The entirety of Hunterpalooza is based on inference, implication, and leaps of logic, and because it is a complex story, the media is utterly incapable of making it comprehensible to the average news consumer. The consumer's takeaway is, "Hunter Biden must be corrupt because he is under investigation." That = mission accomplished for the GOP. Going back to the nothingburger of Hunter's tenure on the Burisma Board of Directors, the media "forgot" to mention that corporate board positions are routinely do-nothing jobs with phenomenal compensation. (John Boehner went from the House to the Board of RJ Reynolds where he was getting $400,000 a year. All Boehner knew about tobacco was that he liked to smoke it.) Many directors are named because of who they are, or what corporation they work for, and there is plenty of back-scratching. If the media was truly concerned with how it looks for a president's family member to cash in on the name they would have been all over Neil Bush, who never aspired to elected office because he was making too much money grifting in the private sector. I won't bother to elaborate on the laughably implausible "smoking gun" that Rudy Guilani wants everyone to believe the laptop to be other than to note the WaPo story's 13th paragraph mention that the experts hired to look at it said it was hopelessly compromised. And the media should have smelled a rat when The Former Guy did his appeal to Putin regarding Hunter Biden - the appeal to a murderous dictator wasn't the goal - the goal was to get a headline about Hunter Biden. Again, mission accomplished.
The media fall for this every single time. The only conclusion is that it is intentional and they are willing accomplices of the takedown. I’m done being charitable. Democrats have been put through these hit jobs way too many times to keep tolerating it.
Impossible, unfortunately. This is one way the Republicans can throw the midterms - legally. Endless carping over inflation, and oh, the fun they had over Joe's remark that Putin shouldn't be allowed to stay in power, and the whole ugly mess they made of Judge Jackson's confirmation hearing are all the GOP brand of dirty politics.
Exactly. It has to be stopped, one way or the other. If Democrats turn the other cheek and tolerate this bullshit this time around, they deserve to lose. It has to be stopped.
He may simply not want to be the one to bring criminal charges against a former president. He wouldn't be the first one either. Nixon could have been charged in the Watergate affair, but it was swept under the rug. It would be an embarrassing thing for the country and hurt our prestige and our credibility, that's what I believe they're thinking. I doubt Trump and his acolytes will be charged with anything for this reason.
I don't think so. The SCOTUS stuff IS a distraction - from the serious story about the missing 7 1/2 hours of phone calls from the WH log on Jan 6th. And sadly, it looks like it's working.
NBC jumped on the bandwagon last night - “Hunter Biden investigation intensifies”. Let’s face it. Every news organization wants Trump to be President. Their profits and subscriptions skyrocketed the last time around. Greed drives the fourth estate.
NBC nightly news jumped on the story last night. Their framing left the impression that Hunter Biden made millions in questionable deals with China, cheated on his taxes, and implied Joe Biden lied during the debates when he said Hunter had not made any money from China. No mention of where this is coming from or how questionable the evidence is.
And when the media returns Republicans to power, they will blame Democrats for poor messaging skills, paying the price for going too far left, and having Biden as a failed president.
Somewhere Jimmy Carter is having a deja vu moment.
Rhandi Rhodes, on her show yesterday, reported that a poll showed that two thirds of Americans want Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmed as the new SCOTUS justice. Glenn Kirschner on his daily podcast outlined what he believed the DOJ is doing after several criminal indictments have come down against Trump "gang" members. The reports may tie together what's happening and why the latest MSM version of "But her emails" is nothing more than a desperate attempt to deflect just how fucked the Republicans are about to get. The good news here is that in the case of KBJ, the majority of the American public didn't buy into the child porn narrative the childish GOP attempted to weave during her Senate hearings. Rhodes pointed out that perhaps the constant MSMs normalization of GOP talking points has fallen on deaf ears. And according to Kirschner's podcast, it's likely that Merrick Garland and his DOJ are much smarter than we have given them credit for and have been able to keep the leaks away from, who Glenn likes to call, the leakers, the liars, and the lawyers. I don't know what's more sad, that the Republicans would think that beating this Hunter Biden dead horse story is actually going to save them or that much of the general public will believe it. For the first time in a long time, I'm hopeful that justice might be coming to Trump and this once political party that have almost gotten away with destroying our democracy. We'll see. In the meantime, I'm going use the Hunter Biden story frequency as a barometer for how close we are getting to seeing some serious shit hitting the Trump fan.
