Why would your standard be "prove that this evidence is fabricated?" Shouldn't your standard be "prove that this evidence is in any way authentic" before we move forward with a discussion of it?
So far, there's at least one picture of Hunter with a meth pipe that doesn't appear to be manipulated. That seems to indicate there's some non-zero something there, with how much being up for debate. Also, the ODNI says there's no intelligence pointing to Russia, despite some claims to the contrary.
We should probably withhold judgement and let the facts come out. Let people compare the signature on this contract for the laptop with Hunter's, let people forensically analyze the image, etc.
What I would do is mix in a fake information bomb among real data so it looked authentic.
Specifically, I would add fake incriminating emails and then go to Ukraine and pay some people off to fake in the other side as well.
It could be invalidated later, but who cares. It would look good enough and people only remember original headlines, not corrections. And if related to an election, only needs to last until election night.
>What I would do is mix in a fake information bomb among real data so it looked authentic.
This is a dangerous line of thinking because you can apply it to anything you don't want to believe. Beliefs should follow from evidence, not supposition.
> Who has copies of their text messages on their laptop?
Anyone with the My Phone app in Windows and a linked phone.
> Who has PDF copies of emails?
Those look like they were created, e.g. with a PDF printer, from the originals. They've now released Hunter's signature on the repair form, as well, and claim to have phone calls from him calling about it.
So far the "Russian disinfo" campaign is without evidence of that, given that the ODNI says there's no intelligence pointing to that and nothing but anonymous rumors thereof. Doesn't mean anything in these files is true, but some of the details match what we already know.
That said, we'll have to wait and see. I don't think Steele's primary Russian subsource is behind this one, though, but it could be like the original Dossier--a mix of salacious but unverifiable statements with true but innocuous statements.
Though I think Hunter with the meth pipe is already pretty damaging. That aside, for the best for the public to know all about the future president & his son's Bursima dealings so that it cannot be used as blackmail in the future, no?
Which one of the (allegedly) three Macs was running Windows?
> the ODNI says there's no intelligence
Ratcliffe says this, not the ODNI. He has zero intelligence background. He lied about his work in the DoJ. Because of those lies, the Senate refused to consider him for the ODNI position for over a year.
Ratcliffe has also been surfacing unsubstantiated crap through Johnson's Senate HSGA Committee. He was installed expressly for this purpose
I was responding to the idea that it's somehow patently absurd for someone to have their text messages be present on their laptop, when it's obviously not.
> Ratcliffe says this, not the ODNI.
Ratcliffe is the head of the ODNI, speaking on behalf of the ODNI.
The FBI and DoJ have also said as much now. So you're in the position of maintaining a conspiracy theory without evidence vs. all of the US intelligence agencies. Moreover, they're not making a positive claim, they're making a negative one: that there is no evidence of Russian involvement.
It's one thing to say "don't trust this until all the facts come out"--that I would agree with--but the Russian conspiracy is a positive claim and those require evidence.
I have yet to see anyone present anything other than bare speculation for that, which only proves them correct in their statements. This is rebuttable: all you have to do is give some actual, verifiable evidence of Russian involvement.
You know, like Hunter's signature on the paperwork, or the EXIF data on the photos. Why do no problems show up under ELA or similar things? Why does this match what we know from public sources about Bursima paying him a ton of money? Why can we find his picture on their website in archives?
Where is there anything like that for the Russia conspiracy? The "best" I saw was a bunch of former agents speculating in a Politico story where they admitted therein that they had no evidence whatsoever...
And yet, your citation of Windows software suggests either that your grasp on the facts of the case are shaky, or that you're more interested in trying to convince others that this is true, than you are in whether or not it is actually true.
> Ratcliffe is the head of the ODNI, speaking on behalf of the ODNI
You completely ignored the credibility issues I raised - issues that even the Republican majority in the Senate found troubling.
Further, your insistence on inscribing the authority of the ODNI (as an office) on Ratcliffe suggests that you, yourself, think he lacks sufficient credibility on his own. The fact is that there is no ODNI analysis or documentation on this. There is only the assertion of Ratcliffe, himself, who has already blown his credibility defending disinfo from Derkach (who the DoC outed as a high level Russian agent).
