviewed studies showing homeopathy works better than placebo. And there are no such studies showing that parachutes work better than placebo.
Before I get misinterpreted, I don’t think that homeopathy works, and I do think that parachutes do work. It’s just a nice pair of examples to help us ask how ourselves just on what basis do we think we know things. It’s not what we tell ourselves.
Do strawmen need parachutes after all?
Fortunately there are now multiple copies of Hunter’s laptop, including one entered into the Congressional Record. Whether or not humanity suffers catastrophic calamities in the years ahead due to excessive hedonism and perversion, the Hunter Laptop will serve as a kind of Rosetta Stone for the current era.
In any event, an original should end up at the Smithsonian.
democracy is aborted through irregularities, fraud, misinformation, and disinformation.
demos-cracy is aborted at the Twilight Fringe (i.e. emanations from penumbras).
Same program, pogrom, differently manifested.
The Democrats have no “bench” of experienced minor leaguers.
See the most recent presidential donnybrook. Bloomberg, Yang, Delaney, Hickenlooper, Bullock, Bennett. They have a bench. Their voters aren’t interested in their bench. They preferred the likes of Bernie Sanders and Liawatha.
Ginni Thomas is a test case.
Is she running for Congress?
Continued inflation, critical shortages of gas and diesel, fertilizer shortages cause reduced crops and crop failures, food prices skyrocket, rationing is imposed.
Biden and Harris stay in place through the summer and fall as things get totally out of control.
Joe pardons Hunter claiming the country doesn’t need distractions. Noise level of other failures is so high that the Hunter story vanishes overnight.
GOP takes both Houses. The 2020 Stolen Election story becomes widely accepted.
Alternate ending one:
Joe resigns for health reasons while both houses are still in Democrat control, John Kerry is appointed VP, Kamala resigns or remains as figurehead with no duties, Kerry is in control. Two years of chaos until DeSantis in 2024.
Alternate ending two:
Both Joe and Kamala hang in there, GOP takes both Houses but deep state launches endless attacks on GOP, DOJ and FBI basically take over DC. Endless indictments of GOP legislators from DC Grand Juries. Endless riots in all Blue Cities against all GOP legislative attempts..
I suggest alternative two is more likely.
To use an aviation saying, the Democrats seem to be “out of airspeed, out of altitude, and out of ideas”. There’s only the big red EJECT handle.
Their last ditch hope seems to be that the January 6 committee will find a way to disqualify Trump from running for anything again.
Either that or hope he gets back in the habit of saying stupid things like hoping Putin will disclose Hillary’s emails. Imagine the potential savior of America can’t seem to avoid saying things the other side can use to bring up the Russia scandal. With all due respect, shut up, dumbshit!
Yeah, I fear alternative 2 above is likely. It uses the Dems only strength – expertise in and comfort with, criminality.
Is it like the old U.S.S.R., where being a government “propagandist” was an actual job title, and the Party held a meeting each week, or even daily, where all the propagandists gathered, and were given the official “party line” that they were to push that week?
What I want to know is, who is in charge, who–what individual or group of individuals–the order didn’t come about by osmosis–gave the orders to the MSM to start covering this story and, moreover, had that order obeyed by the various parts of the MSM?
But, the greater question is–as Biden sinks into senility and his out of control utterances become more and more dangerous–who is actually in charge of the Presidency, and of our government?
Just a reminder:
Mayor Pete’s spouse is the malefic spawn of Liberace and Mr. Rogers. Even his pronouns are toxic.
Let Ginni Thomas speak out against this infamy!
neo – I think you nailed it. This is limited hangout. It looks like Hunter is going to be indicted. When Republicans point out that the mainstream media covered up Hunter (and Joe’s) corruption problem prior to the election, it will be given three Pinocchio’s because the mainstream media now did report the laptop contents.
You might say that it doesn’t count as reporting when the media grudgingly acknowledges the laptop two years after the election with the details buried 20 graphs into the story. That statement will, no doubt, lack context and be awarded at least two Pinnochios in a seperate fact check.
I don’t think it has anything to do with dumping Joe. Ds are stuck with him now.
Speaking of the media, I’m absolutely certain that this iddy biddy tid-bit has been plastered all over the place, has been raging non-stop across all TV channels, has saturated the Internet, and is THE TALK OF THE TOWN!
“Scoop: FEC fines DNC and Clinton for Trump dossier hoax”—
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/fec-fines-dnc-clinton-for-trump-dossier-hoax
Right?
Barry Meislin–I read the CNN reporting on this but, if I remember correctly, while Hillary’s 2016 campaign and the DNC spent at least a reported million on ginning up, spreading, and keeping alive this hoax, the fines levied for misreporting opposition research as merely “legal services” were chump change–the DNC was fined $105,000, and Hillary’s campaign a measly $8,000–slaps on the wrist.
Shocking surprise!….
(Thanks…)
Somebody decided to kneecap Cuomo. Don’t know who is ultimately pulling the levers, but I was under the impression that Cuomo was taken out because they wanted him removed as a possible prez candidate in 2024. Biden won’t run. Even if he hasn’t died by them.