KBJ is walking through this minefield like Obama did - retaining solid support from a public who clearly SEES that they are solid, 100% qualified candidates… you know - that is heartening!
It's bad enough that all of this stinks of a fishing expedition in search of a crime. It's also that there is a feeling conveyed by the press that a crime MUST exist and they're simply unable to find it.
I think the reason the media does these detailed accounts is they know most people can’t stand reading such long accounts so they are left with the impression of wrongdoing even though those articles contain no proof. If journalists were really interested in putting the facts in perspective they would lead with “When Biden was out of office Hunter did deals with Russians and Chinese”.
Which is why headlines can be misleading and very, very damaging. I read the WaPo article twice and realized it's an article full of absolutely nothing of any interest. And the investigation seems boilerplate to me, as someone who used to work for a tax agency (big corporations are under constant, ongoing audit, and big money deals absolutely do trigger an audit, which is what happened to Hunter Biden). He's a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, it would not surprise me if these vultures are trying to push him into using again.
He really should file a lawsuit for defamation and libel. At the very least, it would change the narrative and ruin their attempt to paint President Biden as weak and corrupt.
Yeah, but of course it would be a distraction, and the press and GOP would eat him alive. To be honest, I just hope Hunter has stopped acting like Billy Carter and Roger Clinton. He's certainly old enough to know better.
Unfortunately, Hunter is his father's Achilles heel.
I know there was a time once when the media was boring and nobody paid attention and people actually respected and trusted it. Can we get back to that again?
I grew up with Walter Cronkite and still think of him every day. I remember being a kid and eating dinner while he was on TV. And every Friday he told us how many US soldiers died in Vietnam. We trusted him to tell us the truth.
Hunter Biden should press charges against them for this smear campaign. I know Democrats are supposed to take the high road, but my God, enough is enough. These hit jobs have got to stop.
I forced myself to read Wapo’s Matt Viser piece y’day and concluded what is plain for all of us to see, ie NO THERE THERE. All that ink for not much, a hit job with no punch. I hadn’t known about the quasi coordinated stories among CNN et al or the likely well timed leaks by Rs to each of these media outlets. MSM are saps for these non stories, and Wapo has a black eye for obvious pandering to both sides reporting. MSM has lost so much credibility twisting themselves into pretzels in the interest of fairness??????’ Come on. MSM is just proving the point.
I tried to read it but got fed up with I realized this went on when Biden was out of office.
The media always gets in a lather when a relative of a Democrat appears to be trading on their family name — Billy Carter, Roger Clinton — but can’t be bothered when Republicans do this. They know the Bush family has been doing that for decades and generations but find it totally acceptable. The media seems to realize that people can’t control what their family members do when Republicans are involved.
For example most people I ask have never heard that Neil Bush constantly traded on the Bush name when Dubya was in office. Not only did Neil make a lot of money selling semiconductors in Asia despite having no expertise in that area, he also got rewarded with free sex romps with prostitutes who magically turned up at his hotel room. The media didn’t even have to do a deep dive on that story since Neil admitted these facts in his divorce deposition.
"One White House reporter from CBS News, doing his best Fox News impression, asked if President Joe Biden would take the extraordinary step of pardoning Hunter — who is not accused of any crime."
It's like an investigator who starts a suspect's interrogation with 'So how long have you been beating your wife..."
Weird to see from professional "journalists." Totally in character for professional infotainers.