I'm not going to respond further on this. But I'll leave you with a quote I found insightful:
> these fake scandals Republicans concoct to smear Democrats work by being too complicated for anyone to follow. Instead, there's a drip-drip-drip of confusing stories filled with buzzwords and noise, all working together to build the illusion of scandal where none exists. The goal is to keep the words "Biden," "Burisma" and "Ukraine" in the headlines so people start to assume there must be something shady going on, even if there's nothing there
So you admit that it's not ridiculous to have text messages on one's laptop, good to know.
> The fact is that there is no ODNI analysis or documentation on this.
Of course not, because there's no intelligence pointing to Russia as the source of this, which kinda undermines your whole conspiracy theory. You do nothing whatsoever to support that with evidence, which is itself an admission that it's bogus.
That last quote is basically how the original Russia conspiracy started, BTW. You know that we've untangled the citogenesis a long time ago, right? They bootstrapped the conspiracy with the original FISA warrant against Carter Page (one of our own spies against Russia, who provably worked on an opp against them not too long prior), leaking some things to the media, then using the leaks themselves to bolster their claims for the FISA warrant.
But unlike that, which relied on anonymous leaks (since de-anonymized by Strzok & co's text messages), the drip drip drip here is of stuff like Hunter's signature matching the form of the one from the legal papers, having recordings of him calling the repair shop for his laptop, having pictures of him with a meth pipe, etc.
But sure, go on and tell us how that compares to the Russian conspiracy's anonymous leaks of unverifiable information.
> So far, there's at least one picture of Hunter with a meth pipe that doesn't appear to be manipulated. That seems to indicate there's some non-zero something there, with how much being up for debate.
It is already public knowledge that Hunter Biden has addiction issues. How does this photo make you believe the other claims are authentic? I've heard before that a standard disinformation tactic is to sprinkle some truth along with the lies.
I'm particularly skeptical of using an unrelated personal problem to assassinate his father's character as being involved in some sort of international business crimes.
> We should probably withhold judgement and let the facts come out. Let people compare the signature on this contract for the laptop with Hunter's, let people forensically analyze the image, etc.
while you're claiming that reasonable people should withhold judgement, the election is 2-3 weeks away and low-information voters are not going to wait for a forensic analysis to form their impressions. It should be 'innocent until proven guilty', full stop, but you're saying it should be the other way around and that we should keep our minds open to the possibility that he's guilty. Totally backwards.
It makes me think they really have Hunter's files. Whether those other files are real or not is precisely what I'm withholding judgement on so the rest of your comment doesn't really match what I said.
It is also public knowledge that Hunter Biden was being paid 50k/month by Burisma. I'm not sure why the "new" allegations from the emails are surprising to anyone, or how anyone could instantly dismiss them as disinformation based on the priors we already have. Did anyone think it was pure merit and coincidence that got him hired? The only thing that mattered was the exact details of the corruption and if it matters to you - I personally am quite sure that many, many people on both sides of the political spectrum are engaged in similar behavior.
> I'm not sure why the "new" allegations from the emails are surprising to anyone, or how anyone could instantly dismiss them as disinformation based on the priors we already have.
This is like accepting a cryptocurrency payment because the sender can prove they have access to the public key.
Let's go directly to the person who was trying to get the story published:[1]
>Giuliani told the Times he brought his documents to 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."
The entire reason the story ended up specifically in the NY Post is because "the media" refused to publish it without attempting to ""prove that this evidence is in any way authentic".
It sounds like you really don't understand how journalism works if you think they will just publish everything regardless of the levels of supporting or contradictory evidence.
I'm not sure if this was an attempt at a gotcha question, but yes. The Steele dossier was very similar in that numerous news agencies refused to publish it due to their journalistic standards. Many aspects of the Steele dossier where eventually confirmed by further reporting or federal investigations. It is too early to say that is the case for these documents from Hunter Biden.
Most of the major papers published false (and hence unverified) claims from the Steele dossier before the 2016 election. Buzzfeed then published it in full in January 2017.
