However, Greenwald's argument definitely should be how it works if a media organization cares about truth and open debate. In this case, it seems very hard to believe that a story -- written by a credible journalist, with a long track record, who literally founded the organization -- was garbage.

I think Glenn hoped to create a media entity that regarded truth as the measure of merit of a story vs. how well it promoted a cause and ads/subscriptions. Now that the experiment has failed so obviously, good for him for moving on.

From my position, they exercised the bare-minimum duties of any good editor to shut down stories they don't believe meet the standards they set for themselves.

And for exercising that duty, they are leaving clicks, ad impressions, and probably a good amount of money on the table.

Edit; he did: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...

With all this said, IMHO the style of the narrative also contributes to the ever increasing aggravation: why are people so focused on what can or cannot be construed as fodder for character assassination, when ideally an election is supposed to be about discussing the merits of different platforms. Investigative journalism certainly has its place, but in the context of the imminent elections and the political landscape, it would do a whole lot better to simply publish a down-to-earth for-dummies side-by-side comparison of candidate platforms, to dissuade pitchfork-induced action and encourage proper level-headed consideration by undecided voters.

But being realistic, at least until the upcoming election is over they've reached a point of no return. 4 more years of Trump would exclude U.S. from international foreign politics.

> But that claim [that Biden wanted the prosecutor fired so his replacement would better fight corruption] does not even pass the laugh test. The U.S. and its European allies are not opposed to corruption by their puppet regimes. They are allies with the most corrupt regimes on the planet, from Riyadh to Cairo, and always have been. Since when does the U.S. devote itself to ensuring good government in the nations it is trying to control? If anything, allowing corruption to flourish has been a key tool in enabling the U.S. to exert power in other countries and to open up their markets to U.S. companies.

I don’t even know what to say other than that that’s an absurd caricature of US foreign policy. Yes, the US sometimes allies itself with corrupt regimes. That doesn’t mean it’s not interested in fighting corruption, especially in a potential future NATO member.

This is paternalistic to the extreme. Do we get to vote on whether we want such a society or is it just imposed by editorial fiat?

> spread more disinformation the week before an election.

You read the draft. Could you point out the explicit falsehoods to me?

Or are you saying we should stop the spread of inconvenient opinion pieces?

If social media doesn’t turn your crank, start your own publication and establish your own editorial fiat. HOWEVER, there’s a problem - if your editing sucks, you won’t attract enough readers to maintain high standards. That’s kind of the shit part of the free market - you can’t just go push a substandard product and scream about “my freedom”.

Ultimately, this draft needed some work and if you go through this thread, you can read some of the Intercept’s own comments. Personally, I found the section about possible disinformation to need more meat. The connection between the Vice President and the company is too tenuous. The article needs to cover WHY experts think it is disinformation, even just to strengthen the claim that it isn’t.

It doesn’t much matter what you want to read, but an editor still had to find balance and appropriate context. Otherwise, publications suck...

Without getting into the irony of the fact that the article we're discussing was blocked on social media, I want to make clear: I don't want to abandon editorial rigor.

But I do think that electioneering concerns should be irrelevant to the context of whether you present information in the public interest. Just as reporting on Trump's tax returns or the Podesta emails were in the public interest, so too are the Hunter Biden emails.

There has not been a historical problem of major publications publishing Russian falsehoods. The "fake news" epidemic is mostly quickly stood up sites propagating on Facebook.

Nor did I see any evidence that Glenn was connected to a Russian disinformation effort. If that were to change (say, if he were found to be receiving payments from the Russian government), then I would support removing him as a writer outright.

> an editor still had to find balance and appropriate context.

Agreed. My claim here is that the editorial staff of The Intercept failed at this goal and their suggestions were not balanced.

On the subject of the Hunter Biden emails, there are a lot of problems with reporting on them. The first is that when you look at the full spectrum of Giuliani’s involvement, the laptop genesis story is a little weird. The second is that copies of the hard drive have not been widely disseminated to news rooms.

The laptop genesis story is relevant and the Greenwald article needed to devote more analysis just because of how weird it is. And as for the hard drives, journalists have their own sets of egos and biases.

Both of those points are relevant if you want to question why the media isn’t reporting on them. The laptop genesis story is weird enough to call for fact checking and verification but the hard drives aren’t available. Sadly that makes for weak articles and removes any exclusive coverage motivation to cover the emails.

Where isn’t that balanced?

In the age of social media nobody waits for that and it becomes a race to publish, well, anything first. The filter is gone.

Really? Where can I inspect that contract? Clearly, the terms that allow him to publish elsewhere if TI doesn't want to publish his stuff that he claims exist seem at odds with the claim that there are terms that he is free to publish whatever he wants in TI without TI exercising editorial control.

I suspect that the story he is painting about the contract terms is misleading, as it makes no sense as presented.

What we have right now is Greenwald's word, which given that A) I can't think of a time he's published an outright falsehood, and B) the letter from the editor didn't deny any of the facts but instead just jumped to describing the process as Greenwald having a "tantrum", I'm inclined to believe at face value.

> Clearly, the terms that allow him to publish elsewhere if TI doesn't want to publish his stuff that he claims exist seem at odds with the claim that there are terms that he is free to publish whatever he wants in TI without TI exercising editorial control.

Or it's a clause that if they mutually agree that TI isn't the best forum for an article Greenwald has written, he's explicitly allowed to take it to another forum, in contrast to the normal staff writer contract provisions.

I promise to write a proper reply and don’t want you to take my silence as a sign of disrespect. It’s been fun engaging with you and I appreciate your brain - I’ll edit this comment when I get back.

Seriously thanks, this has been a lot of fun!! :)

Edit - Hey friends, meowface genuinely doesn’t deserve those downvoted. They are smart - I don’t agree with them, but they’ve made some strong points in excellent ways.

As for the comments about downvotes, call me naive, but I yearn for a world where we comment when we disagree but reserve up and downvotes for statements about the quality of a comment. I don't agree with you, but I upvoted you because you made me think. Ultimately, that's what I really look for from Hacker News. I don't know everything, but I have my own unique experience. If I'm wrong, please correct me....:)

Incidentally, if you want to continue this engagement off site, let me tell you a bit about my perspective. I used to publish an indie magazine that ended up winning some awards. At one point, I was tasked with editing a submission by a high ranking gang member who wanted to write about why he doesn't like the police and why his gang is a better choice for kids. I had to tell a story to make advertising dollars and it was a hell of a story. But our magazine ran contrary to a municipal bylaw so I had to somewhat tone it all down. It was complicated and to this day, I believe that I failed the story. Anyways, I think I bring a slightly different perspective (as do you) and I would appreciate the opportunity to learn from you.

I feel like I’m missing about 500 words. If Greenwald would tighten his prose and strengthen the persuasion, this article could rule.

>If Greenwald would tighten his prose and strengthen the persuasion, this article could rule.

Holy non sequitur Batman!

That’s flimsy journalism. Expecting better out of a journalist is far from voluntary ignorance.

It seems like the information is really up in the air, it will take time to determine what conclusions from it are legitimate and false. The information itself is quite clearly real, at least, I haven't seen any specific piece of information in regards to this claimed as false, just the whole subject referred to as "disinformation".

https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-4393-d7aa-af77-579f9...

We should be very careful about disinformation, but another form of information warfare and "active measures" which I'm sure Russian intelligence is and has been deploying is the spread of skepticism of true information and belief that any or all information could be disinformation. Division, discord, fear, uncertainty, and doubt are the goals; not just falsehoods. All of these erode a sense of shared reality. Just as any claims about a political figure need support, so do claims of disinformation.

So, I think it's diatribe time. Could you quote the parts of the article (with full context) that seem like disinformation?

I’ll write you the reply you deserve but have to step out. Again though friend, you’re a good person and I respect your mind.

Edit - Seriously friend, I’m having a rough day in my personal life. I feel really lucky that I found you to engage with and get my mind off of things. You’re cool. Thanks for being cool. I’ll pay you back one day for this.

I still don't think there's anything like blind acceptance of disinformation in the article, but he could've hedged certain parts a bit more.

Also, I kind of regret some of my earlier comments. I still think the way the media and Twitter handled this is absolutely ridiculous, and I really don't think there's a disinformation aspect to this article (bias and dis/misinformation are very different), but I kind of jumped to the conclusion about the rigor of the article after only reading about half of it (mostly the parts about the media). I think the truth about the article's rigor probably lies in the middle between your and my initial opinions of it, and similarly I think proper rigor kind of lies between Greenwald's and the editor's opinions. I prefer Taibbi's reporting on it (and Taibbi's reporting in general).

And to be clear, as I mentioned in my other comments, I've never seen very good evidence of corruption on Joe's part; my concern is pretty much just with the emails and the media's handling of them.

edit: Actually, I just went ahead and removed my very initial comment and another one. I was kind of shooting from the hip, though I definitely still stand by the parts about the media, and probably most of my other comments so far. But I might change my mind tomorrow about some of the other comments, and this definitely isn't the ideal platform for an extremely lengthy and careful debate.

"Beyond that, the Journal's columnist Kimberly Strassel reviewed a stash of documents..."---this is an opinion article, why isn't the newsroom covering this explosive story?

"All of these new materials, the authenticity of which has never been disputed by Hunter Biden or the Biden campaign"---absence of a denial is not proof of its validity.

"Facebook, through a long-time former Democratic Party operative, vowed to suppress the story pending its “fact-check,” one that has as of yet produced no public conclusions."---an unnamed source told me that Facebook is really trying to push the election to Biden…

Even if Greenwald is sincere in his attempts to daylight the truth, he increasingly seems unaware or unwilling to accept that he might be or is being used as a useful idiot by foreign agents.

He explicitly explains why he thinks it does serve as some additional evidence of such, and I agree with it. It's not proof, but it's evidence:

>Why is the failure of the Bidens to claim that these emails are forged so significant? Because when journalists report on a massive archive, they know that the most important event in the reporting's authentication process comes when the subjects of the reporting have an opportunity to deny that the materials are genuine. Of course that is what someone would do if major media outlets were preparing to publish, or in fact were publishing, fabricated or forged materials in their names; they would say so in order to sow doubt about the materials if not kill the credibility of the reporting.

>The silence of the Bidens may not be dispositive on the question of the material’s authenticity, but when added to the mountain of other authentication evidence, it is quite convincing: at least equal to the authentication evidence in other reporting on similarly large archives.

----

>Facebook, through a long-time former Democratic Party operative, vowed to suppress the story pending its “fact-check,” one that has as of yet produced no public conclusions."---an unnamed source told me that Facebook is really trying to push the election to Biden…

He doesn't name him in this article for some reason, but he links another article he wrote, where he explains this: https://theintercept.com/2020/10/15/facebook-and-twitter-cro...

>Just two hours after the story was online, Facebook intervened. The company dispatched a life-long Democratic Party operative who now works for Facebook — Andy Stone, previously a communications operative for Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, among other D.C. Democratic jobs — to announce that Facebook was “reducing [the article’s] distribution on our platform”: in other words, tinkering with its own algorithms to suppress the ability of users to discuss or share the news article. The long-time Democratic Party official did not try to hide his contempt for the article, beginning his censorship announcement by snidely noting: “I will intentionally not link to the New York Post.”

Seems like a temper tantrum to me, even if the journalism is legitimate. It could very well be these claims are clickbait for the journalist to strike out on his own without the publisher.

Source? Your link doesn't say anything about basic edit suggestions.

Looking at the emails [0], this appears to be strong editorializing (much of it far from clearcut) for what (I believe) is an opinion piece.

[0]: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...?

It looks like a tantrum to me.

As you say, he was the one who first began displaying the unprofessional behavior. He probably should have just sent like half of his follow-up email (the citations of the email compared to the article) and given them a chance to reply. But I also understand why he felt he was being unduly pressured and why staying there wouldn't have been wise for him.

I am also very familiar with the editing process. I'm not saying that the editing suggestions are beyond what you would ever see in an editorial context, but I would never characterize them as "basic edit suggestions."

Much of the quibbling in the edits to me suggests ulterior motive, like the rejection of the idea that there has been "suppression" of the story (there obviously has).

And if you're familiar with the editing process, you'd know that edits are not always completely apolitical, I know people who have been asked to make edits for political reasons in major national publications.

I think it is hard to claim this is just equal editorial scrutiny, given the publication of multiple false claims around the Hunter Biden story (ie. "very likely to be Russian disinformation", etc.).

> the editor is nothing less than professional/polite

To me, I don't necessarily always side with the actor who appears to be more professional, though I do agree that Greenwald comes off as rude in the email.

The Intercept said it had no doubt that Greenwald would "launch a new media venture where he will face no collaboration with editors — such is the era of Substack and Patreon."

"In that context, it makes good business sense for Glenn to position himself as the last true guardian of investigative journalism and to smear his longtime colleagues and friends as partisan hacks," the Intercept statement reads.