What's particularly baffling to me is how anyone can draw conclusions at this point when, according to WAPO reporting, "people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI."
Can any of the information be validated? And if not, how is ANY of this newsworthy now? It's kinda like examining a crime scene at a busy subway station a week or two after the fact, no?
@joshtpm: As you can see the reporters have literally internalized gop attack ads and their content as a central element of a news story even to the point of reporting the attacks, their intensity and success in advance of their even happening.
You need read no further than the 6th graf of WaPo piece:
"The Post did not find evidence that Joe Biden personally benefited from or knew details about the transactions with CEFC, which took place after he had left the vice presidency and before he announced his intentions to run for the White House in 2020."
But you should read further, and sample the sidebar for a flavor of this thinnest of gruels in which they refer to the "purported hard drive." Purported? That's what passes for confirmation in a purported investigative piece with global dimensions? Aluminum nuclear tubes, anyone? Sych mealy mouthing would get a story spiked at any credible news organization.
But there's more! From the sidebar on how the Post sought to confirm the validity of the purported hard drive:
"The verifiable emails are a small fraction of 217 gigabytes of data provided to The Post on a portable hard drive by Republican activist Jack Maxey. He said the contents of the portable drive originated from Hunter Biden’s MacBook Pro, which Hunter reportedly dropped off at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Del., in April 2019 and never reclaimed."
"The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post. Neither found clear evidence of tampering in their examinations, but some of the records that might have helped verify contents were not available for analysis, they said. The Post was able in some instances to find documents from other sources that matched content on the laptop that the experts were not able to assess."
"Among the reasons for the inconclusive findings was sloppy handling of the data, which damaged some records. The experts found the data had been repeatedly accessed and copied by people other than Hunter Biden over nearly three years."
"Most of the data obtained by The Post lacks cryptographic features that would help experts make a reliable determination of authenticity, especially in a case where the original computer and its hard drive are not available for forensic examination. Other factors, such as emails that were only partially downloaded, also stymied the security experts’ efforts to verify the content."
The reporting "is unlikely to resolve [the] debate, offering instead only the limited revelation that some of the data on the portable drive appears to be authentic. The security experts who examined the data for The Post struggled to reach definitive conclusions about the contents as a whole, including whether all of it originated from a single computer or could have been assembled from files from multiple computers and put on the portable drive."
Something from Atrios on media logic that dictates why CBS has hired Mulvaney:
“The Business Of The News Business
Would also be bad, but I'm curious if similar decisions are made in the other direction. You know, the Dems are going to take charge so we need access to them!
No I'm not curious. They don't do that.
Back when Media Matters did guests studies of the Sunday shows, the excuses made were literally, "Republicans are in charge so our viewers need to hear what they think" and then "Democrats are in charge so we need to give viewers a chance to hear what Republicans think."
CBS News has stated flat out why they hired Mulvaney and are looking to hire more former GOP and GOP insiders. They want ACCESS—as if they don't already have it!—ahead of the Republicans taking over Congress. The media already decided the outcome of the election—pushed by them, in fact. Envious to see all those profits being generated by Fox and the other odious outlets, they want in on the gravy train. From the WAPO story:
“If you look at some of the people that we’ve been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” CBS News’s co-president Neeraj Khemlani told the staff of the network’s morning show, according to a recording of his comments obtained by The Washington Post. “A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”
It's beyond despicable. The media is broken when Hunter Biden's laptop is a big story but the threats to America democracy are not.
It is hilarious how the media are pretending that nepotism is a new concept and is only being exploited by the Biden family. You know, because nepotism does not exist at the NYT, WaPo, WSJ and CNN. Also, where is this laptop? Who has it? Is there anything to it other than Rudy Giuliani talking about it non-stop since 2016?
It isn’t just about nepotism it is about the power and influence of a person’s family. Maggie Haberman’s mother Nancy is a prominent media communications exec at NYC’s top PR firm. She has worked for many influential New Yorkers, including Trump. Don’t tell me the fact that Maggie is likely to have better access to the rich and powerful than your average reporter didn’t play a role in her hiring by the Times.