I don't know what you are considering examples of claims from the dossier or what you consider proven false means. Rather than me guessing, you could provide examples if you want me to make any effort to refute them. Otherwise I will point to the Wikipedia page which I believe backs up my previous comments[1]
>The media, the intelligence community, and most experts have treated the dossier with caution due to its unverified allegations, while Trump has denounced it as fake news...Some aspects of the dossier have been corroborated, in particular its main allegations that Putin and Russia actively favored Trump over Clinton and that many Trump campaign officials and associates had multiple secret contacts with Russians. However, many allegations in the dossier remain unverified. One allegation against Michael Cohen was dismissed by the Mueller Report, a court ruled that another of the claims was "inaccurate and misleading" and stated another claim was inaccurate. Goldman and Savage have described it as "deeply flawed". The Daily Telegraph has reported that anonymous sources believe Russian intelligence agencies may have sought to create doubt about the veracity of the dossier.
These aren't ad hominem attacks because they get to the central issue we are discussing. Different news agencies have different reputations for verifying that authenticity of what they report. I'm not going to give a story in the National Enquirer the same credibility as a story published in the New York Times. It isn't an ad hominem attack to voice that opinion.
Although I do notice that you did not address the merit of my post. There is a little irony there.
No, they are ad hominem attacks because they only attack the credibility of the source and not the information.
As I’ve said, the NY Post is hardly a bastion of journalism. The thing is, neither is The NY Times, the Washington Post, or basically any media source other than CSPAN. They are all biased and anyone paying the slightest bit of attention over the past four years has noticed this. So to somehow claim that the “real journalists” would have done otherwise is absurd, considering that they’ve done the exact same thing repeatedly.
You are the one who brought up the credibility of the media. How it is ad hominem to say that there are different levels of credibility? It is not a binary in which every news organization is either "CSPAN" or "Fox News". Some organizations are more committed to real journalism than others. The Post is not one of those organizations. This story ended up there because of this fact. Even Fox News turned it down over concerns about credibility.[1] Refusing to ignore that aspect of this is not an ad hominem attack.
I didn’t say they were all equal, I said they were all biased. My only point was that criticizing the Post for publishing unverified information should mean you criticize the “real journalists” for doing the same thing. This has happened numerous times in the last four years.
I find it funny you were labelling my comments as ad hominem. I thought we were only allowed to discuss the merits of a specific story.
We were talking about the New York Post and the documents from Hunter Biden's laptop. I don't know what unverified information you are referring to here or how that would be relevant to this discussion. What is clear is that many "real journalists" were not satisfied enough with the evidence to publish it. That even includes organizations like Fox News that have a bias that would seem to align with publishing the story.
I legitimately don't know what you are considering to be a personal attack. You said the media don't care about verifying their stories. I said you don't understand journalism if you think that is true. That isn't intended to be a personal attack. Maybe there is something else I said that you took offense to. I will happily apologize if you point it out and it truly crossed a line.
You are free to ignore this since you said you have no interest in this conversation. If that is the case, I will take a cue from the upvotes I am receiving and the downvotes you are receiving that the HN community thinks I am in the right here.
If you think these news sources are all operating under the same amount of good faith, then I think the disinfo campaigns have succeeded. I see quite a bit of daylight between Fox and CNN.
The legitimacy of those networks are definitely still in question. I remember during the 2015 primaries, CNN got the nickname "Clinton News Network" because of the incredible amount of bias they showed. It seems to have only gotten more extreme (on both sides) since then.
Not to say that it was an ad hominem attack. The comment above was extremely relevant and got to the point.
Unfortunately I don’t see much difference anymore. CNN used to be the gold standard, but they have fallen into the partisan trap just as much as Fox. They just do a better job at presenting a polished viewpoint.
Not meaning to attack you, but is it fair to say that your evaluation is entirely subjective?
Disinformation campaigns aim to change your lens of how you view, process, and store those evaluations. The experience you have can also be explained by having your heuristics changed from disinfo.
If you ask me, Fox News, aside from its evening opinion-based shows, has been moving toward the center since Ailes left.
And CNN's home page looks more like an anti-GOP blog than a legit news site these days. Given that CNN was once my go-to news source back in the day, it's just sad.
I remember when all the major news sites, including Fox, covered essentially the same stories, albeit with a different spin.