"We get it. But facts are facts and The Intercept record of fearless, rigorous, independent journalism speaks for itself."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2020/10/29/glenn-greenw...

Any way you look at it, this is a terrible response. Jealous much? “People are willing to pay with actual money for Greenwald’s writing. Can you imagine?!? How shameful!” Even the post-blog-revolution news media companies don’t get it.

The Intercept did have a record. It was in large part due to Greenwald. He’s leaving, so with him goes a large part of their reputation.

The truth is, news doesn't happen overnight. If anything sufficiently important is to be determined true, it needs to happen over a course of weeks or months, as people process the information, debate with each other, and come to a consensus on what it means for the country. Just because we can have this conversation with smaller and more rapid steps due to technology doesn't mean that we can get to the destination any faster.

So, in my opinion, burying this story is wrong. Amplifying it is also wrong. If Trump truly believes this is corruption, he should open an investigation, one that will be widely mocked as a political hit job and will still not finish until well into the next term. But, if you care about your country, you do it anyway. Not to win an election but because it's the right thing to do. I guess we'll see what happens.

The news media is. The public (especially, given the pace of early voting, this year) doesn't seem to be, as much.

Anyway, my broader point is that Greenwald, and likely many others, feel immense pressure to get this out before the election, so that people have "all the relevant information", but the truth is, we never have all the relevant information because information exists in a continuum not a binary space.

Edit: Jesus christ those replies. This is what I'm talking about. You're reaching North Korea levels of indoctrination.

I used to have a lot of respect for Greenwald, it's been disappointing to see his evolution since the Snowden revelations.

Anyway here's the intercept's response. Will you read it?

https://static.theintercept.com/amp/glenn-greenwald-resigns-...

"We have no doubt that Glenn will go on to launch a new media venture where he will face no collaboration with editors — such is the era of Substack and Patreon. In that context, it makes good business sense for Glenn to position himself as the last true guardian of investigative journalism and to smear his longtime colleagues and friends as partisan hacks."

Honestly, coming from not known who ether party was in this before this hackernews post. The intercept comes off as in the wrong to me. However, I could be being manipulated.

I am interested. Do you think these emails will come out as faked? I think even if they are real it doesn't change who should be president. But shouldn't we always be watching our elected leaders closely? What is the line between not publishing something because it is wrong and not publishing something because it might be true, but it goes too far against your beliefs.

The problem however is the convenience of whatever bullshit-du-jour is on the menu just in time for the election, by an administration that's been crying wolf at every corner since before it even started.

You can't get your "leader watch" news from agencies that are so blatantly corrupt, especially when they conveniently protect the leader who's got it way worse than the one they're accusing.

That this is a discussion is mind blowing to me. Your house is on fire and half the people in it are shit-talking the firefighter.

DKIM is already confirmed by an independent security researcher: https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim. This is why Biden is not denying this, he knows the entire _three_ troves are real, dick pics and all. Graham, by the way, stated on October 14 that he's voting for Biden.

I... kind of think this wouldn't be the first time?

Greenwald rose to fame on the back of Snowden's revelations, and I don't want to downplay how important that was. But much of his journalism since then has had, well, a pretty conspiratorial no one else is writing this because THEY don't want you to know the TRUTH! slant to it, and he is always specifically -- often, it seems, exclusively -- concerned with failings of The Left, either "The Left is baselessly accusing The Right of something" (cf. Russian interference with the 2016 election) or "The Left is suppressing an important story that makes them look bad" (cf. Hunter Biden's magical mystery laptop).

And, look, sometimes THEY don't want you to know the TRUTH! is true! It was true with Snowden! But the boring, pedestrian reality is that most of the time when someone is the lone voice with the "big story" that other major news outlets are "suppressing," it's not because those other outlets are afraid to offend their Deep State, it's because the story doesn't have a lot of there there.

I mean, the Hunter Biden laptop story starts with asking us to believe that he dropped off three personal laptops for repair at a small computer repair shop, in a different state than he lived or worked in, and then forgot about those laptops, and that then those laptops were subpoenaed by the FBI and the shop owner illicitly made copies of the laptop's hard drive and that made its way to a tabloid -- the only publication that would run it, apparently -- by way of Rudy Guiliani. I'm just saying, it's not hard to imagine reasons other than they're part of the deep state conspiracy, man! that the Washington Post took a pass on this.

The thing is, this kind of story appeals to Greenwald because he's become -- or maybe always was -- the kind of person who doesn't believe he's doing his job properly unless he's taking the contrary position. Well, actually, there's no evidence Russia wanted Trump to win the election, they really wanted Clinton. Well, actually, there are no far-right conspiracies promoted by Trump, just far-left conspiracies against Trump. As New York (the magazine) put it a couple years ago,

It is of course important to keep one’s own side honest and to prevent conspiracy theories or bad arguments from taking hold. The problem is that the search for anti-Trump conspiracy theories is the whole of Greenwald’s analysis. He sees, or allows himself to see, nothing but crazy charges against Trump, to the point where there is no room in his field of vision for Trump himself. And so it seems obvious for him to casually observe that the conspiracy theories of the far right have disappeared, when in reality they have more power and influence than ever before.

That was written in 2018,[1] but I don't see much sign of that attitude changing since. Glenn is now stomping out of The Intercept because they challenged him to back up his "well, actually, this Hunter Biden stuff is a really big deal" contrarian take, which proves that they're part of the deep state conspiracy theory too, man.

I know this is harsh on Greenwald. He's absolutely correct that the conspiratorial mindset isn't something found just in right-wing circles; it's something I noticed occasionally many years ago when I was a more regular listener to Pacifica Radio. The problem is that he has repeatedlty demonstrated his own susceptibility to that mindset, and it's a real hard one to break out of. Removing himself from all editorial constraints and pushback is... not likely to help.

[1]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/02/how-glenn-greenwald-...

Not only since then, but also before then. Unclaimed Territory was sensational first, news second. I mean I read and liked it, post-9/11 everyone was desperate for any views not drip-fed by the Bush administration. But if you had told me this guy's resignation from his own news startup would be pitched as the presidential-crisis-cum-journalistic-scandal in the 2020 elections I wouldn't've believed a word.

Right now it's an existential referendum and if we choose survival we can return back to to such matters.

All these BS stories are coming out right now, with days to go in the election, so that they can't be debunked and/or placed in context. It's "but what about her e-mails" all over again.

Edit, relevant: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/how-fake-persona-laid-...

"Rosemont Seneca Bohai Morgan Stanley bank records show Hunter Biden, while simultaneously serving on Burisma’s board, received $708,302 between June 2014 and October 2015 from Rosemont Seneca Bohai, for undisclosed reasons, in a series of payments that ranged from $10,000 to $150,979 per month"

https://checkyourfact.com/2019/10/17/fact-check-hunter-biden...

"FBI investigating Hunter Biden over money-laundering allegations: report"

https://nypost.com/2020/10/29/fbi-investigating-hunter-biden...

Imagine that you are in charge the the Biden campaign, and that the story is false. What action would you take? It looks like its not gaining traction on its own, would you really direct the public's attention back to it?

Or you'll have to remind me where Snowden, possibly the most thorough and careful whistleblower of the last century, talked about the "deep state" or any of that QAnon shit.

The revelations with Snowden were in the details of things people already knew at a high level. People knew about the NSA's Echelon program, but didn't know things like how they tapped the un-encrypted intra-datacenter links.

Your current administration.

If your country burns, it takes a lot of other countries with it. You'll understand that we actually want what's good for you.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-in-cyprus-was-behind-ke...

The NY Post is a tabloid. One of their headlines this week was that Miley Cyrus was once chased down by a UFO...

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/s...

The "fake" dossier actually existed, as did its contents. What got leaked was an unfinished internal draft that was never meant to be released. Buzzfeed was the company that published the dossier; the NYT simply reported on the dossier after it became a big issue. Given the nature of the allegations, multiple agencies in the U.S. attempted to verify the allegations. They were able to corroborate some but not all of the allegations in the dossier, as discussed in the Mueller Report.

Shortly after it was published by Buzzfeed: "How a Sensational, Unverified Dossier Became a Crisis for Donald Trump"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/politics/donald-trump-...

Reputation trails actions. Overall Greenwald seems like a remarkably average journalist with strong rhetorical chops who lucked into a couple good stories. But he's spent the past few years squandering that social capital on a mix of conspiracy and irrelevance, and this may be his bankruptcy.

> He gave up his career as a lawyer to do what he does.

This means absolutely nothing. If anything lawyers aren't especially known as paragons of truth! (And that's fine for a lawyer where the adversarial system holds, but can make you a bit shit as a journalist.)

Sure, bud. Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist is all of a sudden "average", just because he dared to ask questions and expose near-airtight censorship by mass media and Big Tech.

https://www.newsweek.com/glenn-greenwald-legendary-progressi...

Your seemingly single criterion for trust still doesn't give the weight to Greenwald.

Mediocre people win prizes, and smart people do dumb things. Greenwald is not a reliable person to carry the entire institution of journalism on his shoulders as you keep insisting he does.

(Newsweek, by the way, has been owned and operated by Olivet / David Jang's Community cult for several years now. It has no connection to the previous magazine of the same name.)

I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced by this. some people value influence more than money.

The US government has officially said there's no Russian involvement in the recent Biden leak and it's been vouched for by Tony Bobulinski who definitely has close ties to the Biden family, yet it's not publishable?

That's as partisan as it gets and deserves to be called out.

EDIT: Do the downvoters have a reason other than ideology, tribalism, and conspiracy theories?

[edit] I must say it is both amazing as well as abhorring to see a post asking for sources to a statement which goes counter the current narrative to be downvoted (currently at -4) as if the question is somehow offensive. Wake up, folks, the truth shall set you free. Seeking for it is not a crime, at least not yet. [/edit]

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/newly-de...

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/fisa-investigation

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/453384-fbis-spreadsh...

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/aug/16/fbi-declass...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/us/politics/carter-page-f...

Each new release like the FBI spreadsheet on the dossier gets more and more to the point that it was a knowing hit piece.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fbi-declassifies-steele-dos...

Even the investigating agents themselves were buying liability insurance and saying it was a BS hit job:

> “[D]oing all this election research – I think some of these guys want a [C]linton presidency,”

> “[T]he new AG might have some questions….then yada yada yada…we all get screwed,”

> “I’m tellying [sic] man, if this thing ever gets FOIA’d, there are going to be some tough questions asked,” one agent wrote. “[A]nd a great deal of those will be related to Brian having a scope way outside the boundaries of logic[.]”

> “[J]esus,” an agent wrote back. “[T]rump was right. [S]till not put together….why do we do this to ourselves. [W]hat is wrong with these people[?]?

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/24/trump-was-right-explosi...

As to the inevitable "partisan sources", I'd love to offer something from a "neutral" or left-leaning source, but they censor all the things instead.

> The Special Counsel's report, made public on April 18, 2019, examined numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials but concluded that, though the Trump campaign welcomed the Russian activities and expected to benefit from them, there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy or coordination charges against Trump or his associates.

Mueller kept his investigation very narrow in that sense, and failed to pursue various avenues of investigation, including not even looking at any financial ties between Trump and Russia (of which there are many, as confessed by Eric Trump). In fact the Mueller Report notes that the Trump, his campaign, and his associates obstructed the investigation by lying and destroying evidence. So a finding of insufficient evidence doesn't really put the issue to bed. Mueller didn't even interview Trump in person, and Trump lied to Mueller in his written responses to questions.

In fact, the Republican-chaired Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a later report which expands on the Mueller probe, and it more or less confirms what those who alleged "collusion" were saying all along. Remember, the original position Trump took was that there were zero contacts between his campaign and Russia. No contacts, no deals.

The Mueller Report and later the SSCI report lay out over 100 contacts between Trump and Russian intelligence and government officials. In particular:

- Trump's son, son in law, and campaign manager met with a convicted Russian Spy in Trump's house on behalf of the Russian government. The Trump Campaign was very eager to meet with her. The spy laid out specific terms: in exchange for dirt on Hillary Clinton, they expected the relaxation of sanctions levied by the Magnitsky act.

- Paul Manafort in fact turned over internal campaign data to a Russian intelligence officer. From the Senate Committee: "The Committee found that Manafort's presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign," ... "The Committee assesses that Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services, and that those services likely sought to exploit Manafort's access to gain insight in to the Campaign".

- In the trial of Roger Stone, we learned that Stone actually gave Trump advance notice to Trump of hacked DNC e-mails, as Stone was in direct communication with Julian Assange. Trump had previously been briefed by the FBI about foreign interference in the campaign, and he failed to alert the FBI of the incoming hacked information. In fact he kept quiet about this, and instead not only did he trumpet the hacked e-mails at every opportunity, he actively encouraged the hackers to try to obtain more information.

