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.