NONE of the news agencies are good faith actors anymore. It's all infotainment to the last atom. I mean, that's itself the subject of the linked blog post.
It's ok to recognize this. It's healthy to recognize this. It doesn't mean you wasted your time watching CNN (or Fox), it means you learned a valuable life lesson, one that vaccinates you against the next attack on your attention.
It seems you're just unaware of how any reputable journalist works, and unaware of how fact checkers work, and unaware of the massive ramifications that happen when real journalists are shown to have published something wrong.
It's really strange that you're unaware of it, because the article you're commenting on goes in to great detail about what happens when other reputable news organisation's fact checking fails.
As of 2020, I find that journalists are no longer reputable, fact checkers don't check facts, and there are no ramifications when something wrong is published.
This is the default state of the world until proven otherwise and is supported by countless examples. The media is not some bastion of truth, it's just as subjective as the rest of us and has progressively gotten worse as all standards are pushed aside for the narrative.
This is exactly the goal state sponsored disinformation campaigns. To flood the marketplace of ideas with so much "fake news" that no one believes anything anymore. When that happens, people feel free to believe in what is convenient or aligns with their personal world view.
The reality is that not all news sources are equally bad or biased. Some do a better job of fact checking than others.
I'm glad they rate political inclination separately from factuality because I've gotten to the point that I only care about the latter, and not the former, and highly suggest others do too. Nothing rated below "HIGH" in Factual Reporting should be passed along, IMHO.
They always link to the evidence for their ratings.
Sure, some do better than others. However none are good at it, and therefore the bar is so low that it's better to assume it's all false until proven otherwise.
Mainstream "reputable" media has ran many campaigns that are obviously not Russia-sponsored, least-of-all the Russia-gate conspiracy theory, and all of "Trump is sexist", "Trump is racist", "Trump supports white supremacy" stories based on fake Trump quotes ("fake" as in, taken out of context and twisted).
You are correct that no one is perfect all the time.
Nonetheless sites like Politifact still provide pretty accurate fact-checking more often than not.
The New York Times will be more reliable than the National Enquirer, and will (eventually) admit error or wrong doing.
It’s not very realistic to see it as black and white, that some bad journalism means all journalism is bad.
That’s simply not true.
To be honest, considering the incredible number of lies, mistruths, and deceptions President Trump has been spewing for the last four years I’d say the fact-checking has been okay.
Of course Democrats and liberals lie or deceive too, and of course some media institutions sometimes screw up or have biases there.
But if we step back and look at what fact-checking is the most important, the President of the United States continuously lying his ass off clearly tops the list, so if we’re going to discuss fact-checking let’s start there.
Sure, some are better than others. But even the supposed best are so bad that it makes no difference. You're likely assuming reputation from decades ago rather than the modern state of the media. The hallowed names no longer matter, they're all the same and have been emptied of almost all talent and integrity. Add in the rise of social media, clickbait, impression counts, and ever-dropping attention
The problems with the media "tops the list" for me before they can claim to be fact-checking anyone else.
Do you really believe Fox News does a better job of fact-checking? Or your media organization of choice.
Politifact is solid. Pro Publica is solid.
Attempting to reduce it to “all are equally bad, or so bad it doesn’t matter” is disingenuous and actually furthers attempts to deceive the public by undermining sources which are actually trustworthy.
Distrust everyone, and you’ll believe anyone.
Of course this doesn’t mean you get to turn off your thinking cap - we always have to exercise our own judgement, even when reading information from sources we believe to be trustworthy.
If you genuinely believe what you are saying then I encourage you to broaden your sources. For example, ‘Ghost Wars’, which won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and has been broadly acclaimed, covers the CIA and all the stuff it did / has been doing in Afghanistan since 9/11.
There are plenty of good books on domestic politics too. Books will help broaden your perspective and better evaluate these journalism or media organizations we are talking about.
If you’re not engaging in this discussion with good intention, and your goal is to deceive and generally undermine people’s confidence in reputable sources of information because you believe it furthers your own political beliefs, well, then you should feel ashamed of yourself.
I’m being honest - I don’t know which one is the case.
What you say, however, is demonstrably untrue and a falsehood.
Why are you picking a single politician or Fox News? Your bias is clear, and so strong that you're already assuming I have a side so you can argue against it when I only talked about the media.