- From Michael Cohen we learned that Trump's claims of having no active deals in Russia was a lie, when in fact Trump was attempting to get a tower built in Moscow, complete with a penthouse gift for Vladimir Putin. It was reported by Buzzfeed that Trump instructed Cohen to lie about this, and while Mueller disputed this, we later learned that in fact when Cohen lied to Congress about the existence of this deal, he was doing so with the understanding that it was Trump's wish for him to do so. Whatever Cohen's motivation though, we do know Trump wanted to keep it a secret from the American people and he himself lied to all of us about the existence of a deal.

- Fast forward to Trump's actual presidency, and he has done everything he can to show deference to Russia, from pushing for Russia to rejoin the G8 (from which they were expelled for the invasion of Crimea), to making blundering strategic decisions in Turkey to Russia's benefit, to siding with Putin over the assessment that Russia was not responsible for hacking the DNC, to pushing the idea that in fact it was Ukraine that was responsible for hacking the DNC.

And after all of this, there still has not been a rigorous accounting of Trump's financial ties to Russia, of which there are many, and there has not been a counterintelligence investigation into the relationship. Not by Mueller, not by the House, the Senate, the FBI, or any other body. Given all of the above and everything we know about how Trump operates.

So was there a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia? No, probably not, and this was not alleged by most of us who had an issue with the relationship between Trump and Russia. Was there collusion? I think the Manafort incident alone proves yes. Trump's campaign manager hands over internal campaign data to what the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence characterizes as a "Russian Intelligence Officer", while the GRU is hacking the DNC and targeting voters with a psyops campaign. Yeah, that's collusion.

> The Mueller Report backed "Steele's central claim that the Russians ran a 'sweeping and systematic' operation ... to help Trump win".[7] James Comey said:

    The bureau began an effort after we got the Steele dossier to try and see how much of it we could replicate. That work was ongoing when I was fired. Some of it was consistent with our other intelligence, the most important part. The Steele dossier said the Russians are coming for the American election. It's a huge effort. It has multiple goals ... And that was true.

DNI John Ratcliffe, who is a Republican partisan, said that on Fox News. He was also just caught lying to the FBI director in making a partisan assessment (with zero to back it up) in a statement about election interference by Iran last week. He's not exactly a credible and dispassionate actor in all of this.

The "Senate Committee" you speak of is chaired by Ron Johnson, who is a staunch Trump ally and again, a rank partisan.

In order for the general public to have any degree of trust about this, there is going to have to be some authority who is at least not a partisan who can speak with authority to actual facts. Not vague "assurances" with no evidence. This issue is way too political to trust Republicans, especially after Benghazi (went nowhere after dozens of investigations by partisans) and Hillary's e-mails (went nowhere after a whole year of hyping it up as the worst crime ever by a politician). This entire thing just smells like the next big Republican freakout over nothing.

Edit: Update! Robert Graham (of Errata Security) has verified the DKIM headers of the “smoking gun” email — https://twitter.com/erratarob/status/1322007153415200768

Your position is the same as everyone here: You haven't read the story and have no information whatsoever to claim that they are being good editors or not.

Until we have a story to look at, it's anyone's guess if he's being a good journalist or they are being a good editor.

As someone who works in media (not on editorial side but on digital), I can assure you thats you are wrong.

Most media orgs have a log of rigor and fact-checking that goes into their stories. The editorial side is typically (not always in some places) shielded from the business pressures (for better and for worse).

Its someone else's problem to worry about clicks etc.

Greenwald stopped being a credible journalist awhile ago. Just look at what he was pushing these last few weeks.

I have a lot of respect for his early work but he went on a weird tangent.

He stopped being a credible journalist because he pushed to publish an article that is not supported by reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memorial_...

If you look, there is often a lot of video on the ground of these events, so that you can see beyond a single narrative.

In the same vein, there is a lot of video of what happened in Kenosha leading up to the shootings.

Similar: sometimes I see people saying "this publication had to retract or correct a story, which is proof that you cannot trust them!". The fact that they posted a correction is a reason TO trust them. You should be suspicious of publications that never post corrections, not publications that do.

How are most of them dismissed if none were actually dismissed? Reaching a settlement is also considered 'winning' the suit in these kinds of cases.

As for "most of them dismissed," 30 of 33 claims against WaPo were dismissed. In other words, Sandmann lost on 30 claims, and settled on 3 of them. Two of his other lawsuits were dismissed by the court, and the only lawsuit still alive is the NBC suit. That's not a legal victory; a motion to dismiss at this stage of a lawsuit assumes that everything the plaintiff said is true without taking into consideration any competing facts.

I was going to write exactly this but didn't because it seemed too obvious to do so. The plaintiff ALSO has legal costs if they go for a ruling. This is why I said a settlement is usually considered a victory. If both parties already agree on the outcome then going trough the legal procedure is a waste of time and money. Only if sandmann's lawyers didn't agree on the settlement money then it would be advantageous to push for a ruling. Hence this could be considered 'winning' the suit even though there is no such thing on courts. only rulings(Ex, in favor of) and paying the legal fees of the other party.

That's in interesting conclusion. If CNN settled for a few thousand dollars to make Sandmann go away, did he really win? Either way CNN looses, they either have to pay for lawyers on appeals or settle out of court and end up where we are.

Pretty much every lawyer whose chimed in on the subject says that Sandmann is unlikely to have won a significant amount. So he "won" in the sense of some PR points with people who already thought he was in the right. That's probably about it.

No one would sue and settle with three different news agencies over 'a few thousand' if That was the only money on the table their lawyers would have pushed for a court ruling.

hmmm, was that about the same time he came to understand that the Authoritarian left that was taking over the Democrat party was illiberal, regressive, and not at all out to advance individual freedom like the "liberals" used to be?

Did he "stop being credible" when is politics separated from your own?

Greenwald has always been left-libertarian, it seems today the "left" only has room for left-authoritarians

I don't think this is actually right. I think owners of news media companies want influence more than profit. I don't think Bezos is buying news media for the profits... The influence helps for their other goals.

in this specific case: he is on a 400K salary living in his walled garden in Brazil.

To profit?

None of this is new. It's way overamplified now, and everyone cries censorship and fascism when it suits them.

I'd like many many more Clay Shirky style analysis of print, broadcast, and social media, followed by a 100 crazy notions for novel NPOV organizations.

The journalists are the activists.

The managers and owners are the businesspeople.

Their motivations are very different but their incentives are aligned.

Glenn seems to have picked a grudge(against establishment Dems) over commitment to solid truthful reporting

Why do you believe Glenn is immune to this interest? The entire point of this is to promote his newsletter.

> I think Glenn hoped to create a media entity that regarded truth as the measure of merit of a story vs. how well it promoted a cause and ads/subscriptions. Now that the experiment has failed so obviously, good for him for moving on.

How do you know that "truth" is not the measure of merit for this story? You haven't read it; you're simply taking Glenn at his word.

From the HN Guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

This is bordering on hyperbole.

1. Glenn Greenwald isn't one to produce a "Garbage Story," he's a credible journalist with a long history of dropping bombshells. He's dropped bombshells about both the right AND the left. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald#Awards

2. It's the job of the media to do exactly what you have alluded to within the last half of the statement above. All sides do just that every single election I've been alive, all the way up to election day. But this time, only one side is allowed to do it.

3. Glenn Greenwald is a co-founder of The Intercept and is provided contractual rights to editorial freedom.

The fact that this comment is the top comment on this thread is extremely worrying. This is censorship, nothing less.

*edit: removed hints of rudeness.

The editors can run the story with a disclaimer outlining their concerns as Greenwald argues.

GG can publish his article and the readers can be the judge.

> 4) Finally, I have to note what I find to be the incredible irony that The Intercept -- which has published more articles than I can count that contain factually dubious claims if not outright falsehoods that are designed to undermine Trump's candidacy or protect Joe Biden -- is now telling me, someone who has never had an article retracted or even seriously corrected in 15 years, that my journalism doesn't meet the editorial requirements to be published at the Intercept.

> It was The Intercept that took the lead in falsely claiming that publication by the NY Post was part of a campaign of "Russian disinformation" -- and did so by (a) uncritically citing the allegations of ex-CIA officials as truth, and (b) so much worse: omitting the sentence in the letter from the ex-CIA officials admitting they had no evidence for that claim. In other words, the Intercept -- in the only article that it bothered to publish that makes passing reference to these documents -- did so only by mindlessly repeating what CIA operatives say. And it turned out to be completely false. This -- CIA stenography -- is what meets the Intercept's rigorous editorial standards:

> "The U.S. intelligence community had previously warned the White House that Giuliani has been the target of a Russian intelligence operation to disseminate disinformation about Biden, and the FBI has been investigating whether the strange story about the Biden laptop is part of a Russian disinformation campaign. This week, a group of former intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation."

> The Intercept deleted from that quotation of the CIA's claims this rather significant statement: "we do not have evidence of Russian involvement."

> Repeatedly over the past several months, I've brought to Betsy's attention false claims that were published by The Intercept in articles that were designed to protect Biden and malign Trump. Some have been corrected or quietly deleted, while others were just left standing.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...

IMO, this makes Greenwald look bad. “I was willing to be a part of a knowingly incorrect news organization until it affected me directly.”

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...

"Never read the comments"

Later expanded to:

"Never respond to the comments"

On the other hand, if Greenwald actually does have, or believe he has, a contract which guarantees him immunity to outside editing as he seems to claim ("The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week") -- which seems somewhat implausible as presented, but that's the story presented -- then the offer he presents also makes sense as what amounts to an attempt to essential settle the dispute over rights and obligations out of court with a compromise which arguably could be better for both his journalistic interests and the Intercept's financial interests than a public, after-the-fact breach of contract dispute in the courts.

Maybe it's possible that all of the implied messages were exactly as Glenn surmised them to be but ultimately, it doesn't matter what's implied. Glenn at no point even brings up what his supposed contractual rights are and lays out a paper trail forcing them to acknowledge a breach of contract.

It's entirely possible that if he had just pushed a little harder, they would have simply been like "Well, it's your grave but it does state it in the contract so we'll put it up without edits" but him not even trying makes it seem like he is engineering the situation to resolve to this particular outcome.

[1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...

From the beginning of the first letter: "Overall I think this piece can work best if it is significantly narrowed down to what you first discussed with Betsy — media criticism about liberal journalists not asking Biden the questions he should be asked more forcefully, and why they are failing to do that."

In other words, the editor is asking Greenwald to keep only the part about criticism of liberal journalists, and not publish the allegations against the Bidens. That's not just a suggestion on how to improve the article - it's asking him to remove a substantial part of the article.

> Glenn at no point even brings up what his supposed contractual rights are

As for his contractual rights, he spells those out in his original article: "to publish articles without editorial interference except in very narrow circumstances that plainly do not apply here". And: "my separate contractual right with FLM regarding articles I have written but which FLM does not want to publish itself". Presumably, the editors would already be well aware that his contract allows him to be free of editorial interference - he's one of the founders of The Intercept, not some obscure random journalist that the editors don't know.

> "Overall I think this piece can work best if..."

is a suggestion (and a perfectly fine way to start a discussion).

Greenwald might have good reason to believe there's more to it than that based on a perceived history of political bias. But, based solely on the text of the email I'm inclined to give the editor the benefit of the doubt.

As a matter of fact, I was firmly in Greenwalds' camp before reading the email exchange. It does read like a bit of tantrum IMHO. It certainly doesn't scream "censorship".

I concede, said "tantrum" may actually be justified based on history that we aren't privy to, but the raw text of the exchange alone does not paint Mr Greenwald in the best light.

Later on, and with more digging, people who were near him at the time confirmed that the controversy was all a sham. The people who previously claimed Kerry lied all suddenly claimed they misremembered, or gently admitted that they lied. There were just enough bits and pieces of facts to build a story, and BS was used to glue it all together.

I think people are seeing a repeat of that. Some things may be true, but a lot of overly convenient information is coming out to bind it together that’s hard to absolutely verify and will likely collapse under scrutiny.

It's not Biden's to deny, it's Giuliani's to prove.

It's not only Biden's to deny, it's His brothers, His Sons, and the others named. Further, if the information wasn't true or not believe to be true, why is it being blacklisted / treated as it's true? Why was distribution banned?

That's the questions being asked that are being shut down.

Making an outrageous accusation and then demanding that the accused defend themselves against it is an old Glenn Beck technique. Sort of like the question, "Are you still beating your wife?"

Fox New's most popular show, and as far as I know the most popular cable news show there is, dedicated their entire hour to an interview with one of the people involved in this story, and has been covering the story extensively for the last week. What you are saying here is absolutely wrong.

And I mean, just a quick google search also shows that WSJ was writing stories about this a couple of weeks ago: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hunter-biden-business-11602...

Carlson's show doesn't even pretend to be a news show, in the sense of something that communicates what is even purportedly actual facts about the subjects it discusses, it is a vehicle for presenting hyperbole and non-literal commentary which is recognized as such by any reasonable viewer.