Along with your point about her Mom, Maggie's Dad Clyde worked for NYT. Yet she started with the New York Post, then NY Daily News, then back to the Post then Politico. It wasn't until 2016 the NYT became interested in her--a full 20 + years after college graduation. I'll add that she like many "journalists" withheld critical, and criminal, WH information to get a book deal.
At what point can the Bidens' sue? At what point does innuendo become slander and a possible crime? I'm not saying they want to do it or should do it. I'm just wondering.
I think it would be possible because there is clear lying and intentional malice. I would have loved to have seen the Clintons sue the right wing media outlets spreading the lies that they had had their close friend Vince Foster murdered. I think they just figure it’s not worth calling even more attention to the slanders. The media should be doing that.
I think it is beyond time for Democrats to fight back as hard as legally allowed. What has ignoring it and turning the other cheek done for them? Republicans just take advantage and do even more harm. In the same way Kamala Harris held up her hand and declared, “I’m speaking” when the reprobate Republican tried to interrupt and disrupt her, the Bidens need to stand up and fight back, and call Republicans and the media out on these baseless attacks. At this point, ignoring it and turning the other cheek cannot be an option.
The buzzwords "Hunter Biden" and "China" in the same sentence make Republicans' hearts go pitter-patter. It doesn't matter that these were hotsy-totsy big money business deals that can be verified, and were. Nothing to see here, folks.
Was it a Freudian slip that the Washington Post stated in the article that their source for Hunter's emails and other garbage is what they termed a "Republican activist"? What the actual F is a Republican activist? I bet I can guess. Someone pitched this crap story to the major newspapers, starting with the NYT, whose story on the laptops popped up out of the trash bin last week, followed by the NY Post.
Biden's success in dealing with Ukraine, and the very serious stories about Ginni Thomas and those missing WH phone call logs, demanded a Trump-style "intervention." He's calling his acolytes and putting them to work.
Notice the possible relationship between Eric's main article today and the Good Stuff. Is the press preparing itself for what they believe to be a republican takeover in the midterms? Time to appease the republicans with the Hunter Biden flop of a story because the republicans are apt to win?
Funny you mention that because yesterday, the dream of having every iteration of "double down" removed from the lexicon was dashed when Joey said, "We have to double-down...something something gas prices and whining car owners."
The entirety of Hunterpalooza is based on inference, implication, and leaps of logic, and because it is a complex story, the media is utterly incapable of making it comprehensible to the average news consumer. The consumer's takeaway is, "Hunter Biden must be corrupt because he is under investigation." That = mission accomplished for the GOP. Going back to the nothingburger of Hunter's tenure on the Burisma Board of Directors, the media "forgot" to mention that corporate board positions are routinely do-nothing jobs with phenomenal compensation. (John Boehner went from the House to the Board of RJ Reynolds where he was getting $400,000 a year. All Boehner knew about tobacco was that he liked to smoke it.) Many directors are named because of who they are, or what corporation they work for, and there is plenty of back-scratching. If the media was truly concerned with how it looks for a president's family member to cash in on the name they would have been all over Neil Bush, who never aspired to elected office because he was making too much money grifting in the private sector. I won't bother to elaborate on the laughably implausible "smoking gun" that Rudy Guilani wants everyone to believe the laptop to be other than to note the WaPo story's 13th paragraph mention that the experts hired to look at it said it was hopelessly compromised. And the media should have smelled a rat when The Former Guy did his appeal to Putin regarding Hunter Biden - the appeal to a murderous dictator wasn't the goal - the goal was to get a headline about Hunter Biden. Again, mission accomplished.
yep. yr description sounds exactly like Whitewater coverage.
"Experts hired to look at it said it was hopelessly compromised..."