> "Distrust everyone, and you’ll believe anyone."
No. Did you just make this up? I don't believe anyone because I distrust them all. That's what "distrust" literally means.
> "Books will help broaden your perspective"
I know. I'm discussing the state of the media, not worried about my perspective.
> "is demonstrably untrue and a falsehood."
Just say "lie". These are same weasley words that media often uses to create a narrative. However my statement can never be a lie regardless of how you feel about it because it's my personal assessment.
> "people’s confidence in reputable sources"
Politifact isn't a news site. Pro Public might be good but, again, I don't care about site reputation. It no longer matters because this authority has been disaggregated and over-extended, a problem caused by the media itself. I look at every piece as an isolated instance and apply trust based on numerous factors, with the publishing organization very far down that list. I find this approach far superior in uncovering the truth.
I also have no interest or responsibility in other people's confidence in the media, and I'll freely express what I think. If their confidence is shaken so easily then maybe the problem is how little trust they already have in the precarious state of the media today. If you disagree and want to still rely on publisher-based reputation then that's your prerogative, but don't project your insecurities or political beliefs onto me.
You understand exactly why I am focusing on President Trump and Fox News.
President Trump is a serial liar (fact), implicitly condones white supremacy (fact), and actively undermines the important norms of our democracy, like elections (fact).
Fox News, for the most part, has been propaganda which is supporting him in that process.
I don't have a bias - rather, I believe in small-d democracy, human rights, and valuing the truth and honest behavior, as much as one can in this world.
Their actions are significantly worse than most other politicans (excepting Trump's political enablers) and news organizations at this time.
No, I don't understand. It doesn't make any specific point other than throwing up a strawman. A strategy used by the media (on all sides).
> "implicitly condones"
This is ignoring the explicit statements and actions to focus on the subjective narrative where anything can be implied. A cheap tactic often used by the media (on all sides).
> "I don't have a bias"
I'm sure you believe this, yet you're the only one vehemently choosing an irrelevant political side in this discussion about the media (of all sides).
> "human rights, and valuing the truth and honest behavior, as much as one can in this world."
Great, me too. Just like the vast majority of people in this world. Are you claiming some kind of moral superiority here? What is this relevant to?
Your comments clearly reveal your bias and the narrative you seek to spread. You use many of the same tactics of the media (again, on all sides) and lack the same introspection. This is my personal assessment by the way, in case you want to argue that it's an "falsehood". I'll end it here since I see nothing more to discuss.
The mainstream news media is actually pretty good at being technically factually correct, but it's so heavily biased that normal people can't see the truth behind the spin. What they take away from a story is the emotion, not the facts. It can be the complete opposite of what really happened.
Subjective language is one way they do it. For example, an organization might have a "culture of abuse". That's not factually wrong but it has no meaning either. When the Christchurch massacre happened, suddenly there was "growing white supremacy". When they want to suggest a person is dishonest, it's "X claims, without evidence, that ...".
Another way is taking advantage of people's inability to distinguish anecdotes from a representative sample. If they want us to believe that crime is increasing, they'll report more on crime so the audience gets the impression that there's more of it. They may even say it's increasing, which it always is if you cherry pick the appropriate time scale.
Then there's using quotes from other people to say whatever the journalist wants to say themselves. A technique for interviewing people is to go fishing for someone to say the right thing, which someone inevitably will if you ask enough people. Or worse, telling their subjects what to say or tricking them into saying they thing they want, perhaps by expressing the same belief themselves and using the human nature of agreeableness to get the subject to say they agree, even if they don't really. Sometimes the quotes are written inline with the rest of the sentence so they feel like facts being asserted by the journalist but aren't subject to the usual standard of accuracy.
I'd say these are more serious problems than factual errors because they're convey high level feelings and overall sense of the state of the world which are being prefabricated and fed to gullible voters so they don't have to think for themselves. With factual errors, you still have to use those facts to conclude something, which is hard mental work.
> When the Christchurch massacre happened, suddenly there was "growing white supremacy".
That white supremacists are expanding their membership and becoming more violent is in fact objectively true and "growing white supremacy" is an objective comment on the political circumstances that led to the Christchurch terrorism attack.