That's not just me, that's Fox News's own successful argument defending the show against defamation claims.

Fox News’s most popular show is Tucker Carlson’s.

Note that Fox lawyers recently argued in court that Carlson has no obligation to tell the truth.

Fox News Argues Viewers Don't Assume Tucker Carlson Reports Facts

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/fox-news-defends-t...

This is basic journalism.

Good journalists tend to not rely on on one anonymous source, they check with other sources and available evidence. The thing is this white house is extremely dishonest and corrupt and leaks like a seive hence a lot of anonymous sources

If so, he is the documented primary business partner in the suspected deals who has provided verified emails, he’s a US citizen with a history of military service who put his real name on the line.

It doesn’t get less shady than that. Unless you’re referring to someone else.

Being associated with the military confers absolutely zero marginal credibility over any other citizen. If anything, it's the opposite since there's a known conservative bias in military and law enforcement - dovish liberalism threatens their values and their power.

No they haven't. Neither Hunter Biden, Jim Biden, James Gilliar or Rob Walker, have denied that the emails and text messages sent to Tony Bobulinski are real.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxE2nlDjYt8

Assertions made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Of course it's not proof, but there's currently some evidence indicating it's real, and currently no evidence indicating it's doctored. Given the circumstances, it'd be extremely irresponsible for any media outlet to assume they're definitely true, but it's almost as irresponsible to assume they can't possibly be true and to not even raise the possibility they could be real.

The same was probably true of the person who leaked Trump's tax returns before the election. Of course they were initially treated with caution, but the media worked to confirm their veracity. Here they won't even ask the question.

I don't think the emails contain anything very damaging to Biden, as far as I can tell. I think the cover-up, lack of care about truth, and blind zealotry is way worse than anything in the emails. I do happen to think the emails are > 50% likely real, but the absolute refusal to consider them impartially is the actual problem, not the emails. It just shows neither pro-Trump nor anti-Trump give a single shit about truth. They just care about winning. Ideology trumps epistemology.

This is the weirdest part about Republican attacks on Biden's ethics or integrity. All that I have seen have been accusing Biden or his family of things that Trump and his family do much more often than the Biden's are alleged to have done them.

In a rational world, that kind of attack would totally backfire.

But it's pretty clear people aren't rational. I've had people tell me that Trump must be trustworthy because he's a billionaire, and had the same people tell me that Gates, Soros, Buffett, and Bezos cannot be trusted because they are billionaires. Huh!?

Attack your enemy (especially falsely!) for the things you are guilty of so the people who are outside of the bubble that uncritically listens to propaganda (yours or your opponents) have been primed to dismiss that line of attack as just the kind of thing that propagandists invent about their enemies isn't a novel technique.

The difference in the accusations is something like this: "Biden monetized the vice presidency, for personal gain. He set up a money laundering operation, that funnelled money from foreign entities back to his family, through deals his crack head son was making."

His son was making 50k/month from a power energy company in Ukraine, that he had no prior experience in.

This is a lot different than hiring your own kids to work for you in your own administration, as Trump did.

Lots of people here are still holding on to "emails" being fake. Maybe you have heard the term, "A lie is 3 questions deep". The problem with the emails are fake theory, is that that emails have these snippets of personal information, that have been collaborated, along with very incriminating selfie photos of Hunter doing crack and prostitutes in hotel rooms. Both would be incredibly difficult to fake because they are so mundane, and intimate, as no one would have the imagination to fake them.

Biden wasn't very wealthy for most of his political career, which was as a Senator from 1973 to 2009, nor when he was VP. His net worth was under half a million when his VP term ended.

His current wealth of around $10-20 million or so came after he was no longer in office, mostly from a multi-book deal with Flatiron Books for both he and his wife ($8 million), speaking fees (basic fee $100k, but sometimes as low as $8k and as high as $190k), and $540k from his professorship with the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.

There's a chart of Biden and his wife's total earnings from 1998-2019 in this Forbes article [1].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2020/10/22/how-t...

This is why I keep posting about this. It's all just unwittingly helping Trump, all because they somehow think being journalists is the thing that'd actually help him or will cause accusations of helping him if he wins.

There's a middleground here. Of course the media having a front page headline about the emails every day would be irresponsible. But refusing to talk about it or look at it inquisitively, at all, ever, is just as irresponsible. As is Twitter censoring links to it.

Maybe in the Republican bubble. Outside of it, no one really cares and sees it as a weird and poorly executed complot

I think the main reason it's not a big controversy elsewhere is due to exactly what you mention - both bubbles absolutely reject anything negative about their side and absolutely accept anything negative about the opposing side. So of course one bubble won't care, or even be aware of what's going on.

I don't think many people care what he has to say

More relevant is https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/28/trump-conspiracy-th...

Basically a bunch of Republican operatives admitting that virtually no one is buying the BS and that's it's not a useful line of attack

If you read Taibbi's article, he's not at all claiming that the emails are damaging to Biden. The headline is "With the Hunter Biden Expose, Suppression is a Bigger Scandal Than The Actual Story".

Like in my posts, he's talking about the media's and Twitter's behavior in censoring the story - not the emails themselves. Everything he says is perfectly consistent with what's said in the Politico article you linked.

Taibbi is one of the most reputable, high-integrity, rational, and truth-seeking journalists working today, in my opinion. Reality often sits between a gray area of poles.

The problem with these timed attacks is that they fundamentally encourage lying to affect elections.

I think the NYT with the tax returns and the NY Post with the emails both acted properly, personally. (Though I strongly distrust both of them in general. NY Post much more so, but NYT gets worse and worse by the month, in my eyes.)

It's also unclear if either of them hoarded anything; they both may have published their pieces as quickly as they could, given the circumstances and when they received the information. I might be missing some evidence of hoarding; apologies if so.

> Meanwhile, additional documents obtained by Fox News include FBI paperwork that details the bureau’s interactions with John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of “The Mac Shop” who reported the laptop’s contents to authorities, as first reported by the New York Post. > Isaac received a subpoena to testify before U.S. District Court in Delaware on Dec. 9, 2019, the documents show. One page shows what appears to be serial numbers for a laptop and hard drive taken into possession.

[0]: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fbi-purported-hunter-biden-...

Oh you meant the more recent taxes expose.

I think staying silent about it is absolutely the smartest move on Joe's part. Trying to defend the contents will only draw more attention to them. It's the media's refusal to be actual journalists that's the dumb thing.

I strongly disagree about Trump. That's basically been Trump's exact MO since forever; any real story concerning him just gets instantly dismissed. "It's locker room talk", "it's fake news", etc. Trump and his White House have held far fewer press conferences than past presidents. And at his press conferences, he refuses many questions and dismisses others with either non-answers or just his typical bullshit salesman-speak.

I do think this is probably the "Trumpiest" Biden has acted so far, but I think I'd probably do the same thing if I were in his position, honestly. At least until the election is over. It's politics. He doesn't want to throw too much gasoline on the fire. It's just the media's and Twitter's behavior that I just mind-boggling and gross, and the irrational way so much of the left is treating it.

If they were a fabrication, the smartest thing to do would be a vehement pronouncement that it's all doctored, fake bullshit. It'd make sense to do that once and then never talk about it again and refuse questions, but the fact that there's not a single denial is telling. It's definitely not proof, but it's a sign.

Also, at least one email thread was corroborated by someone else on the thread as being real. That doesn't prove the rest of the emails are real, but it increases the likelihood.

Again, I don't even think there's anything damaging in there. But the absolute kneejerk insistence that they're fabricated, and that even trying to be impartial about it is giving into propaganda, by so many people, is pretty bizarre to me. There's a reasonable, rational, balanced middle ground here that very few people (besides some actual journalists like Matt Taibbi, Ross Douthat, and perhaps Glenn Greenwald - pending exactly what he says in this forthcoming article) seem to be taking.

This is false, and rather laughable. If he addresses them directly, then that gives legitimate news organizations license to report on his denial, including reporting on the accusations. By not denying them he puts the onus on those pushing the story to demonstrate its legitimacy first.

>For example, here's a screenshot of a few of the emails in question: https://i.imgur.com/XNQarwF.png

>Is this a smoking gun of corruption of any sort? Obviously not. But could it raise some questions, before an important election? It could. If someone had completely fabricated this email, in my opinion almost any rational person would, at least once, somewhere, say or write that it was absolutely completely fabricated.

>Additionally, someone on this exact email thread corroborates that the email thread is all real, and claims that "H" is Hunter Biden and "the big guy" is Joe Biden, which seems plausible given the email context.

The smartest move, if they're true, is to be silent. The smartest move, if even a single email is doctored, is to protest that it's fake.

There's already been tons of reporting in non-left-aligned media about the emails and the fact that his silence is suggestive of them being real. If he were to deny it, the very little bit of reporting that NYT etc. did about it, suggesting it's likely disinformation, likely from Russia, could be even more strong with its claims that it's total bullshit.

Combined with the corroboration of the person in that email thread, and the fact there isn't anything that interesting in the emails (why doctor something so boring? like with the DNC emails hacked and leaked by Russian intelligence), I'm happy to bet money with you that they'll be proven to be legitimate within a few months. I don't think it's proven at all, but I think it's more likely than not.

The fact that the mainstream press hasn't talked about the controversy much outside of the context of twitter et al blocking its dissemination, or it being a suspected disinformation campaign is a win for Biden. Denying the content of the controversy suddenly allows the story to be reported as a he-said, she-said, giving the story a life of its own. This does a disservice to Biden because now the reporting can be neutral between the parties. The battle here is over swing voters, and a he-said/she-said controversy is exactly the kind of nebulous "concerns" the GOP hope to raise about Biden. It was the specter of something going on that defeated Hillary and they're hoping to repeat this with Biden. Not addressing the specifics of the controversy allows the story to stay where it belongs, as a right-wing media hail mary.

As a comparison, mainstream press didn't report on the Trump dossier until Buzzfeed's reporting of the dossier became the story. Once the story becomes reified, mainstream outlets can then report on the controversy. The winning move is to keep the story from becoming its own controversy. Not addressing it directly helps to accomplish this.

Take for instance the Podesta emails as a recent example. No one denied that they were real, just denounced the means by which they were made public.

And so far, there doesn't seem to be any hard evidence that Joe was profiting from or involved with any of the deals himself (though there are some accusations of this).

The leaks are worthy of fair assessment and research, but people definitely shouldn't jump to conclusions of corruption.

  > I don't think the emails show clear signs
  > of any improper behavior with respect to China.

You say there’s nothing damaging in there. If that’s the case then the Biden campaign has even less reason to respond.

There's probably nothing really damaging. But some things in it could still potentially be interpreted that way, to the point that if someone had completely fabricated the emails, I think it'd be worth coming out and saying "to be clear, these are blatantly made up, my son never sent this email/these emails" even just once. Even in just an off-hand comment in an interview.

For example, here's a screenshot of a few of the emails in question: https://i.imgur.com/XNQarwF.png

Is this a smoking gun of corruption of any sort? Obviously not. But could it raise some questions, before an important election? It could. If someone had completely fabricated this email, in my opinion almost any rational person would, at least once, somewhere, say or write that it was absolutely completely fabricated. Additionally, someone on this exact email thread corroborates that the email thread is all real, and claims that "H" is Hunter Biden and "the big guy" is Joe Biden, which seems plausible given the email context.

I think it definitely is a cover-up. Not because of some collusion between Biden and the media; I think it's all social forces and incentives.

Optically, the media doesn't want accusations of having helped Trump win if he wins.

At the object level, a large percentage of people in the media lean left and strongly dislike Trump and don't want to do anything that might help him win.

And, probably, some percentage may also be so biased that they really think there's no possible way the emails could be real.

In the last case it wouldn't be called a cover-up, but it's being awful at one's job. In all of the cases, it's not a cover-up in the sense of a nefarious conspiracy, but it's journalists not being journalists due to strong political bias.

I think if this were leaked emails about Trump, the right-leaning media would've done exactly the same thing and not reported on it, or only reported that "the left-wing media is spewing conspiracy theories again!", as the inverse of what's happening here. I think the lesson that's reinforced here for me is just that all media organizations of any kind once again can't be trusted when it comes to actually caring about truth and epistemology.

a distraction so to speak. This is exactly why they're doing it.

There are reasons to not think its purely garbage storage, as many have pointed out. Not to mention a business partner, and someone who was sentenced to jail who has released their gmail account to the public.

We learned this doesn't work all that well with the Comey letter eleven days before the 2016 election. "We've reopened the Hillary investigation" turned into "oops, nothing new" a few days after the election.

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

"A fact that's missing critical context can travel half way around the world while the full context is putting on its shoes."

The same fundamental concept is at play here.

Supposedly Comey violated it because some FBI agents were already illegally leaking it to Guliani and he was sure Clinton would win anyway

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/02/joe-biden...

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/09/james-biden-health-...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/will-hunter-bi...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-ukr...

