Or, taking a cue from the British: The New York Pissers.
(1) No
(2) Yes
(3) Sadly, no.
Bumping it because this seems the best place to put it - The State Department has sanctioned Russia for the 2020 disinformation campaign:
Since at least 2019, Derkach and his associates have leveraged U.S. media, U.S.-based social media platforms, and influential U.S. persons to spread misleading and unsubstantiated allegations that current and former U.S. officials engaged in corruption, money laundering, and unlawful political influence in Ukraine.
And if I read another article correctly - these are specifically the people working with Rudy.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/11/politics/us-russia-sanctions/index.html
Surprise…not! The Times finally admits Hunter Biden's laptop is real
Care to define “real” for us ?
As far as I can tell, here is the money quote from the NY Times article that has got the NY Post and eenerms so excited
People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.
I am underwhelmed.
Wait. So there are emails “… about Burisma …” on the laptop of Hunter Biden, a (AFAICT) rather worthless poster child for the Peter Principle, who also just happened to be on the Board of Directors OF Burisma ?
Wow.
Smoking gun stuff, that.
eenerms: was it that, or is there something else in particular to which we should point our attention ?
Still waiting to find out what exactly the information on the laptop is and why any of us should give a good goddam about it. You know if Rudy had found even the slightest inkling of anything incriminating he would have been shouting it from the rooftops Four Seasons Landscaping parking lot before the election.
Instead we got nothing but vague insinuations for years. There’s nothing there. But keep hoping, suckers.
I think this is the smoking gun you’re looking for, from the article
My God, Hunter Biden had a laptop? And there were emails on it? Stop the presses! How will the country ever survive the scourge of a man with a laptop and emails?
That’s my sentiment as well.
I’ve tried following along.
“Hunter Biden is Joe’s son!”
“He had a drug problem!”
“He tried to leverage his father’s job to make lots of money!”
Beyond that, I’ve haven’t heard of any dots to even try to connect. Is it unseemly for a politician’s son to leverage his nepotism? Of course it is. And it was that way when George W. did it in the 1980s, too.
But there’s no apparent influence peddling that even occurred. At best, I’ve heard of some references to “the big guy”’when Hunter was soliciting business.
And there’s even some speculation that that isn’t even a Joe Biden reference!
So … this is basically a “Whatever we do, we’re going to play by the rules” statement (from a Georgetown/Yale Law grad), in contradistinction to DJT’s
‘I would like you to do us a favor, though’
To Zelensky … when he was threatening to withhold some $390M in military assistance … to Ukraine … who was [wait for it] concerned about the Russian military’s ultimate aims ?
Do I have that right ?
Oh, Hunter … What ever will we do with you ?!?
This is just the break the McCain campaign has been waiting for!!
What should be in doubt is any information that came from the laptop itself. The chain of custody is unreliable. It would be relatively trivial for someone with the right computer experience to modify the data on the laptop to be whatever they want it to be and hide their tracks. Some data can be externally verified, like emails that can be verified with the email server and with the recipient, but data that is only on the laptop would be suspect. Anyone who had access to the laptop could do something like create a Word document with whatever they want in it.
I’m just gonna start countering this one with my own conspiracy theory that hunter was hired by Burisma as a possible way to entrap him in scandal.
I have my own theory that it really is Hunter’s laptop data, but it didn’t come by way of Hunter leaving it with that shady repair shop. Rudy Giuliani was given the data by the Russians in Ukraine, and they had stolen the data while Hunter was in Ukraine. Rudy’s team arranged the bogus Connecticut repair shop as a way of laundering the source.
So I think it really is his data, but what is supposed to be incriminating about it?
I just read WaPo’s article about their forensic processing of the laptop. It all seems very messy. I think the site is paywalled but I also think you get X free articles a month.
The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post. Neither found clear evidence of tampering in their examinations, but some of the records that might have helped verify contents were not available for analysis, they said. The Post was able in some instances to find documents from other sources that matched content on the laptop that the experts were not able to assess.
Among the reasons for the inconclusive findings was sloppy handling of the data, which damaged some records. The experts found the data had been repeatedly accessed and copied by people other than Biden over nearly three years. The MacBook itself is now in the hands of the FBI, which is investigating whether Biden properly reported income from business dealings.
Most of the data obtained by The Post lacks cryptographic features that would help experts make a reliable determination of authenticity, especially in a case where the original computer and its hard drive are not available for forensic examination. Other factors, such as emails that were only partially downloaded, also stymied the security experts’ efforts to verify content.
…
Soon after that period of inactivity — and months after the laptop itself had been taken into FBI custody — three new folders were created on the drive. Dated Sept. 1 and 2, 2020, they bore the names “Desktop Documents,” “Biden Burisma” and “Hunter. Burisma Documents.”
Williams also found records on the drive that indicated someone may have accessed the drive from a West Coast location in October 2020, little more than a week after the first New York Post stories on Biden’s laptop appeared.
Over the next few days, somebody created three additional folders on the drive, titled, “Mail,” “Salacious Pics Package” and “Big Guy File” — an apparent reference to Joe Biden.
(note to mods: this is about 15% of a very long article)
That last bit is pretty telling. The handling of this device has been insane.
With regards to the dates of the files and directories on the disk, that can be totally faked. The fact that the dates are after the story was released is just because whoever made the directories was a novice. Anyone with a moderate amount of Windows system experience could have the dates on the directories be anything they want. An advanced hacker could make the hard drive look however they wanted it to look. Nothing on the drive should be viewed as reliable in and of itself. No matter the dates, contents of the files, etc., unless there’s external validation, everything on the drive should be considered spoofed and faked.
I mean, pretty much, yeah. Assuming he wasn’t, you know, being given an official White House job, or being given high level security clearances over the strong objections of intelligence professionals. And assuming there was not only “no smoking gun” but “no plausible allegations” that Trump had been involved in any way in these arguably unethical but not illegal activities…I wouldn’t think it’s a big deal.
Of course, there’s an asymmetry here, in that, having decided it’s not reasonable to attack Trump on this issue, I could just go on to attack him based on some of the dozens of other serious crimes probably or definitely committed by him and his close associates. You guys don’t really have that option, so keep flogging that laptop story.
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