Exactly. THAT is the only thing worth publishing at this point. Anything else is clickbait.
Idea: Great headline!?
The media fall for this every single time. The only conclusion is that it is intentional and they are willing accomplices of the takedown. I’m done being charitable. Democrats have been put through these hit jobs way too many times to keep tolerating it.
‘Hunterpalooza’… exactly… c’mon 🇺🇸 - laugh this off , seriously.
Impossible, unfortunately. This is one way the Republicans can throw the midterms - legally. Endless carping over inflation, and oh, the fun they had over Joe's remark that Putin shouldn't be allowed to stay in power, and the whole ugly mess they made of Judge Jackson's confirmation hearing are all the GOP brand of dirty politics.
Exactly. It has to be stopped, one way or the other. If Democrats turn the other cheek and tolerate this bullshit this time around, they deserve to lose. It has to be stopped.
Exactly. And on a related note, does Merrick Garland know how much we need him to step up to the plate? Somehow, I doubt it.
right! and I am so curious: what is he so afraid of? and why?
He may simply not want to be the one to bring criminal charges against a former president. He wouldn't be the first one either. Nixon could have been charged in the Watergate affair, but it was swept under the rug. It would be an embarrassing thing for the country and hurt our prestige and our credibility, that's what I believe they're thinking. I doubt Trump and his acolytes will be charged with anything for this reason.
Convenient distractions from SCOTUS shenanigans :/
I don't think so. The SCOTUS stuff IS a distraction - from the serious story about the missing 7 1/2 hours of phone calls from the WH log on Jan 6th. And sadly, it looks like it's working.
W O W…
NBC jumped on the bandwagon last night - “Hunter Biden investigation intensifies”. Let’s face it. Every news organization wants Trump to be President. Their profits and subscriptions skyrocketed the last time around. Greed drives the fourth estate.
and someone is leaning the a act same “investigation intensifies” stories, which are regurgitated w/o context
The timing is so painfully obvious, it’s both breathtaking AND embarrassing… :/
Yes.
NBC nightly news jumped on the story last night. Their framing left the impression that Hunter Biden made millions in questionable deals with China, cheated on his taxes, and implied Joe Biden lied during the debates when he said Hunter had not made any money from China. No mention of where this is coming from or how questionable the evidence is.
And when the media returns Republicans to power, they will blame Democrats for poor messaging skills, paying the price for going too far left, and having Biden as a failed president.
Somewhere Jimmy Carter is having a deja vu moment.
I was thinking the exact same thing. The media is for sure trying to Jimmy Carter Joe Biden.
Rhandi Rhodes, on her show yesterday, reported that a poll showed that two thirds of Americans want Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmed as the new SCOTUS justice. Glenn Kirschner on his daily podcast outlined what he believed the DOJ is doing after several criminal indictments have come down against Trump "gang" members. The reports may tie together what's happening and why the latest MSM version of "But her emails" is nothing more than a desperate attempt to deflect just how fucked the Republicans are about to get. The good news here is that in the case of KBJ, the majority of the American public didn't buy into the child porn narrative the childish GOP attempted to weave during her Senate hearings. Rhodes pointed out that perhaps the constant MSMs normalization of GOP talking points has fallen on deaf ears. And according to Kirschner's podcast, it's likely that Merrick Garland and his DOJ are much smarter than we have given them credit for and have been able to keep the leaks away from, who Glenn likes to call, the leakers, the liars, and the lawyers. I don't know what's more sad, that the Republicans would think that beating this Hunter Biden dead horse story is actually going to save them or that much of the general public will believe it. For the first time in a long time, I'm hopeful that justice might be coming to Trump and this once political party that have almost gotten away with destroying our democracy. We'll see. In the meantime, I'm going use the Hunter Biden story frequency as a barometer for how close we are getting to seeing some serious shit hitting the Trump fan.
KBJ is walking through this minefield like Obama did - retaining solid support from a public who clearly SEES that they are solid, 100% qualified candidates… you know - that is heartening!