Honestly, and I know this is an ad hominem: you declaring that such a view is "subjective" says a lot more about your politics than it does anything about journalism. So I looked at your HN profile. In fact, looking at your comment from 6 days ago[1]:
> [James Watson] [b]lasphemed against contemporary morality by taking the "wrong" side in the nature-vs-nurture debate. See his Wikipedia page for details.
That is not why James Watson got in trouble. James Watson got in trouble because he said directly that black people were dumber than white people, and that this is due to genetic differences. He has only flawed circumstantial evidence for the former, and absolutely zero for the latter. His claim is strongly disputed by anthropologists and sociologists, who have considerable evidence that African art, technology, and society is just as sophisticated as the European variety. His claim is also disputed by human geneticists - again due to a total lack of evidence.
The fact that you
a) dishonestly sanitized his actual views with a cowardly euphemism, and
b) apparently agree with him that Africans are dumber than Europeans
makes me suspect you aren't "objectively" concerned about the media reporting on increasing white nationalism.
How can it be objectively true when there isn't even an objective definition of white supremacy, let alone knowledge of who subscribes to that belief? But even then, growing on what time scale? It's surely been in decline over the past century but perhaps grew over the previous year or decade? The journalist is still correct if it grew over the past year and otherwise declined over the past decade, or if the reverse is true, so it's a meaningless statement without more details.
> He has only flawed circumstantial evidence for the former
The former is consensus among researchers in the field. The latter is something there's disagreement on and no clear consensus. This is not like claiming the Earth is flat or he achieved cold fusion. It's not clearly incorrect, but is morally wrong by contemporary standards.
The fact that you are blatantly a white supremacist means that your entire first paragraph is dripping in pure bad faith. You are also attacking your own strawman by the way, "growing white supremacy" was your quote! Not something from a journalist. White supremacy has clearly been crowing over the past decade, with increasing membership and activity among white supremacist terrorist groups (in the US) and political parties (in the EU). I guess you can say that it "declined" over the past century, but that's a useless point of view when considering the Christchurch terrorist attack.
> The former is consensus among researchers in the field.
No it isn't. The "consensus among researchers in the field" is that black Americans tend to score more poorly on IQ tests than white Americans. It does not mean black people are actually "dumber" since IQ is not conclusively related to "intelligence" - we don't even know what intelligence is! We also know that you can raise your IQ considerably by practicing IQ tests, that psychological pressures have immense impact on IQ scores, that education increases your IQ score, that being adopted into a richer family can increase your IQ score, and so on. Hence the IQ tests are flawed circumstantial evidence, where the testee's "inherent" and "biological" intelligence is hopelessly entangled with psychological and economic factors that obviously have nothing to do with the individual.
This is like the phrenology arguments of old: it might have been the consensus among researchers in the field that Africans had less cranial CC than Europeans. But there was no evidence that this had anything to do with brainpower, and racists like yourself have always played fast-and-loose with "real fact" versus "evidence-free assertion" to make your point. Now that it's been demonstrated that the 19th century phrenologists were wrong about African/European head size differences, you rarely see people pushing phrenological arguments and they sound self-evidently ridiculous.
> The fact that you are blatantly a white supremacist
No I'm not. But the fact you count me as one, shows that it probably is increasing by way of being redefined to include a broader group of people.
If you want to be pedantic, "dumb" means unable to speak, so obviously we're using the term colloquially here. IQ is our best measure of intelligence and it's reasonable to say "dumber" means "lower IQ". You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater because it doesn't support your belief.
There is clearly an effort to present this story as "debunked" or "false" or "fabricated." The CBS link, as I said, doesn't show anything to be fabricated and is merely a bunch of ad hominem attacks.
Debunking things before investigating them is not good journalism. Period. As I said in the initial comment, the NY Post is not a reputable paper and the story itself seems strange and fake, but guess what? That doesn't matter. The evidence for the story, at this point, seems at least plausible, plausible enough to investigate it. If it's fake, Murdoch and the NY Post will have a massive libel suit to pay for. That's how the legal system works.
> Debunking things before investigating them is not good journalism.