If the story is true. If it's a fabrication - as they allege, and given that Fox News passed on it (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-electio...) and the Post's reporter didn't want his byline on it (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/18/business/media/new-york-p...), seems reasonably likely - they didn't hear about it until last week.

It's a non-tabloid newspaper. What I want and expect from such a publication is to only see stories for which the basic underlying facts have already been verified. There might still be disagreements over the implications of those facts and how to act on them, which I want and expect to see covered.

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Congress shall make no law [emphasis added] respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

(In various ways that aren't very relevant to the current discussion, this generally applies to states as well.)

What Hunter/Joe Biden are accused of doing is a very popular scam among politicians in most countries and unless you are dumb enough to explicitly put in writing a bribery scheme then there is very little legal risk.

The scam comes about because it is fundamentally unfair to limit the employment opportunities of a politician’s family or the politician themselves after they leave office. So what happen is that companies will put a politician’s family members into positions of employment where there is a large gap between the value they produce in that position and what their reenumeration is. Alternatively, after the politician leaves office they will be parachuted into one of these scam jobs.

In return for organising these scam positions the company gets some alternative value from the politician. There can be a whole range of value from impressing (helping to scam) third parties to actually getting favourable government action or policy changes.

I feel like this is a very common arrangement for politicians and this is part of the reason there is a lot of pressure by the media to not cover this.

> The Hunter Biden documents have at least as much verification as those other archives that were widely reported. There are sources in the email chains who have verified that the published emails are accurate. The archive contains private photos and videos of Hunter whose authenticity is not in doubt. A former business partner of Hunter has stated, unequivocally and on the record, that not only are the emails authentic but they describe events accurately, including proposed participation by the former Vice President in at least one deal Hunter and Jim Biden were pursuing in China. And, most importantly of all, neither Hunter Biden nor the Biden campaign has even suggested, let alone claimed, that a single email or text is fake.

1 - https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...

Keep in mind that _you_ are a member of the public.

Your statement is counter to fundamental thesis of democracy. We must believe in the intelligence of the public to make an educated decision.

Your statement is also counter to the fundamental thesis of capitalism. We must believe in the intelligence of the consumer to make an educated decision.

If you don't believe in the sanctity of the public to make educated decisions, than what do you suggest we do to restore the fallen pillars of our society? You no longer believe in the capability of the public to perform capitalism and democracy. Rather, you believe that some subset of society should wield the power to influence the lower masses. Like rats in a maze.

Now, that I have characterized this harsh dichotomy for you, you must face the question are you a rat in a cage or are you one of the puppet masters?

And, by the way, I could care less for the video and photographic content of that laptop, to me that content is irrelevant --actually, I feel sorry for Joe Biden and I can't imagine how hard it must be to have a son who is a drug addict and a man child. But shouldn't that also corroborate the validity of the laptop content? Why isn't the media all over it?

And, please, let's not pretend that several Trump stories came from anonymous sources with no audio or text evidence. And the mainstream media danced all over it. For instance, the (supposedly) anonymous senior administration who was part of the resistance. Not only did the NYT run stories on his unverified accounts (no audio/text/video to back it up), they also wrote a book with his accounts. And we just learned that this senior admin wasn't senior after all. How can you really read thsoe stories and not come way perplexed by the blatant bias? I understand why people hate Trump, but is it worth to abandon journalism standards? Where do we go from here?

Consider:

- The FBI came out and said there's no evidence of foreign disinformation.

- As has the DOJ.

- As has the director of national intelligence.

- Hunter's lawyer contacting the shop owner to ask for the return of the hardware

- The FBI's grand jury subpoena for the laptop

- The Biden campaign's weak (those meetings weren't in our schedule), later walked back to non (they might have happened anyways), repudiation of authenticity

- Travel mentioned in the emails matches up with Secret Service travel records

- The absurd volume of pictures of Hunter Biden in compromising positions

The argument against authenticity, at this point, falls deeper and deeper into conspiracy theorist territory. At the very least, it fails Occam's razor. The best argument I know of against authenticity is the lack of release of any raw messages with headers, but even that is pretty low-impact in the face of FBI/DOJ/DNI confirmation.

I've collected what I found so far here, both arguments for and against, with sources where possible: https://www.kialo.com/are-the-hunter-biden-emails-as-release...

If the raw messages are later released in whole, and the DKIM is validated, that's the smoking gun. A number of media organizations are then going to have some very uncomfortable questions to answer. The same later applies to some of our three-letter agencies if they turn out to be bogus. That would mean our investigative and intelligence agencies are both tainted.

https://dailycaller.com/2020/10/29/cybersecurity-expert-auth...

Government censorship is a subset of censorship. Private citizens of a private company are perfectly capable of suppressing, altering, or deleting material they consider objectionable, which seems to have been what happened in this case.

Edit: I dunno if I agree that this counts.

"But Intercept editors in New York are demanding I not only accept their censorship of my article at The Intercept, but also refrain from publishing it with any other journalistic outlet, and are using thinly disguised lawyer-crafted threats to coerce me not to do so (proclaiming it would be “detrimental” to The Intercept if I published it elsewhere)."

I don't think there's any other way to interpret that than "threatening litigation". You don't receive a message from a company's lawyers because they're having a friendly conversation about not intending to do anything.

Guess what I'm saying is, he didn't receive a message from the company's lawyers that I've seen yet.

Most evidence can be faked. The chain of custody for evidence is important, and that's not a property of the evidence, but of its history.

There's no substitute for trust in the person or organization reporting the news.

Then it turns into a comically bad diatribe about bias in the press.

Greenwald over the past 4 years has become an insufferable troll. This article adds nothing new in any way, and given the wildly unjustified harm it could do to an impending election, it is beyond doubt that the Intercept editorial decision not to run this was the right decision.

EDIT: For the record, I'm "center-left". When I say fascist left, I mean the extreme left who believe that anyone who disagrees with them is the enemy. Unfortunately this belief is spreading more and more amongst the left, but I still believe there are a lot of moderate, even-headed left but the conversation is being dominated by the fascist left.

This really only serves to muddy the waters. There are a few clear and well-recognized definitions of fascism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#By_scho...

There may be some differences, but they very clearly describe the same set of core traits.

For example, the people in this comment thread claiming that editors making editorial decisions are the "fascist left" are pretty clearly misusing the word.

That said, 'not fascistic' does not imply 'good'.

The corresponding left-wing authoritarianism would be "leftist populism", "Stalinism", or some other term.

What you're describing is called Horseshoe Theory, and it's not well-supported by evidence. Right-wing and left-wing populism have a few things in common (authoritarianism primarily), but have much larger differences than similarities.

I will point out that attacks on a free press ARE a clear sign of authoritarian regimes. I would encourage you to take a look at the history of the German word "Lügenpresse" (literally "lying press"). Especially take note if you see similar things being said about the modern media -- and which groups are saying it.

From Umberto Eco's definition of fascism: "'Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class', fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups."

From Gentile's definition: "corporative organization of the economy that suppresses trade union liberty, broadens the sphere of state intervention, and seeks to achieve, by principles of technocracy and solidarity, the collaboration of the 'productive sectors' under control of the regime, to achieve its goals of power, yet preserving private property and class divisions;"

I understand that it is appealing to try to dilute the meaning of "fascism" by applying it overly broadly until it loses its meaing. Whataboutism is also convenient way for the Right to distance themselves from the evils committed by the right-wing Nazis and other far-right fascist groups.

The better way for the Right to distance itself is by supporting moderate democratic norms rather than giving in to violent populist impulses. Power is one heck of a drug though.

So, correcting for the projection:

"I understand that it is appealing to try to dilute the meaning of "fascism" by applying it overly broadly until it loses its meaing. Whataboutism is also convenient way for the Left to distance themselves from the evils committed by the left-wing Nazis and other far-left fascist groups."

The facts don't change just because some people want to fling a dehumanizing insult.

Otherwise you could argue that giving speeches or writing pamphlets and books is a fascist thing.

    "The Cult of Tradition", characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by Tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.

    "The Rejection of modernism", which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.

    "The Cult of Action for Action's Sake", which dictates that action is of value in itself, and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.

    "Disagreement Is Treason" – Fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.

    "Fear of Difference", which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.

    "Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class", fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.

    "Obsession with a Plot" and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society (such as the German elite's 'fear' of the 1930s Jewish populace's businesses and well-doings; see also anti-Semitism). Eco also cites Pat Robertson's book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.

    Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak." On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

    "Pacifism is Trafficking with the Enemy" because "Life is Permanent Warfare" – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to not build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.

    "Contempt for the Weak", which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate Leader who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.

    "Everybody is Educated to Become a Hero", which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, "[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."

    "Machismo", which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold "both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality."

    "Selective Populism" – The People, conceived monolithically, have a Common Will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the Leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of "no longer represent[ing] the Voice of the People."

    "Newspeak" – Fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.

There's no such as even fascist left, even in the kind of disputable way in which Leninist and non-Leninist Marxists will argue over whether Leninism is a genuinely Marxist, Communist, or leftist movement, or a form of right-wing state capitalism.

Fascism is an ideology, not a set of tactics. Yes, right and left wing groups (both moderate and extreme) often learn tactics from each other. No, that doesn't make the ideologies the same.

"There should be a communist utopia...for aryans as they crush all other races under their boot" is not a movement with really any members anymore.

Cotton's OpEd was a prominent member of government advocating for fascist actions.

The irony here is palpable.

Read up on the Reichstag fire and how it was used to justify suspension of civil rights. The parallels are striking.

In this case, you are the one in the wrong. Spreading misinformation purposefully to trick people into agreeing with you is what is destroying this country right now and you are doing this.

This was a calculated move to paint all the protesters as rioters and drum up support for treating them as such.

Even without reading into it, Cotton was advocating for bringing US military troops into US cities to put down the protests because some of them turned violent. That is NOT normal, and NOT something we should see in a healthy democracy.

I might add that once the police stopped attacking protesters violently, the protests calmed down pretty quickly.

> Spreading misinformation purposefully to trick people into agreeing with you is what is destroying this country right now and you are doing this.

Projection is such an ugly thing to see.

I don't think this is true. Quoting from his piece:

"Some elites have excused this orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic, calling it an understandable response to the wrongful death of George Floyd. Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protes...

He clearly says in plain words that the majority are law-abiding protestors. I suppose you could argue that the piece actually means something other than the plain words that it uses, and you could certainly argue that he's drawing the line between protestors and rioters in the wrong place, but at no point does the op-ed make the claim that all protestors are rioters.

Occhams razor:

Glen Greenwald is one of the most respected journalists on the planet. the man is a modern day Cronkite. his character is beyond the pale when it comes to accurate journalism so it begs the question: What is Glen reporting that an editor finds so 'garbage' as to risk their entire future career on censoring this man?

And despite his founding of the Intercept in part to investigate abuses by people in power (and his constant criticism that the press never publishes negative articles about people on their side) he has never written a single article critical of any of the abuses of power by the Trump administration. Not a single article critical of anything Trump has done in the past four years. [1]

1. All articles: https://muckrack.com/ggreenwald/articles

I think you're grossly misrepresenting his opinion on the matter. No one denies that Russia made some half-assed attempts to influence the election. Every country tries to interfere in every election. Hell, we even bragged about it at times: http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html

Even Biden himself brags about interfering in the affairs of other governments: https://youtu.be/FdHWU5jDQ2w?t=46

But did Russia conspire with the Trump campaign to rig the election or provide dirt on Hillary Clinton? No, and he's right for standing by that claim despite the immense pressure from partisan hacks who have effectively smeared him as some kind of Russian puppet. Your post is evidence of how effective that smear campaign has been.

I don't think that's all that true. Glenn Greenwald is extremely popular with a particular political faction, which is itself particularly unpopular.

> his character is beyond the pale

Probably not what you intend:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/beyond_the_pale

This isn't my experience at all, at least not for many years (speaking both in terms of my own opinion of his writing and the apparent opinions of others).

> In recent years, however, Hersh has appeared increasingly to have gone off the rails. His stories, often alleging vast and shadowy conspiracies, have made startling — and often internally inconsistent — accusations, based on little or no proof beyond a handful of anonymous "officials."

"Critics have described Hersh as a conspiracy theorist, in particular for his rejection of official claims regarding the killing of Osama Bin Laden and his rejection that the Assad regime used chemical weapons on Syrian civilians."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh#Criticism_and_co...

I don't think this means what you think it means. You just insulted his character, not praised it.

The Intercept decided an article fell below their journalistic standards and chose not to publish it. That only leaves ninety-million other places for Glen to publish it, and by his own admission he has this right.

It mostly kind of ceased to be worth following and at times he seemed to be in perpetual rage combined with sort of "I wish this to be true so it must be".

Your argument seems to be based on an assumption that the story was garbage, with the evidence being that the editor pulled it, which begs the question.

There are things that are legitimately news now (as in were discovered recently, are now published), this isn’t it.

