Even if that scenario is true, there is zero evidence to corroborate it, nor has there been any concluded official investigation into the matter. I don't think it's fair for Twitter to execute that portion of their policy based on assumption alone.

> Even if that scenario is true, there is zero evidence to corroborate it,

I'm not saying that there is.

That's just my understanding of Twitter's reasoning, not a defense of them or anyone else.

Don't shoot the messenger, eh?

There's zero evidence to corroborate anything, though, including plausible scenarios where publishing this information is either illegal or foreign electoral interference or both. And, as far as it goes, not even the Post's story has any evidence to verify it. Even the emails' authenticity is still in question, which would be trivial to verify if Giuliani and the Post simply released the raw emails instead of image files.

Meanwhile Steve Scully was suspended, reportedly because his twitter account was not hacked, as previously claimed, so sometimes the "hack" claims are spurious and need time to be sorted out.

"I sure hope this computer repairmen scans the data of our abandoned computer, realizes what it contains, and turns the data over to Rudy Giuliani or equivalent."

If the store owner was in on it, then he's taking a heckuva gamble on this working out right, with relatively little (known) reward.

The claimed story seems simpler.

That seems like an extraordinarily risky undertaking. You would certainly be found out and face real consequences.

Remember the guy got the FBI involved, which would make the whole operation a federal crime.

Look up the Skripal poisoning. Russian agents have operated in NATO countries before to do stuff like this.

That said, the “hack” theory is pretty weak, I believe it mainly relies on a coincidence that Burisma was hacked last year https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/us/politics/russian-hacke...

However, the computer shop guy claims the laptop was dropped off in early 2019 and this article says the Russians hacked Burisma in November 2019. The email PDFs themselves provided by the NY Post are dated September 2019, so stuff doesn’t add up here.

There is no shortage of Republican operatives that will risk jail time to further their cause. See [1] for example.

And regarding the FBI, they were hoping that the FBI would open some sort of investigation, which would give the issue much more credibility. But that failed, so plan b was to just hand it over to NY Post.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/1/21497823/jacob-wohl-jack-...

If that were true, we would already be hearing denials about those emails. The fact that we haven't, indicates to me that they are instead going to tack on the "official Biden schedule shows he didn't meet with this guy" line because the emails are legit.

It's perfectly plausible that the Biden campaign has no idea if they're authentic or not, because neither he nor anyone on his campaign were on them. The only people who actually know if they're authentic or not are Hunter Biden, the sender, and anyone who has the emails. Which, incidentally, includes the NYP, who could mathematically prove their authenticity instantly by simply publishing them in the raw. In fact, if the NYP did any due diligence at all, they already verified the emails themselves. Which raises the question: why are they publishing just the images?

My bet is that the NYP didn't bother to verify the emails, because they don't even know how to do basic due diligence on these types of things. (I would guess they're authentic though, FWIW.)

Could be a "drip drip" play - wait for the people in question to explicitly deny the authenticity of the messages, then drop the raws for maximum impact. The longer they sit on this, though, the less likely that is, and I'm not sure if I trust the Post to be savvy enough for that kind of thing.

That's exactly what this is. 'Expect more bombshells in the coming days' -- Rudy Guilliani

> Hunter Biden

You're right - my comment was written under the assumption that the Biden camp has enough access to Hunter that they could verify the authenticity of the emails. I'll add: I would be shocked if that were not the case.

Regardless of my personal feelings about the NYP, my guess is they probably did verify to some extent and I agree that they are probably authentic.

I can understand the temptation of doing this sort of "slow the spread" if you're a social media platform faced with Trump, my worry is when that gets turned around and deployed against the Left, or against anti-trust, etc. I'm already getting near daily push notifications from Uber telling me which way to vote in California elections, I'm terrified of what the future holds where Twitter et al. can ban certain messages from even being sent to friends.

My mental model of Hunter Biden is a well-coiffed crack addict, who probably has said and done a thousand things and as likely as not has no clue what scams he was engaged in in 2015. He could potentially verify the emails; he could hem and haw out of embarrassment; he could lie; he could have himself lost access to the emails, which were, after all, downloaded onto the laptop he ostensibly lost.

And suppose you're a campaign operative, and you've been tasked with finding out from Hunter whether the emails are authentic or not. He swears that they're not. Next question: do you bet the campaign on his honesty?

> my guess is they probably did verify to some extent

Probably verifying to some extent is frustrating when it's trivial to mathematically prove authenticity via DKIM.

As far as social media and big tech goes, as soon as they took on this role of moral arbiters of the world, they signed onto an endless stream of these controversies. This is the world we live in now.

> he could have himself lost access to the emails, which were, after all, downloaded onto the laptop he ostensibly lost. And suppose you're a campaign operative, and you've been tasked with finding out from Hunter whether the emails are authentic or not. He swears that they're not. Next question: do you bet the campaign on his honesty?

This was in 2019 - I'm assuming that the emails are backed up somewhere.

> they took on this role of moral arbiters of the world

Who gave them this role? I certainly didn't and I will donate to anyone who supports taking this role from them.

> This was in 2019 - I'm assuming that the emails are backed up somewhere.

Where? The laptop was lost in 2019, but the emails are from 2015. At some point they were on his company's mail servers, though whether they're still there would depend on their mail retention policy, which in my experience is often as short as 2 years. Even if they do still have it, going from campaign to Hunter Biden to ??? to IT personnel can take awhile.

> Who gave them this role? I certainly didn't and I will donate to anyone who supports taking this role from them.

I mean, if you're on Facebook/Twitter/etc, you are giving them this role, it's just a tradeoff you find acceptable for convenience.

They already said precisely that.