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.
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...