Being principled only when it suits your favored cause isn't being principled at all.

And while I don't think the sex videos on the laptop should have been published or covered in the news, the emails about Hunter's dealings with China probably should be. But the inconsistency of the media and the social networks on this issue should be pointed out. And if Don Jr had a laptop stolen with questionable emails about deals with Russia, I can guarantee that the media would have a field day with it (much like they did with the largely fraudulent Steele Dossier) -- not to mention the more lurid content.

That was not an opportunity to hawk this tired disinformation again (1). Nobody cares. Even this "report the controversy" (2) gambit is lame.

1) https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/how-fake-persona-laid-...

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teach_the_Controversy

This is exactly the kind of sentence which is technically true but worded in a way to make it sound like it says more than "Hunter took a plane trip with his dad in 2013."

- Biden was VP for 8 years. Is he not supposed to travel with his kids during that time?

- "Air Force Two" is the term used for any plane the VP is on. Anyone flying with the VP is on Air Force Two.

- Hunter Biden, and only Hunter Biden, met with the Chinese bankers. Joe Biden had no contact with the bankers, involvement in the meeting, or financial involvement with the fund before or after.

- The emails in question were from 2017, after Joe Biden was no longer VP.

- While the emails may be questionable, there is no evidence of Joe Biden's involvement in any part of the deal during or after his time as VP.

Flying with your dad, Vice President of the United State, to raise a billion dollars from senior party members from an adversarial country isn't a good look.

Taking a well-paid board seat on a Ukrainian gas company... despite knowing nothing about energy and while dad, the VP, is managing affairs with the Ukrainian government also isn't a good look.

"Just taking a trip with dad" indeed. This is clearly graft -- and condemning it should be bipartisan.

I don't expect everyone to be as pure as Obama -- but, "C'mon, Man."

1) That doesn't prove Joe Biden himself benefited directly from it (that's implication all these last-minute 'stories' are trying to make)

2) So far nobody has presented a single shred of proof of anything other than hearsay and the testimony of people who seem to have a really big chip on their shoulders. In fact, the only 'recording' that has been presented is of a third party warning Bobulinski that him making a scandal out of that would affect them all (it's not Hunter Biden in the recording)

3) Tucker Carlson's dog conveniently ate his homework last night

4) The source of the story - Rudy Giuliani - seems to be severely detached from reality, to the point that he somehow fell for the simplest prank in the book and got himself into a Sacha Baron Cohen film

5) There's been so many contortions to this story - from accusations of child pornography, to all kinds of evidence that would be 'presented' but never materialized - that it's very hard to believe anything these messengers are saying anymore

This story stinks to high heaven. Did Hunter Biden benefit from his dad's position? Possibly, but the people trying to push the narrative have shat the bed so many times already I find it very hard to believe they are motivated by anything other than politics.

I'm 100% down with condemning failson grift! Let's start by instituting 100% tax rates for inheritance or gifts over idk, 100k, and making legacy university admissions illegal. For me it's a "nonpartisan" question not because it spans R vs. D but because the largest fundamental faults that cause it are so divorced from any one candidate or party it can only be seen as a partisan campaign tactic if someone tries to make it about a specific person.

So, to you and Greenwald - don't fucking do it.

You could stop story publication unless you have a preponderance of very strong evidence for your claims.

I am personally torn on this kind of philosophy. Would that everyone was like this, but since they are not, surely there are times when too much is on the line to behave this way?

He explicitly talks about this attitude in this interview: https://www.vox.com/2016/9/15/12853236/glenn-greenwald-trump...

But it is a bit weird that here we are again, on the cusp of another trump presidency, and Greenwald swoops in to Trump's aid, again. Not sure how I feel about it.

You'd think the democratic party would have learned after 2016 by nominating another clinton. The seem to feel that supressing negative stories is just easier than answering them. Nominating someone like Sanders would have at least allowed the issues to be discussed.

This is a pretty uncharitable read. The Intercept's issue with Greenwald's article is not that it is "not convenient," but that Greenwald doesn't adequately support his own conclusions on a story with tenuous evidence. That's not hack journalism; that's journalism. Journalists and editors are obligated to review stories and ask the question "is what we are reporting true? is it relevant? is it timely?" and if the answer to any of those is "no" or "we're not sure," to hold off. THAT'S the standard that The Intercept is using, and that's where Greenwald fell short. Anything less is the very definition of hack journalism.

The founders never imagined a situation where a very few private citizens would have the power to censor the speech of millions of others. Nothing even remotely similar to that existed at the time and there was nothing to suggest it could ever exist. The US Constitution is also a minimalist document so it wasn't concerned with enforcing behavior between private citizens.

Furthermore there are a few private outfits that have near a near monopoly on public speech, so they have the effect of censorship.

Sadly I have the feeling that good faith journalism has no role to play nowadays. It doesn't have the reach and credibility it needs to justify it. People now "inform" themselves in a decentralized manner, seldom break their bubble and don't care much about facts preferring narratives. The hardest facts and science can be presented and it will still come out as narrative.

Perhaps there is "too much" on the line, but I think that we live in a complex world, it is difficult to estimate the downstream impacts of your action, and that every time you choose to suppress a story due to potential political consequences, you are undermining broader "trust."

Better to default to reporting freely since, as a rule, suppressing stories generally erodes trust, whereas the direct downstream impact of airing a specific story can be difficult to estimate in a complex world.

There seems to be some sort of paradox of tolerance to trust and the news media.

In principle, we should allow all information. However, bad faith actors can easily take advantage of this principle, and flood the airwaves with dubious and ultimately-overblown stories (see Clinton's emails). If bad-faith actors are afoot (which seems the case here), then at some point an editor needs to step in and refuse to print the story—the question though, is when? And is there anyway to step in, and have it not look like censorship?

> Plenty of people lost trust in the media following their focus on the Hillary Clinton email scandal, which amounted to nothing but likely swayed the election.

Hm, let's do a comparison. Do you think trust in the media would have been better or worse if media outlets had received leaked emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign during the summer (some indicating, for instance, that some members of Hillary Clinton's campaign had conspired to acquire questions ahead of the Democratic debates), embargoed them until after the election, and then released them?

"bad-faith actors are afoot (which seems the case here)" -> I don't see why the 'faith' of the actors really has any relevance as to whether the information is in the public interest to know.

It depends! What is the source of the information? Does the source have incentive to fabricate or exaggerate their claims? Can other trustworthy sources confirm the information? Does the information hold up to critical scrutiny? Does the information matter?

If the answer to these questions are all yes, then I think the media acted in a trustworthy way. If not, then I don't think so.

My argument is not that embarrassing information should be withheld because of an an election. Instead, my argument is that news media should not publish any and all information without the due process of journalism. If the claims hold up to scrutiny, then sure, publish it! If the claims don't hold up, then don't publish it.

> "bad-faith actors are afoot (which seems the case here)" -> I don't see why the 'faith' of the actors really has any relevance as to whether the information is in the public interest to know.

No, but bad faith actors have an incentive to inject noise into the news cycle, and in turn, have incentive to fabricate or exaggerate claims. Journalists and their editors, when they believe information is given in bad faith, should hold it to a higher level of scrutiny so that they avoid mischaracterizing a story.

edit: typo

The emails exist and I think have gone through the same amount of due process as other leaked documents. Here's NYTs David Barstow (who broke the Trump tax returns) discussing why the faith of the leaker/hacker does not matter:

https://soundcloud.com/user-593288826/the-investigative-jour...

I'm not convinced. The story was initially rejected from several outlets and even struggled to get a byline in the NYPost. This is on top of the questionable provenance of the laptop and the lack of metadata on the files. All of this for a story that, at least in my view, isn't even very remarkable.

> Here's NYTs David Barstow (who broke the Trump tax returns) discussing why the faith of the leaker/hacker does not matter:

I think my point isn't clear—a bad faith actor doesn't intrinsically make their information less truthful. The veracity of the information is a completely independent factor. My argument is that, when someone brings new information, and you expect this person to be acting in bad faith, you should evaluate that information with extra scrutiny, because they have incentive to fabricate and to stretch the truth. The information may, ultimately, be truthful, in which case good! check it, double-check it, and publish it! But their word shouldn't be taken for granted just because the story is exciting.

He does not owe it to anyone to support/be against any particular candidate. His task is to report. And if someone is inconvenienced by the truth it is their problem.

But there is an obvious outcome where this gets published, people realize that Biden has flaws, and choose to elect Trump instead as if he did not have flaws. There is no chance of an outcome where people realize that Biden has flaws and elect a different candidate without flaws instead. If Greenwald was actually concerned about presidential emoluments clause violations, nepotism, and corruption, it would be unwise to publish a hack job against the candidate less guilty of these infractions.

Now, I do think that awareness of progressive causes and systemic shortcomings were advanced during Trump's presidency; perhaps Greenwald is playing the extremely long game, hoping that in 2024 the system is able to make a more permanent reform? But it seems more like he's angry that the game is rigged and is destructively flipping the game board over instead of playing - please don't do that, Glenn, I live here.

To put it another way, what's more likely?: that Glenn Greenwald just suddenly decided he'd like to publish garbage articles, or that the Intercept is seeking to filter what content it publishes to achieve political aims?

Obviously it's up to each individual to make their own call on that, but to me, it's pretty obviously almost the latter.

https://twitter.com/ErikWemple/status/1321896097099489283

Greenwald himself just confirmed on twitter he could publish with no editorial oversight. Eventually, his colleagues balked. "A grown person throwing a tantrum", as the editor puts it, sounds about right.

I guess how this whole debacle is received will probably depend on one's life experience.

He's also just published their recent correspondence. It doesn't make him look great either:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...

I’m not asking to make a point or take a side in this via a pretense of Socratic method, I’m asking to try understanding the motivations and intentions of how Greenwald is being depicted in terms of ‘throwing tantrums’ as a non-journalist fan of journalism.

I guess it I have a hard time understanding how one can read all of the presented material and come away with the impression Glenn Greenwald is the misrepresented party in some vigorous but rational and fact-based discussion.

...but, your point is taken.

If you want to compare this with a similar recent situation with an actual high-profile journalist and real high-profile story - Ronan Farrow and his former employer NBC are still bickering over whether NBC unethically spiked his MeToo reporting. I don't think at any point either side has emitted a Greenwald-style screed-de-coeur, despite the bitterness of the dispute.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ronan-farrow-nbc-harvey-wein...

As far as I can tell, the "tantrum" they allude to is better stated as 'exercising his contractual rights he negotiated as a founder for exactly these sorts of cases'.

And he has listed in his contract that he can publish without editorial oversight. The emails from the editor are very clearly are drawing a hard line that certain themes won't be publishable, in contrast to his contractual rights. Him taking offense to that is the basis for them claiming that he's having a "tantrum".

It's very clearly about contracts.

This mentality is authoritarian, anti-democratic, and anti-free speech. It implies that YOU, the editor, or whoever gets to decide for the rest of us what is worth knowing about or not. This is why non-partisan mainstream news is failing. The Internet has shown people the stories (true or not) that were being left out. I want raw information from the news not a carefully selected set of stories that follow a neat narrative.

It is true that it might not be the right thing to publish, in context of current smears in politics not exceptional, aside maybe violation of privacy which also didn't get much focus as of late.

He also seem to have contractual rights to publish it, so the editors aren't responsible. The effectiveness of this censorship is a large concern aside from the story.

I'm not asking rhetorically I'm on my phone, and on the bus but this seems like it could lead to the incident, "I tried to teach GPG to Greenwald but I had the same problem Snowden had encountered when he reached out in December, that Greenwald was busy and couldn’t focus on it. " From : https://theintercept.com/2014/10/28/smuggling-snowden-secret...

Except if it's about Bad Orange Man, right?

https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-...

As the story is already running elsewhere, it is unconvincing that there is a pressing need for this particular outlet to suppress it.

The sad thing is a lot of these commenters are journalists or work in the news industry. Sad thing to see.

Not to mention the downvote brigading.

He is/was one of the main editors of The Intercept. He is the second person listed on https://theintercept.com/about/. There is a wide media censorship on this story. If you think it's just this story, they are also squashing reports on the Philadelphia riots.

> I want to be clear that I'm not claiming to know the truth as it relates to this story...

Make up your mind.

It should read: "If the editor concludes that it's a garbage story..."

Looks like including the entire sentence makes it pretty clear that this isn't a self-contradicting position to take.

Besides, the rest of their post clearly indicates they do think the story is garbage. It looks as if they are giving a spin of legitimacy to that angle as if that was also what editors thought.

This is a strawman. Greenwald didn't say that editing in general isn't ok. He didn't argue that all editorial disputes at all times must be resolved with critical articles alongside controversial ones. He suggested it as a solution here. It's not nonsense to suggest it, whether or not the editor accepts it.

Maybe they did see it the way you outlined: "garbage story dropped a few days before the election." He clearly sees it as censorship of an article that needs to be published. This is a resignation, so sure, the dispute was not resolved. Calling it a nonsense argument though, that takes a good squint.

It is when it's a media outlet you yourself founded and (according to Greenwald) the other editors were contractually obligated to publish what he'd written, uncensored.

Regardless of whether or not his article is good or bad, it seems like that is indeed how it should have worked.

I can totally see his point with journalistic bias and the money strings. The ideal of independent press has long been dropped, and now we have news agencies of every political denomination. Sometimes it feels like objectivity isn't even a goal anymore.

I'm not a Trump supporter in any way. Still, I do want the truth to be known even if it's about a person I support.

Mind you, I'm not clearly on the "don't publish" side. But that position is not clearly wrong.

"The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression."

I doubt that a journalist of greenwald's caliber is going to write "garbage". I take your point about the editorial function in general but we can't lose sight of the context.

Would it be a garbage story if the photos/sex vids were Trump's? The mainstream media wouldn't call it a "garbage story" they'd call it some kitchsy bullshit thing like "crisis of democracy" or "bombshell"...

You get the idea. You're assuming the quality of the journalism in direct contradiction to the images/videos/SMS that's already in the wild.

Nobody disputes why this story was dropped at the time it was dropped. It's a common tactic that has been practiced for decades by political campaigns and even media outlets. Heck, there is a reason why the Kavanaugh story broke when it did. There is a reason why the NY Times published Trump taxes when they did.

What's different is that all of center-left/left news establishment decided that they are going to get Biden elected and protect him from any negative news.

First of all, was it "censorship" when Fox News had not a single article on Trump's taxes for many days after the NY Times pice? No, tat's not censorship, it's an editorial decision.

Second, you're missing the "garbage" part of "garbage story" in the line you quoted. A news organization has a responsibility to vet stories, and avoid publishing stories that can't be vetted.

Are you saying that all the news outlets that refuse to mention this story are acting like partisan hacks??!? I AGREE!

>Second, you're missing the "garbage" part of "garbage story" in the line you quoted.

What's the 'garbage' part of this 'garbage story'?

>and avoid publishing stories that can't be vetted.

Who vetted the NY Times story? Did NY Times release the documents or their sources? Or did everyone just report it? How about the Kavanaugh allegations? Did anyone have issues putting out prosperous, unverified, and clearly false accusations just to get him and by extension Trump? How about the Steele dossier, initially an unverified, and later found to be a fabricated document, put out by the Russians and paid for by the Hillary campaign ... it served as a basis for YEARS of reporting. The last 4 years, we've seen the mainstream media throw out all semblance of journalistic integrity just to get Trump.

Are you for real?

Second, if there is evidence of a son using a name to enrich himself but there is no evidence that the father played a part, I don't think it is news. It may be a shitty thing ethically to do from the son, but I don't think it is particularly news worthy. I thought the same thing when they were talking about how the wife of Bush Jr killed someone in a driving accident. Newsworthy if a candidate did it, not newsworthy if his wife did.

What skill does he possess that is worth $600,000? The only thing that makes sense is his connection to Joe Biden. It's obvious they were paying him money to be on the board because of his connection to Joe Biden, and Joe Biden should have put a stop to it. That's the crux of the issue to me. The fact that the media is forming a wall of silence around this issue really does show the vast biases they have.

This doesn't mean Trump isn't corrupt, by the way, which he is and I believe he is unfit to be president and nothing about the laptop or these emails stopped me from voting for Biden. But every tiny issue with Trump is magnified and overanalyzed by the media, but this rather big issue on Biden is swept under the rug. The media is just as corrupt and biased but the only losers are we the people.

This wasn't that long ago. Everybody should remember Bush's coke problems.

You are right that there's a double standard, but I don't think that double standard is where you assert it is.

I mean, has there been any investigation of the intelligence response to Russia having bounties on US soldiers' heads? And you think that "any small thing" by Trump gets investigated?

Four years ago we were obsessing over emails from the Clintons, which Trump would have us believe were worthy of jailing Clinton. Yet here we are four years later with absolutely no wrongdoing exposed, no grand jury indictments, etc.

The lack of awareness and short memories are astounding.

Yeah. It turned out to be speculative bullshit. There is no link between American solider deaths in Afghanistan to any bounty program from Russia (or even that such a bounty program has ever existed).

Why do you think the story just disappeared?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_bounty_program

And we still don't have a President that can keep up with intelligence briefings, apparently.

The choice lines from YOUR source: - "On July 9, 2020, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said that Marine Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr. and DOD intelligence agencies have not found a link between alleged Russian bounties and that specific attack."

- "On September 14, 2020, Gen. McKenzie stated, "It just has not been proved to a level of certainty that satisfies me," reflecting a growing consensus among the U.S. military leaders that the anonymous sources initially presented in the media were either exaggerated or false."

Give me a break. If there was even an inkling that this story was true, it would be front-page news from now until election day.

>According to the New York Times, on 1 July, the National Intelligence Council, which reports to the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, produced a two-and-a-half page document in which various intelligence agencies assessed the credibility of the existence of a bounty program based on the available evidence. Anonymous officials who had seen the memo said that the "C.I.A. and the National Counterterrorism Center had assessed with medium confidence—meaning credibly sourced and plausible, but falling short of near certainty"—that the GRU had offered bounties.

It takes evidence to get to a medium confidence assessment, it is not purely "speculative bullshit."

Clearly not. Circular arguments aren't a good look.

I'm someone who believes that Bush should be in jail for crimes against humanity. But nothing you said doesn't take away from the fact that the media is corrupt right now and avoiding a real story on Biden.

"What about George W. Bush?"

Yes, it's whataboutism. Answer the question about Joe Biden vs Trump.

Clinton did destroy tens of thousands of emails that were under subpoena by the FBI. If you or I did that, we'd be jail for eternity. And yet...

I think this is the spirit behind "lock her up" -- the fact that there are two sets of rules for the powerful and for the rest of us. This is true for them all: Trump, Clinton, Bush and Biden.

Describing him as a "drug addict with no skills" is very misleading.

What the heck does that mean??!??! What do you mean it "didn't need a new article on the even of the election". WHY NOT?! Because you're voting for Biden?

And by the way, Biden has denied all wrongdoing by Hunter. It is certainly relevant when you have concrete proof that his denial was wrong.

It's well-trodden ground, it's been covered (some might say not enough, but regardless), there's no significant new news, and it would be a blatant attempt to influence the election.

In this case, the Times has written numerous stories on Hunter's use of his name to try and make money. That story isn't new. The new part of the story is the insinuation that he did this with Joe Biden's permission, and that Joe himself may have been making money. That part hasn't been verified by anyone.

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/women-accused-trump-sexual-m...

What are you talking about??! That story was reported EVERYWHERE. If it was 'old news' why was it reported EVERYWHERE?

The fact that it didn't change the election outcome (which is what you're really complaining about) is not the same thing.

>the Times has written numerous stories on Hunter's use of his name to try and make money. That story isn't new.

Hold on a second here. There is plenty 'new' here:

- Joe Biden STILL denies any wrongdoing by himself or Hunter Biden. As it pertains to Hunter Biden's conduct, we now have direct evidence that's false. You don't think that's a story?

- How about the fact that we have direct evidence of Joe Biden being introduced (and taking photos with) with corrupt business partners of Hunter Biden?

- How about the fact that the emails show Hunter Biden trying to induce VP Biden to take actions that benefit Burisma and Chinese business deals?

- How about the fact that Hunter Biden's former business partner, Tony Bubolinski, has gone on record that Joe was planned to be involved in at least the Chinese business deal (and even if that turns out to not have happened, it isn't the salient point - his son is attempting to influence policy through his father)?

- How about the fact that Hunter Biden is being investigated by the FBI for money laundering?

- How about the fact that many outlets, including the Biden campaign and anonymous CIA officials make claims that this is Russian disinformation, when we have clear evidence it is not?

- How about the fact that a journalist that broke the Snowden story, says there is something worth reporting here but was told he couldn't by his editors and lays out his case quite cogently[1]. Greenwald is not the only one. Taibbi also noted the hypocrisy and the unprecedent nature of how this news is bing squelched. [2]

It is such a clear self-serving double-standard you're setting. You don't think it's a story, therefore it isn't a story. Meanwhile every two-bit conspiracy theory against Trump is given front-page treatment.

The irony of it all is that even if all the allegations are true, it isn't enough to sink Joe Biden. This low-level of corruption is par for course for political actors. The real story really is the abrogation of journalistic standards by mainstream news, the ad hoc censorship by social media, and the defense of these actions by Joe Biden supporters, present company included. We literally had the account of a major US newspaper banned for putting out a TRUE story, and journalists vilified or muzzled for waiting to report on it.... but it's all OK if it means Joe Biden is elected ..?

>That part hasn't been verified by anyone.

You're setting up a strawman, that the only way this story is relevant is if there is direct evidence that Joe Biden has been making money from Hunter Biden's adventures. There is certainly implications of that but that's not the most salient part of this story.

Besides if only news organizations were able to do things like ... you know .. VERIFY reports? You know, maybe by ASKING questions of the candidate?

And of course Greenwald puts your ridiculous and hypocritical standard to rest with this quote:

"First, the claim that the material is of suspect authenticity or cannot be verified ... is blatantly false for numerous reasons. As someone who has reported similar large archives in partnership with numerous media outlets around the world (including the Snowden archive in 2014 and the Intercept’s Brazil Archive over the last year showing corruption by high-level Bolsonaro officials), and who also covered the reporting of similar archives by other outlets (the Panama Papers, the WikiLeaks war logs of 2010 and DNC/Podesta emails of 2016), it is clear to me that the trove of documents from Hunter Biden’s emails has been verified in ways quite similar to those."

[1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b... [2] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/with-the-hunter-biden-expose-s...

Seems like you’re searching for proof of guilt rather assuming innocence.

That’s what we all wanted right? That’s the point of all the tech folks talking about no bystanders and corporations being forced to take a political stance was about wasn’t it?

It worked. They’re taking a stance.

I never wanted that. But yes, this sentiment is out there. And yes, this is the logical end result.

What are you talking about? I'm unsure if you're describing the tenor of comments here, but there was a clear amount of uneasiness with how these platforms are using their reach, whether with the Biden story or Uber on Prop 22.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...

It is responsible to decline to run this story. It only serves to feed conspiracy theories and drive disinformation opportunities right at the time of an election.

I am really disappointed with Greenwald here.

Although I've been following this story, I am not familiar with this round debunking. I realize that the email headers are not available, but have the emails decisively been shown to be illegitimate? Or just difficult to verify?

https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/oct/29/tony-bobulins...

Just to pick one example, here's Politifact on the question of who "the chairman" referred to: "Bobulinski has also claimed that Joe Biden was the person described in another message days later as "the Chairman." Whereas the interview goes much further than just a "claim". Instead, it directly shows a text message sent to Bobulinski by Rob Walker (the "Biden family representative") clarifying that "the Chairman" does in fact refer to Joe Biden: https://youtu.be/2zLfBRgeFFo?t=906 (or search the transcript for "the chairman").

Now certainly, the text message might be faked, or Rob Walker might not actually know what was meant. Hopefully, if allowed to happen, future research will be able to determine this. But this is something that can and (probably) should be verified. To reduce this to "Bobulinksi has also claimed" doesn't give adequate weight to fact that Bobulinski did a surprisingly good job of providing verifiable evidence for his interpretation. So yes, read the Politifact article, but also listen to the interview before deciding to trust its conclusions!

That's leagues away from saying that Hunter's involvement in these things has been "debunked."

Guess that can’t be called debunked either.

“No evidence yet disproving...” is not a standard of evidence for an extreme assertion. It’s ridiculous to act like it is.

The number of logical fallacies in your reply is alarming - and most regular citizens are susceptible to these same fallacies, especially when spammed out in high production infotainment.

At least two recipients of emails from the laptop have confirmed their authenticity. Now, maybe there's still some forgery happening here, I don't know. But the idea that it's made up from whole cloth is no longer plausible.

Can you point me to a specific sentence in the Greenwald piece that you think is "debunked"?

I think you’re wrong in your last sentence because there is nothing for Biden to deny or refute. The emails are real, probably sourced in a scammy way by Giuliani, but still real. They just do not contain any content that suggests or corroborates any wrongdoing or questionable behavior in any sense other than Hunter Biden has a big mouth and is a bit immature, that’s it.

What aspect of it would you expect needs to be denied or investigated? No part proves or suggests Joe Biden had anything to do with it or had any meetings or any business dealings related to it. No part suggests or proves Hunter Biden leveraged any political promises or power of his father for any profit.

I cannot see what aspect of it you believe is open to investigation. One person ran their mouth about their political figure father and .... nothing. That's all.

We cannot pretend like that requires journalists to devote attention to it - in any other situation they utterly would not. That’s a nothing story 8 days a week. It’s only being inflamed this time because it is politicized to subvert an election.

Agreed - and to be clear, I count Giuliani as the scum of the damn earth (and I say this as a New Yorker).

But do you think that you can say, on one hand, that the emails are real, but that "The entire spectrum of details around the Biden emails has been roundly debunked"?

> They just do not contain any content that suggests or corroborates any wrongdoing or questionable behavior in any sense other than Hunter Biden has a big mouth and is a bit immature, that’s it.

It shows that convincingly, yes. But, we also know that he received a $600k salary as a result. Isn't it worth investigating why? What did he do to be worth this salary?

No, it really, really isn’t. The FBI already did and found nothing worth prosecuting. There is no reason to even loosely speculate it has a connection to Joe Biden.

It is a 100% non-story, period. Unless some vast new source of information was obtained, there is nothing in it.

“This info contains no wrongdoing and no indication of Joe Biden being involved” is not at all valid pretext for “but shouldn’t it be investigated?”

If that were true, all possible facts that are ever gathered showing no wrongdoing would be justification for constant investigation. Every time someone with noteworthy parents spouted off some immature nonsense, it would be the pretext for never ending persecution by investigation.

This situation truly, truly is not noteworthy. Hunter Biden did some business deals and ran his mouth. In doing so, there is no evidence of anything questionable or illegal. Why would go around opening up big investigations into pieces of information that don’t prove, corroborate or even suggest wrongdoing?

I think that this does warrant an investigation. We have the son of a powerful career politician offering to sell access to his Dad's office. We have a foreign corporation cutting a generous check on that basis. We have emails outlining these details in an archive that has been verified in part by one of the people in the "To" field, who was indeed a business partner in an earlier venture. We have an official decision being made during this time, by Joe, which is favorable to the corporation in question.

None of these facts are in dispute.

It seems the only dispute is whether they warrant an investigation by someone with more integrity than the FBI (ideally, a lot more).

I just feel so sad for the US that it is such a deep epistemological divide.

Almost half the country appears to believe true knowledge no longer derives from fact or observation, but instead derives from speculative conspiracy theories that use lack of evidence to reinforce themselves to the point of being essentially unfalsifiable religious beliefs, like QAnon, Pizzagate, disbelief in basic institutions of justice, refusal to acknowledge or accept whole classes of humans, like trans people, through denial of rights and continued discrimination.

Anyone seeing this and not realizing it is a full on existential threat against basic human rights and decency just isn’t paying attention.

Distrust of the FBI doesn't stem from Trump-support and is not related to "refusal to accept whole classes of humans"; it chiefly stems from the fact that it's a historically racist and xenophobic institution that threw itself headlong into trying to violently disrupt civil rights activism, and has never done any serious internal healing since.

The deep, lasting, institutional corruption of the two major political parties is based on fact and observation, including the fact pattern I have laid out in the comment to which you responded, which again, to my knowledge, is not in dispute. Whether or not it amounts to another in a long line of actual instances of self-enrichment at the public's expense is something that I do not trust (and I don't think any reasonable observer can trust) the FBI to investigate and conclude on its own.

There is a difference between a claim being unproven - and properly erring on the side of caution and skepticism - and claiming that the story has been investigated and debunked (when, to my knowledge, it has not).

It's on him to deny it, yes. He doesn't have to prove that it's illegitimate, but if he doesn't even say so, then that's reason enough to assume it's true.

This attitude doesn't seem reasonable. Anyone can make up random nonsense about someone else (no federal libel laws in the US...). Acknowledging the nonsense will only legitimize it. Why should the subject of the nonsense have to invest time and energy in debunking/denying it?

Bubolinski, a recipient on the emails recovered from the laptop, has confirmed that those sent to him are genuine. Has that claim been debunked?

If you are simply saying that the evidence isn't strong enough to say one way or another, fine. But "roundly debunked" means, at least to me, that there has been an investigation and that the factual claims have in some way been shown to be false. That, to my knowledge, hasn't actually happened.

And sure, "anyone can make up random nonsense", but these claims aren't being made by "anyone", but by people with closeness to the situation that not just anyone can claim. And they aren't random nonsense; they are part of a pattern of explaining how a family has become fabulously rich on a 176k salary.

Oh please. Let's try to keep the "post-truth" ethos on the Right, rather than adopting it ourselves, mmkay?

This story has been completely debunked. I welcome real facts suggesting otherwise, but there truly aren’t any. This story is not being cut because of Evil Democrat Socialites. It’s cut because it truly, really, actually is debunked by well-regarded professional journalists at many other trusted outlets.

Greenwald has spent the last four years on a bizarre war path against the Democratic establishment. This is just more of the same.

The standing claim is that Hunter Biden’s emails do affirmatively show Joe Biden’s involvement in questionable or illegal activity.

The emails do not show that. This has been established by all major news outlets, even Fox News.

Therefore it is debunked.

Now, some totally separate other evidence may show something different. That is irrelevant. The claim is about what these emails affirmatively prove or corroborate. If someone were to say these emails suggest impropriety by Joe Biden, that claim is totally debunked.

https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/tony-bobulinksi-i-have...

The "story" (at least that I am referring to) is that Hunter Biden had these emails and they were released. Is your claim that the emails were forgeries? If not, the NYPost story had relevant, true, information of public interest.

If you're discussing the broader context of the Ukraine prosecutor firing, I agree that there is strong evidence that Biden was not pushing for his firing in response to circumstantial evidence of pressure from his son or anything. Not, to me, strong enough to consider the claim "completely debunked."

It has been completely debunked - the emails do not contain any suggestion, evidence or information that in any way implicates Joe Biden in activity that even might have impropriety, let alone actual impropriety.

Nobody’s saying the emails don’t exist. They appear to have been up for sale in Ukraine for at least a year, suggesting that the Giuliani “found it in Delaware” story is possibly a lie, but the emails exist nonetheless.

Their content has no bearing or connection to Joe Biden. Drawing that line would be deliberate misinformation purely for election destabilization.

The emails mention his father, a meeting, etc. There's obviously some connection, but claiming that the emails are referencing a meeting with Joe is not "deliberate misinformation."

I'm sorry, but it's just pretty clear that your threshold for what constitutes a "debunking" is much lower than mine.

It's a stupid reason to not vote for Biden anyways, but I think it is better to be honest.

Every credible journalist would laugh you out of the room if you try to frame that as if it’s legitimate in any way or counts as evidence of anything besides Hunter Biden having a big mouth.

Just as they are shutting down even Greenwald if he is going to try to pull that same disingenuous crap just to keep pushing his crusade against the Democratic party leaders.

My parents are both retired journalists in DC, one a former editor-in-chief of a publication with millions of paid subscriptions. Both voted for Biden.

They have also expressed their concern with the response to the Hunter Biden story, but I won't name them for obvious reasons.

I understand that you have a vested interest in presenting this as open-and-shut, but in no way are you speaking for "every credible journalist" unless you mean in a tautological no-true-scotsman way.

And I mean this absolutely sincerely, from the POV of open journalism, high priority for inquiry into our democratic process, freedom of the press.

The way the Hunter Biden email story has morphed into basically a manipulative, disinformation campaign to overwhelm citizens and undercut basic trust in journalistic integrity and election procedures is staggering and frightening - as this anecdote about your parents being swindled by it highlights.

It could be a no true scotsman issue on my part, or it could be that really, actually the story is completely debunked and belief in it indicates departure from credible journalism to instead embrace partisan conspiracy theories.

The evidence really, actually suggests the latter in this case.

The existence of the emails is not disinformation, nor has it been discredited. You're attaching all of these claims to what "the story" is and using it to make extremely condescending remarks about reputable journalists (and my parents).

Good day, can't wait for after Nov. 3rd for people to return to normal.

Don't worry, I am well aware that there are quite a few right-wingers here.

I'd argue that all of the rampant censorship about any conceivable questioning or criticism of Biden is the thing that history is likely going to look back on in a few months, and perhaps years, as unethical and irresponsible journalistic conduct.

I disagree with some of Greenwald's stances, but he and Matt Taibbi seem to be the only actual journalists left in the country, that I'm aware of. It's mind-boggling.

I strongly dislike Trump as president and as a person, I think he's probably the worst president we've had from a domestic perspective, and I couldn't disagree more with him and his party's agenda, but as of the past few days I almost want to see him win due to all of this recent censorship tipping the scales. Almost like an Oedipus-style prophecy ironically fulfilled by the attempt to prevent it. I don't actually want him to win, but I want these people to have this blow up in their face.

The cover-up is probably a lot worse than the allegations (which don't seem that damaging, going by the leaked emails, but I'm curious to see Greenwald's analysis), and I bet this is turning many more people further from media outlets and closer to Trump or at least further from the left. Even if he loses the election, I think the past few weeks have shown he might have already won. Not due to anything he did, but solely due to an entirely avoidable shooting of oneself in the foot. This could have ripple effects that last longer than the next 4 years.

Imagine multiple media outlets simultaneously get an email saying "Meowface denies being Dogface during the night". If someone refuses to print this, due lack of evidence and lack of truth - that is not called a cover-up. There is no reason to dignify it with airtime in the first place.

After all one can publish this sort of stuff on blogs, internet forums, tabloids etc. Curation is the true news product - sifting of truth from untruth is one way to do it.

This is a true Shiri's scissor, here. The left-leaning journalists who recognize, in my opinion, how ridiculous this behavior is vs. the rest are basically living on different planets.

Is it really surprising that after all the overblown conspiracy nonsense we've been battered with from the White House and Trump that people have grown suspicious and weary of new stories that smell even remotely similar? It's gotten to the point where if Trump supports a story I assume it's probably untrue by default just because of the sheer volume of lies and nonsense he retweets on a daily basis. I don't know anything about the Hunter Biden story. Maybe it's loaded with true, damning information against Biden. If so, it's too bad, because we are neck deep in a boy-who-cried-wolf situation here and I'm not going to learn about it until it's been verified and reported by media outlets that I can actually trust.

But just like conspiracy theories are irrational, kneejerk dismissing all negative stories as conspiracy theories is also irrational. There's a much more reasonable way of handling this. Things always have to be taken on a case-by-case basis.

You mention boy-who-cried-wolf, and NY Post is definitely a shitty and extremely biased outlet, but probably about as biased as modern day CNN. Both have peddled a lot of hyperbole and unjustified shit, and both have also reported on real things. As far as I know, the NY Post never supported absurd conspiracy theories like Pizzagate or QAnon.

NY Post certainly hyped up Hillary's private email server well beyond the point of reason and fairness, but this scenario would exactly be like if every non-right-biased news outlet all decided to never publish any story even mentioning that she had a private email server that she may have used for non-personal affairs. Of course it'd be extremely irresponsible to have headlines about her email server every day, but it's just as irresponsible to consider the mere existence of the topic an unspeakable matter, as it would be if Twitter were to have censored every link to an article mentioning that she had a private email server she's alleged to have used for non-personal things. This is the Streisand effect in action, here.

It's simply not rational to assume that any story Trump supports is probably untrue. He lies an unbelievable amount, but if you assume 60% of everything that ever comes out of his mouth is a lie, that 40% could still have some real things worth trying to look at objectively. And in this case, this isn't some thing he just peddled entirely himself out of the blue; a newspaper reported on it, even if they're a very biased newspaper. He's going to support anything that he thinks helps his campaign, and not everything that helps his campaign is necessarily bullshit, even if a lot is.

This absolutist stance is part of the thing that only bolsters his constant accusations of fake news - "fake news" has in some sense become a self-fulfilling prophecy in some cases, like here. The left never followed Hillary's proclamation of "when they go low, we go high". Every year, the opposition sinks lower and lower, gradually trending towards the level of the other side. And that's probably exactly what Trump wants and has been trying to trigger.

And it is worth mentioning that both Fox New (the news side, not the opinion side) and the Wall Street Journal turned the story down. And the journalists at NY Post refused to put their name in the byline. If I worked at CNN, and saw that right leaning orgs were staying away from it, maybe skepticism is warranted. And keep in mind, they are refusing to release copies of the source material to other journalists. So no one other than the NY Post has the ability to authenticate (even fox business can't get access[1]).

[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/media/523087-giuliani-goes-off-...

I don't know what the solution to this problem is. Just wanted to point out that "letting them decide" has a lot of problems.

When you have all of the intelligence agencies you trust saying "Hey there are nation-state actors who are actively trying to sow dis-information in order to affect the outcome of the US elections." as an editor your only response can be "We are going to be really really choosy about stories we publish with respect to either candidate prior to the election."

Maybe it is a big scoop and all legit, and maybe it will like the "Hunter files" that Fox News was touting and have now mysteriously vanished. The responsible thing to do is publish after the election. What ever the story talks about will still be true or untrue then, and the risk of it being an elaborate hoax are non-zero. Nobody wants to be the person who was "duped by a foreign intelligence service into helping them move the election their way." That is not a badge of honor.