It's definitely time to talk about Hunter's laptop.

[Chuck Naill]

I may not be the smartest dog in the pack, but I know better than to chase a skunk down a rabbit hole.

CRIMESTOP: "The faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. In short....protective stupidity."

Such a lame post. No original thought. Who wants or should be mindless? Really dude?

[Chip]

Project Veritas, the New York Post, Breitbart, and Marco Polo.

You forgot InfoWars and One America News Network?

Sloppy. . .

[Chuck Naill]

Project Veritas, the New York Post, Breitbart, and Marco Polo.

You forgot InfoWars and One America News Network?

Sloppy. . .

It’s what they crave.

[dneal]

Project Veritas, the New York Post, Breitbart, and Marco Polo.

You forgot InfoWars and One America News Network?

Sloppy. . .

Your dodging and denial is what's sloppy.

Let's see who else is cited.

The New Yorker (that's a hard right wing one there)
BuzzFeed (another den of fascist conservatives, right?)
NPR
New York Times

Of course you can avoid all that media stuff, left or right, and look at the emails yourself. They're all there. iMessages and WhatsApp too.

Easier to whine about bias though. Keeps you from committing crimethink.

Big Brother appreciates your dedication to the narrative.

[Chuck Naill]

Not dodging, but not taking the bait.

[dneal]

Bless y’all’s hearts.

[Chuck Naill]

It really upsets you that no one takes you seriously.

[Bold2013]

I blame all of Hunter’s treason on Trump

[Chip]

Compared to Trump's crimes, and the foul deeds of his nepo babies and minions, this is pretty small stuff.

Your obsession, not mine.

[Chuck Naill]

Stop posting the obvious!!

[dneal]

The obvious:

PNG image 11.png

[Chuck Naill]

It is better to recognize the danger than to pretend it doesn’t exist.

[dneal]

It is better to recognize the danger than to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Yet when presented with an actual mountain of proof (the laptop with its emails, messages, and other information), we see people doing that very thing: pretending it doesn't exist.


“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

[Chuck Naill]

It is better to recognize the danger than to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Yet when presented with an actual mountain of proof (the laptop with its emails, messages, and other information), we see people doing that very thing: pretending it doesn't exist.


“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

I think it is the source rather than the “content”.

[dneal]

You can download the content and look at it for yourself. The emails, the text messages, etc... The data is right there.

[724Seney]

You can download the content and look at it for yourself. The emails, the text messages, etc... The data is right there.

@dneal: You should know better than to make a statement like that.........
The "woke brothers" hate to become confused by the facts.
For them, it is much easier to live in their little dream world, way out there in hypocrisy land.

[Chuck Naill]

You can download the content and look at it for yourself. The emails, the text messages, etc... The data is right there.

Like it was for Covid, Fauci, and Trump?

[Chip]

How does it feel to be both a tool and fool?

How Did Hunter Biden's Laptop Allegedly Go from a Repair Shop in Delaware to the New York Post?

News reports identified the hard drive's source as a computer repair shop owner in Delaware.

Bethania Palma
Oct 15, 2020

With just over two weeks to go until the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the New York Post published a story that was lauded by right-leaning media and political figures as a "bombshell" and criticized by others as disinformation resurfacing an old method of political attack.

The story was based around contents found on the hard drive of a laptop that had allegedly belonged to Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Citing emails found on the hard drive, the Post reported it had a "smoking gun" proving that the elder Biden had met with a Ukrainian energy firm executive while Hunter sat on the board of that firm.

The Post claimed to have confirmed a long-running line of political attack against Biden — namely that Biden had used his position as vice president in the Obama administration to benefit Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, while his son sat on the board.

However, the Post's "smoking gun" email doesn't prove that Biden met with the Burisma executive on behalf of his son, and Biden's campaign has denied any such meeting ever took place. Many noted that the story raised more questions than it answered.

Below, we unpack what we know.

