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.
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.
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.