I hope you are right. My cynical brain regarding all of this is just so corrosive, and I really want to be wrong.
It's bad enough that all of this stinks of a fishing expedition in search of a crime. It's also that there is a feeling conveyed by the press that a crime MUST exist and they're simply unable to find it.
for a 2017 biz deal
I think the reason the media does these detailed accounts is they know most people can’t stand reading such long accounts so they are left with the impression of wrongdoing even though those articles contain no proof. If journalists were really interested in putting the facts in perspective they would lead with “When Biden was out of office Hunter did deals with Russians and Chinese”.
Which is why headlines can be misleading and very, very damaging. I read the WaPo article twice and realized it's an article full of absolutely nothing of any interest. And the investigation seems boilerplate to me, as someone who used to work for a tax agency (big corporations are under constant, ongoing audit, and big money deals absolutely do trigger an audit, which is what happened to Hunter Biden). He's a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, it would not surprise me if these vultures are trying to push him into using again.
He really should file a lawsuit for defamation and libel. At the very least, it would change the narrative and ruin their attempt to paint President Biden as weak and corrupt.
Yeah, but of course it would be a distraction, and the press and GOP would eat him alive. To be honest, I just hope Hunter has stopped acting like Billy Carter and Roger Clinton. He's certainly old enough to know better.
Unfortunately, Hunter is his father's Achilles heel.
Haha. The truth is just soooo boring. (Snark)
I know there was a time once when the media was boring and nobody paid attention and people actually respected and trusted it. Can we get back to that again?
I grew up with Walter Cronkite and still think of him every day. I remember being a kid and eating dinner while he was on TV. And every Friday he told us how many US soldiers died in Vietnam. We trusted him to tell us the truth.
Hunter Biden should press charges against them for this smear campaign. I know Democrats are supposed to take the high road, but my God, enough is enough. These hit jobs have got to stop.
Well said!
Let me know when the son of an ex-Vice President makes $640mm, like the son-in-law of a sitting President just did.
So:
Hunter Biden did stuff
There is no evidence the President had any personal benefit.
The President is not being investigated
And, even after this long ass story, it’s entirely possible Hunter won’t even be charged.
Thanks Washington Post
Liberal bias my ass
You forget that Hunter did those things when his dad was no longer in power.
That could be a headline, too!? (in parallel universe, but still…)
I forced myself to read Wapo’s Matt Viser piece y’day and concluded what is plain for all of us to see, ie NO THERE THERE. All that ink for not much, a hit job with no punch. I hadn’t known about the quasi coordinated stories among CNN et al or the likely well timed leaks by Rs to each of these media outlets. MSM are saps for these non stories, and Wapo has a black eye for obvious pandering to both sides reporting. MSM has lost so much credibility twisting themselves into pretzels in the interest of fairness??????’ Come on. MSM is just proving the point.
I tried to read it but got fed up with I realized this went on when Biden was out of office.
The media always gets in a lather when a relative of a Democrat appears to be trading on their family name — Billy Carter, Roger Clinton — but can’t be bothered when Republicans do this. They know the Bush family has been doing that for decades and generations but find it totally acceptable. The media seems to realize that people can’t control what their family members do when Republicans are involved.
For example most people I ask have never heard that Neil Bush constantly traded on the Bush name when Dubya was in office. Not only did Neil make a lot of money selling semiconductors in Asia despite having no expertise in that area, he also got rewarded with free sex romps with prostitutes who magically turned up at his hotel room. The media didn’t even have to do a deep dive on that story since Neil admitted these facts in his divorce deposition.
https://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/11/25/bush.brother.reut/
I think they get in a lather whenever a D seems to get traction, period.
Yep. Mainstream media really does hate Democrats, and then they have the nerve to claim the both-sides perspective. It really gets my blood up.
And it’s become incredibly normalized :/
Democrats need to de-normalize it asap. We cannot survive another election cycle with a rightwing biased media hanging over it.
"One White House reporter from CBS News, doing his best Fox News impression, asked if President Joe Biden would take the extraordinary step of pardoning Hunter — who is not accused of any crime."
It's like an investigator who starts a suspect's interrogation with 'So how long have you been beating your wife..."
Weird to see from professional "journalists." Totally in character for professional infotainers.
Lockstep - just like the R Senate. Another ‘hollowing out’ of their own brand :/
What's particularly baffling to me is how anyone can draw conclusions at this point when, according to WAPO reporting, "people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI."
Can any of the information be validated? And if not, how is ANY of this newsworthy now? It's kinda like examining a crime scene at a busy subway station a week or two after the fact, no?
Nice analysis!😆
Related - :/
@joshtpm: As you can see the reporters have literally internalized gop attack ads and their content as a central element of a news story even to the point of reporting the attacks, their intensity and success in advance of their even happening.
You need read no further than the 6th graf of WaPo piece:
"The Post did not find evidence that Joe Biden personally benefited from or knew details about the transactions with CEFC, which took place after he had left the vice presidency and before he announced his intentions to run for the White House in 2020."
But you should read further, and sample the sidebar for a flavor of this thinnest of gruels in which they refer to the "purported hard drive." Purported? That's what passes for confirmation in a purported investigative piece with global dimensions? Aluminum nuclear tubes, anyone? Sych mealy mouthing would get a story spiked at any credible news organization.
But there's more! From the sidebar on how the Post sought to confirm the validity of the purported hard drive:
"The verifiable emails are a small fraction of 217 gigabytes of data provided to The Post on a portable hard drive by Republican activist Jack Maxey. He said the contents of the portable drive originated from Hunter Biden’s MacBook Pro, which Hunter reportedly dropped off at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Del., in April 2019 and never reclaimed."
"The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post. Neither found clear evidence of tampering in their examinations, but some of the records that might have helped verify contents were not available for analysis, they said. The Post was able in some instances to find documents from other sources that matched content on the laptop that the experts were not able to assess."
"Among the reasons for the inconclusive findings was sloppy handling of the data, which damaged some records. The experts found the data had been repeatedly accessed and copied by people other than Hunter Biden over nearly three years."
"Most of the data obtained by The Post lacks cryptographic features that would help experts make a reliable determination of authenticity, especially in a case where the original computer and its hard drive are not available for forensic examination. Other factors, such as emails that were only partially downloaded, also stymied the security experts’ efforts to verify the content."
The reporting "is unlikely to resolve [the] debate, offering instead only the limited revelation that some of the data on the portable drive appears to be authentic. The security experts who examined the data for The Post struggled to reach definitive conclusions about the contents as a whole, including whether all of it originated from a single computer or could have been assembled from files from multiple computers and put on the portable drive."
No wonder Vince Foster killed himself.
“Thinnest of gruels”…
”Hunterpalooza”… “Katie bar the door”. I love this site
Like a snail on a fence post.
Something from Atrios on media logic that dictates why CBS has hired Mulvaney:
“The Business Of The News Business
Would also be bad, but I'm curious if similar decisions are made in the other direction. You know, the Dems are going to take charge so we need access to them!
No I'm not curious. They don't do that.
Back when Media Matters did guests studies of the Sunday shows, the excuses made were literally, "Republicans are in charge so our viewers need to hear what they think" and then "Democrats are in charge so we need to give viewers a chance to hear what Republicans think."