On Oct. 14, 2020, The New York Post published a story headline that read, "Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad."*

The Post reported that Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney for U.S. President Donald Trump (who is running against Joe Biden), gave them a "copy" of Hunter Biden's laptop drive on Oct. 11, 2020. The newspaper was first alerted to its existence by Steve Bannon, a former Trump aide and former Breitbart News executive.

The "smoking gun" message is embedded in the story. It was allegedly sent by Burisma board adviser Vadym Pozharskyi in April 2015, and read, "Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure."

The story didn't offer any other evidence that a meeting between Joe Biden and Pozharskyi ever took place, and the Biden campaign responded by stating that it did not. A Biden campaign spokesman told the New York Times, "We have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place."

The spokesman also stated the Post had never contacted them about "critical elements of the story."

The Post story contained a second email, allegedly sent by Pozharskyi in 2014, addressed to both Hunter Biden and Devon Archer, who was also on the Burisma board. In the message, Pozharskyi was seeking "advice" from the men as to "how you could use your influence" to help the company in a matter described as various Ukrainian government agencies attempting extract money from the company. It didn't specifically ask Biden to seek help from his father, the American vice president.

Aside from those emails, the story included embedded images from Hunter Biden's alleged computer hard drive which include family photographs and screen shots from a lurid video involving the younger Biden.

It also contained an image of a December 2019 subpoena for a MacBook Pro and a hard drive.

The story prompted immediate scrutiny and criticism for its timing and sourcing, dropping just over two weeks before the presidential election in which Biden is Trump's challenger, and sourced from Trump allies.

It also raised questions about whether the emails, upon which the story's entire premise is based, were real. Some even questioned whether the laptop itself actually belonged to Hunter Biden.

We reached out to the Biden campaign and Hunter Biden's attorney, George Mesires, with questions about the story but didn't hear back in time for publication.

The story also raised red flags for disinformation researchers.

For example, Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, tweeted that the story should be approached with caution, and noted that it's an "old Cold War disinformation tactic to pass information, especially but not exclusively when forged, to low-brow newspapers that have high circulation and low standards of investigation. Ideal for surfacing and amplification."

On March 16, 2022, a New York Times story about a U.S. Department of Justice into Hunter Biden's tax affairs, the Times mentioned emails "from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation."
The Chain of Events

The Post reported that the saga started in April 2019, when a man identifying himself as Hunter Biden dropped the laptop off at a computer repair shop in the Biden family's home state of Delaware. The laptop had been damaged by water.

Although the Post didn't identify the shop owner, journalists were able to track the shop down because the Post failed to remove metadata from images embedded in the story. The shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, spoke to several reporters in a nearly hour-long conversation recorded by The Daily Beast.

In the discussion, Mac Isaac alleged that a man identifying himself as Hunter Biden had dropped the laptop in question off with liquid damage. He also said he didn't actually see the vice president's son dropping the laptop off. The Post story contained an invoice naming Hunter Biden.

Mac Isaac declined to answer many questions, but he did state that the contents of the laptop troubled him. Mac Isaac referenced the debunked Seth Rich conspiracy theory, which holds that Rich, a DNC staffer, was murdered by Democratic political operatives after he hacked the DNC's server. Mac Isaac claimed he was fearful for his own safety.

U.S. Intelligence officials have concluded that it was Russian government agents, not Rich, who hacked the DNC. The Russian government had actively promoted the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, as had right-wing media and social media personalities.

Mac Isaac said he was troubled by the contents of the laptop, and was therefore in contact with the FBI — although he gave contradictory statements as to who initiated the contact. According to the subpoena published by the Post, the FBI took the laptop from Mac Isaac in December 2019.

We left a voice message with Mac Isaac's computer shop but didn't get a response in time for publication. We also reached out to the FBI with questions about the claims in the story and Mac Isaac's statement, but the FBI replied that according to policy, it wouldn't confirm or deny an investigation.

The Post reported that before Mac Isaac gave the laptop and hard drive to the FBI, he "made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello."

When reached by phone, Costello told Snopes that he was given the contents of the hard drive in September 2020. The contents, he said, contain thousands of emails, text messages, pictures and videos.