The NYP doesn't appear to have investigated them though. And they don't seem keen on providing access for other people to investigate the authenticity - as people have pointed out, it would be trivial to prove the email authenticity given the DKIM headers. Yet they remain stubbornly absent from the story, no?
> The evidence for the story, at this point, seems at least plausible
It doesn't even pass a simple smell test - who drives cross-country to drop off their laptop at a cheap repair shop and then doesn't pick it up? Another smell test - you have a bunch of emails that you could trivially prove are authentic but for some reason you're avoiding doing that.
Sure but again - why would he use a tiny repair shop on the other side of the country when he lives in Los Angeles? I'm originally from the North West UK but live in London and I take my Macs to the London Apple stores when they need fixing, not John Q Northerner's Chop Shop when I'm visiting family.
Plausibly, because he was having it worked on (maybe to give to a family or friend) then just found/decided that he didn't want to bother with it. People will decide that computer problems are immediate and inconsequential at the drop of a hat, if you've ever worked on them.
I don't know many people who would just go "eh, forget it" for a Macbook at an anonymous repair shop whilst it was still laden with emails and photographs and other personal content. Even if he can shrug off the cost of the laptop itself, I'm reasonably sure that Hunter Biden - long the target of the GOP ire, remember - or at least a lackey would have been back to that shop about 30 seconds after someone realised what had happened.
Assuming Hunter was happy with being the family punching bag. The messages released so far can be interpreted that he resented being the pity party of the biden namesake.
Ok, he resented being the pity party and instead of finding a sympathetic reporter to give some anonymous background or quotes to, he goes cross-country, leaves a laptop in a tiny repair shop, and crosses his fingers that it somehow comes out without making him look like a dick? I mean, this is sillier than the current explanation.
>and unaware of the massive ramifications that happen when real journalists are shown to have published something wrong
Even the source article had to go back to the W administration to find examples. In the age of the Internet news writers know to avoid making a statement of fact while busily implying facts, so later when it turns out when they're wrong they're just HACKS and not also FRAUDS.
This is a golden example of uncharitable commentary.
Instead of slapping a narrative on someone that summarizes all of their ignorance, maybe take a tactic that doesn’t make you stick out as an unlikeable, unpersuasive partisan.
Listen, consider and dispute what someone says.
Your strawman summary of a hypothetical dumb person is only nourishes the narcissist who hit reply.
Evidence is always a back-and-forth. Enough specifics have been presented that the media should be demanding to know what, specifically, is fabricated. Joe Biden, running for office, should be able to offer specific denials, explanations, and clarifications.
The question we are tryong to answer is: was Hunter Biden using his dad to get some easy money; or was Joe Biden using his son to hold the payouts? The former is a slimy gray area; the latter outright corruption and highly compromising.
Should we apply this same rule to the NYT's article on Trump's tax returns? They never proved authenticity other than to say that they had "an anonymous source." It seems one group of people are completely fine with accepting the NYT article on faith, but dismiss the New York Post article as obviously fabricated.
Isn't there some evidence? Like the pictures? Sure, the emails could be fake and the photos real, but it does seem to indicate that they have at least obtained some sort of computer from Biden?
Also, neither Joe or Hunter Biden have denied any of it so far, AFAIK.
> Also, neither Joe or Hunter Biden have denied any of it so far, AFAIK.
If they comment - even to blanket deny - it gives the story weight which is exactly what the people who planted it want because then they can spin it out for a few more days/weeks.
Better to keep quiet - like with the court packing question - and let other people kick this ridiculous farce into touch.
If all the emails and such are fake, are you saying it’s a better strategy to just not comment on it versus just releasing a statement that it’s all fabricated (because you know it is)?
Seems like a strong denial would go much further here.
> > are you saying it’s a better strategy to just not comment on it
> Yes.
> > Seems like a strong denial would go much further here.
> "But he would say that, wouldn't he? Why would he deny it if it was fake?"
That would be much easier to verify in that case. It seems more that the biden admin knows that any refutation of the content of the emails would backfire when they are proven to be true. In that case claiming ignorance is the correct nice.
I think it pretty much doesn't matter what he says or does - people will believe the angle they believe and that's presumably what the people behind this are hoping will carry for three weeks until election night.