https://www.eschatonblog.com/2022/03/the-business-of-news-business.html
CBS News has stated flat out why they hired Mulvaney and are looking to hire more former GOP and GOP insiders. They want ACCESS—as if they don't already have it!—ahead of the Republicans taking over Congress. The media already decided the outcome of the election—pushed by them, in fact. Envious to see all those profits being generated by Fox and the other odious outlets, they want in on the gravy train. From the WAPO story:
“If you look at some of the people that we’ve been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” CBS News’s co-president Neeraj Khemlani told the staff of the network’s morning show, according to a recording of his comments obtained by The Washington Post. “A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”
It's beyond despicable. The media is broken when Hunter Biden's laptop is a big story but the threats to America democracy are not.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/03/30/cbs-mulvaney-backlash/
It is hilarious how the media are pretending that nepotism is a new concept and is only being exploited by the Biden family. You know, because nepotism does not exist at the NYT, WaPo, WSJ and CNN. Also, where is this laptop? Who has it? Is there anything to it other than Rudy Giuliani talking about it non-stop since 2016?
It isn’t just about nepotism it is about the power and influence of a person’s family. Maggie Haberman’s mother Nancy is a prominent media communications exec at NYC’s top PR firm. She has worked for many influential New Yorkers, including Trump. Don’t tell me the fact that Maggie is likely to have better access to the rich and powerful than your average reporter didn’t play a role in her hiring by the Times.
Along with your point about her Mom, Maggie's Dad Clyde worked for NYT. Yet she started with the New York Post, then NY Daily News, then back to the Post then Politico. It wasn't until 2016 the NYT became interested in her--a full 20 + years after college graduation. I'll add that she like many "journalists" withheld critical, and criminal, WH information to get a book deal.
Guess: It’s with Biden’s ‘granddaughter’s diary’?… in safekeeping /s
At what point can the Bidens' sue? At what point does innuendo become slander and a possible crime? I'm not saying they want to do it or should do it. I'm just wondering.
Ask HRC I guess?… /s
I think it would be possible because there is clear lying and intentional malice. I would have loved to have seen the Clintons sue the right wing media outlets spreading the lies that they had had their close friend Vince Foster murdered. I think they just figure it’s not worth calling even more attention to the slanders. The media should be doing that.
I think it is beyond time for Democrats to fight back as hard as legally allowed. What has ignoring it and turning the other cheek done for them? Republicans just take advantage and do even more harm. In the same way Kamala Harris held up her hand and declared, “I’m speaking” when the reprobate Republican tried to interrupt and disrupt her, the Bidens need to stand up and fight back, and call Republicans and the media out on these baseless attacks. At this point, ignoring it and turning the other cheek cannot be an option.
The buzzwords "Hunter Biden" and "China" in the same sentence make Republicans' hearts go pitter-patter. It doesn't matter that these were hotsy-totsy big money business deals that can be verified, and were. Nothing to see here, folks.
Was it a Freudian slip that the Washington Post stated in the article that their source for Hunter's emails and other garbage is what they termed a "Republican activist"? What the actual F is a Republican activist? I bet I can guess. Someone pitched this crap story to the major newspapers, starting with the NYT, whose story on the laptops popped up out of the trash bin last week, followed by the NY Post.
Biden's success in dealing with Ukraine, and the very serious stories about Ginni Thomas and those missing WH phone call logs, demanded a Trump-style "intervention." He's calling his acolytes and putting them to work.
Notice the possible relationship between Eric's main article today and the Good Stuff. Is the press preparing itself for what they believe to be a republican takeover in the midterms? Time to appease the republicans with the Hunter Biden flop of a story because the republicans are apt to win?
yep, good point
Everyone is going to be really disappointed when the Dems hold both chambers with room to breathe. :::she said boldly:::
Can’t hurt! Next: Double-down?! :)
Funny you mention that because yesterday, the dream of having every iteration of "double down" removed from the lexicon was dashed when Joey said, "We have to double-down...something something gas prices and whining car owners."
Joey…S?
Sorry, Biden. I call him Joey.
Agreed. They are living in a fantasy. Dems will hold both chambers, and will add a couple of seats to the Senate.
That’s what my best pal is saying as well…👍
So happy to meet someone who shares my view about the midterms. I know it's virtual but still.
Yes, they are. And helping Republicans do it!