Costello told Snopes that the reason his client, Giuliani, ultimately gave the hard drive copy to the Post was because that's what its source (although Costello didn't name him, we presume based on Mac Isaac's own statements that he was the source) wanted done.

"We turned [the hard drive contents] over [to the Post] because the intent of the source was to get the hard drive to Rudy Giuliani so he could do something with it, bring it to the public’s attention," Costello said.

Costello said it was "reasonable" to assume Mac Isaac wanted the hard drive's contents given to the Post because he was frustrated by his perceived lack of law enforcement action by the FBI, who had possessed the laptop since December 2019. Costello said the laptop's original owner never retrieved his property, therefore it was "considered abandoned property" that "became the property of the source."

Both Facebook and Twitter took action against the Post article, with Twitter blocking users from posting links to it. Twitter said it did so because the story included personal and private information, and its content violated Twitter's policy against posting hacked material.

"We don’t want to incentivize hacking by allowing Twitter to be used as distribution for possibly illegally obtained materials," the platform stated.

A Facebook executive said their company suppressed the distribution of the story on its platform to stem the spread of misinformation, pending review by Facebook's fact-checking partners.

The platforms' actions prompted a rebuke from Trump.

"So terrible that Facebook and Twitter took down the story of 'Smoking Gun' emails related to Sleepy Joe Biden and his son, Hunter," Trump tweeted. "It is only the beginning for them. There is nothing worse than a corrupt politician."

The New York Post story played on an allegation originally raised to counter those made against Trump in an impeachment inquiry.

Trump was accused of attempting to strong-arm Ukraine's president into producing damaging information on Biden by withholding crucial military aid. Trump was ultimately impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives, but the Republican-controlled Senate voted acquit him without calling witnesses or admitting new evidence. Trump and his supporters countered by turning Ukraine corruption allegations on Biden, stating that as vice president, Biden had pressured the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor so the prosecutor couldn't investigate Burisma while his son sat on the company's board.

The New York Post article resurfaced a 2018 statement made by Biden which has been widely taken out of context to show "proof" of that corruption: "I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money," Biden stated. "Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

Biden wasn't admitting to pressuring Ukraine to fire a prosecutor looking into his son's firm, however. He was describing efforts by the Obama administration to stamp out government corruption in Ukraine, which included getting rid of an ineffective prosecutor. An investigation by Senate Republicans into Biden's activities as vice president in relation to Ukraine concluded in 2020 without finding any evidence of wrongdoing.

Since we published this story, many Snopes readers have inquired whether a photograph included in the Post story truly showed Hunter Biden asleep with a "crack pipe" dangling from his mouth. At this time we know nothing about the provenance of the photograph: Who took it, whether it was real or staged, whether it was taken with or without Biden's knowledge, whether Biden was truly asleep, or whether he had been smoking crack (or anything else) with the pictured pipe. We also note that the image only shows part of the person's face alleged to be Hunter Biden.

We sent questions to the Post's editors asking how the Post verified the authenticity of the hard drive's contents and why it included personal images from it which were not pertinent to the story. We will update if we hear back.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/10/...ptop-giuliani/

[Chuck Naill]

This is “evidence “ @denial and @711seny will soon dismiss because it’s not what they want to hear. 🫢🫢🫢

[Chip]

Your dodging and denial is what's sloppy.

Let's see who else is cited.

The New Yorker (that's a hard right wing one there)

BuzzFeed (another den of fascist conservatives, right?)
NPR
New York Times

Of course you can avoid all that media stuff, left or right, and look at the emails yourself. They're all there. iMessages and WhatsApp too.

Easier to whine about bias though. Keeps you from committing crimethink.

Big Brother appreciates your dedication to the narrative.

You mention The New Yorker as support for your loony accusations. That surprised me, because I subscribe and have read every issue for many years.

Here are screenshots of their coverage:







Your citing the magazine as evidence for your raving seems, at the least, to be innaccurate.