I can’t believe that the masterminds have Kamala in mind. So …. who were they trying to clear the field for when they gave the okay for sticking the knife in Cuomo?
Wait til’ they get a load of Ashley’s diary.
Authenticity of emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop
On March 16, the NYT reported:
“The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”
On Oct 10, 2020, news of Hunter’s laptop was characterized as likely “Russian information operation” in an open letter by the 50 former US intelligence officials. The media echoed and amplified this message for weeks, while news of the laptop was actively suppressed by the top social media platforms.
But now, long after the election, we have America’s “newspaper of record” writing about their authenticity.
Keep in mind that by Oct 29, 2020 the “smoking gun email” had been cryptographically authenticated by an independent source (see below). Cryptographically authenticated means it was provably not a forgery. The cyber experts in our very own FBI were fully capable of carrying out a trivial verification like this. So it was provably known in October 2020 that it was not Russian disinformation.
Thus, actual disinformation was from our very own intelligence community – amplified and echoed by media, while contrary news was actively suppressed on major tech platforms.
The email that was cryptographically authenticated was sent on April 17, 2015 from Vadym Pozharskyi (Ukrainian energy businessman and executive of Burisma) to Hunter Biden. This was the “thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father” email, also known as the “meeting for coffee email.” Pozharskyi had sent earlier emails to Hunter asking how Joe Biden could use his political influence on Burisma’s behalf. That December, Joe Biden threatened to withhold a $1 billion of loan guarantee unless the Ukrainian prosecutor looking into Burisa corruption was fired. That Ukrainian prosecutor was then duly fired.
Only the “meeting for coffee email” email was cryptographically authenticated in public view because that was the only one sent to the independent researcher. It was digitally “signed” by Google’s email and the old Google 2015 public key is still available in various online archives. It’s not publicly known how many other emails on Hunter’s laptop could be similarly authenticated. Not all emails are digitally signed, and even those that are digitally signed may not have the public signing key still available for verification. However, it stands to reason that if the smoking-gun “meeting for coffee email” was authentic, then the other emails are most likely also authentic.
Here is a quick run-down of possible corruption and conflicts of interest on Hunter’s laptop that I know about:
1. Ukraine
Hunter’s appointment to Burisma Energy’s Board of Directors at a reported salary of $50,000 per month during his dad’s time as vice president.
While Hunter was pulling down $600,000 a year and Joe was likely getting some cut of the deal, Joe Biden extorted a foreign government by threatening to withhold US taxpayer dollars. There are videos of Joe Biden boasting about this on YouTube, as if he’s proud.
In Nov 2019, during the 1st Trump impeachment hearing, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent made the case for launching an investigation into the Bidens and their involvement in Ukraine as a conflicts of interest. The Obama-Biden administration and Adam Schiff’s House Committee ignored this.
2. China
Hunter Biden’s joint global equity firm, the Bohai Harvest Equity Investment Fund, had helped coordinate the purchase by a Chinese mining company of the world’s largest cobalt source in the Congo. That deal gave China control over a huge chunk of the world’s known cobalt supplies — an ingredient necessary to make electric car batteries.
There are other China deals. These deals involve Chinese nationals linked to the Communist government and the People’s Liberation Army.
The infamous “10 held by H for the big guy” email is about one or more of these China deals.
Hunter Biden Business Partner Tony Bobulinski came clean and spoke at length about the China deals. More on this below.
3. Moscow, Kazakhstan, etc.
One of Hunter Biden’s investment firms received $3.5 million from the richest woman in Russia.
4. Sex and drugs
You’ve undoubtedly heard about the lurid photos on Hunter’s laptop. The ones you should pay attention to are the ones where blackmail from foreign powers is a distinct possibility, especially Hunter’s escapades with Chinese and Russian women.
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What difference, at this point, does it make?
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Not much.
The FBI reportedly failed to find enough evidence regarding possible money laundering to merit any prosecution. While it appears that the money laundering investigation has been closed, the investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes continues. Joe Biden himself is not under investigation.
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Post script
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The Delaware computer shop owner who handed over Hunter’s laptop to the FBI (and then eventually a copy of the disk image to Rudy Giuliani after the FBI stonewalled) is now nearly destitute. He received many death threats and his shop was repeatedly vandalized. He lost business and he eventually had to close up his shop. His unemployment claim was stonewalled and he was harassed by the IRS over trivially small amounts of money. He’s now struggling to make ends meet.
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References
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Here is a copy of the NYT article:
https://archive.ph/Z2yeW#selection-825.2-825.111
Here is the open letter from the 50 IC officials:
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-4393-d7aa-af77-579f9b330000
Here is Tucker Carlson interviewing Hunter business partner Tony Bobulinski:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/10/27/tucker_carlson_interviews_hunter_biden_business_partner_tony_bobulinski_about_joe_biden_involvement.html
Here is the source code and technical explanation of how the “meeting for coffee email” was cryptographically authenticated:
https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim