> it was hacked information provided by a foreign adversary to sow division and influence an election.
Every single one of these claims is false. Hunter Biden gave his laptop to a repair shop, the repair shop shared its contents with the New York Post and the FBI. At no point was any foreign agent involved, at no point was anything "hacked"
Under Twitter's definition[1] the repair shop accessing the contents and sharing them would be considered "hacked".
During the NY Post story, on Twitter you weren't allowed to link to "hacked" material (though this was probably not well enforced).[2]
Twitter changed that policy and reverted the account freezes[3] so that it was fine to link to "hacked" material as long as you weren't directly affiliated with the entity that produced the "hacked" material. [4]
You're right, Rudy Giuliani is clearly a credible figure and his account of how he happened to come across Hunter Biden's laptop is sensible and not-suspicous in the least.
Hey, quick question completely unrelated to this, was Trump pro or anti Putin? Did Julian Assange leak information in good faith or did he co-ordinate with Republicans to release only information that made Democrats look bad, in the 2016 election? Who provided Assange that information?
I never mentioned Rudy Guiliani? The story you linked is about a completely separate and unrelated story. WikiLeaks and Assange were not involved with Hunter Biden's laptop. As for the provenance of the laptop: Hunter Biden never denied giving the laptop to the repair shop. And the repair shop, voluntarily and on its own initiative, gave the laptop and all its contents to the FBI, who would presumably have found any foreign involvment, if it existed, in their investigation of the matter.
> The story you linked is about a completely separate and unrelated story. WikiLeaks and Assange were not involved here.
I am aware. My point is that there is a precedent for this behaviour and neither Trump nor Republicans are credible.
> As for the provenance of the laptop: Hunter Biden never denied giving the laptop to the repair shop. And the repair shop gave the laptop and all its contents to the FBI, who would presumably have found any foreign involvment, if it existed, in their investigation of the matter.
Let me be clear: I have no doubt in the veracity of any of the information or materials leaked. I distinctly recall seeing posts on /pol/ containing videos of Hunter smoking crack and banging hookers (that have since been scrubbed from the Internet), and people allegedly attempting to hack his iCloud account.
However, the I do not find the story and chain-of-custody of his laptop credible. I have been looking further since your prior comment and I cannot find anything that unambiguously confirms its provenance.
On the flip side, I also do not find a lack of official condemnation or attribution to Russia to be sufficient in disproving it. Joe Biden and the Democrats were clearly trying to kill the story and scrub any mention of it, so acknowledging it only gives it legitimacy.
Happy to ammend my comment if you can point me to something that proves otherwise, though. Jeffrey Epstein was discovered in part because a woman stumbled across his black book on the sidewalk — sometimes unlikely coincidences happen.
~~Donald J. Trump was not directly involved in the breaking of the laptop story.~~ (edit: my bad) "Republicans" is a group containing tens of millions of people (though I am not aware of the repair shop owner's party affiliation, if any?)
> Donald J. Trump was not directly involved in the breaking of the laptop story.
Do you really believe that Rudy Guiliani, a man acting as Trump's lackey for numerous things, received bombshell information and publicized it without Trump having any knowledge or involvement?
Michael Cohen testified under oauth that Trump knew about leaked DNC emails in advance of the 2016 election. Fast-forward to ~2019 and Trump had already personally tried to pressure Ukraine into providing damaging information about Joe Biden. There is very little plausible deniability here.
> "Republicans" is a group containing tens of millions of people (though I am not aware of the repair shop owner's party affiliation, if any?)
I am obviously not referring to a collective conspiracy of between hundreds of millions of American citizens. I meant the Republican Party.
> My mistake, I had forgotten about Rudy Giuliani's involvement.
That's okay, I had to go back and re-check the details of the story multiple times.
Based on your other comments, I think we're probably share a similar view about it. All I'm saying is that, while the validity of the content itself unimpeachable, the story about how it was uncovered is highly suspicious.
> Which contains many thousands of people, many of whom do not get along. It's a minor miracle that it is still holding together at all!
Of course, but they demonstrably put up a rather unified front against the Democrats; Catholics and Protestants hated each other, yet put aside their differences to vote for common interests.
Aren't the GOP currently spearheading an investigation into Hunter Biden's laptop?
I don't think it's suspicious. If the Russians (or whoever) had stolen the personal labtop of a close Biden family member, it doesn't seem plausible to me that the Bidens would not make that fact public. Joe Biden would not cover up a foreign adversary's crimes when both political and financial incentives run the other way.
> it doesn't seem plausible to me that the Bidens would not make that fact public
It makes sense to me, considering how damaging and embarrassing the content was. If they confirm it, they lose plausible deniability in being able to claim it's fake.
For a large period of time there was a coordinated effort to purge everything from the Internet and paint anyone bringing it up as a conspiracy theorist. It's harder to get away with that if you call attention to the leak and confirm it's authenticity.
Perhaps the laptop truly belonged to Hunter Biden. Without a confirmation or proper chain of custody, it's hard to say either way. It's not implausible that an advanced threat actor, especially one backed by a nation-state, could create an elaborate laptop forgery to 'layer'[0] hacked material into a legitimate news story and avoid the hack itself taking centre-stage like in 2016 — of course, this is speculation on my part.
I don't understand why the chain of custody matters if DKIM and DMARC are legitimate ways to verify the communications contained in the laptop. The focus on crack smoking hookers getting clapped by Biden isn't as interesting when it comes to political malfeasance.
> I don't understand why the chain of custody matters if DKIM and DMARC are legitimate ways to verify the communications contained in the laptop.
Whether the information is real is orthogonal to how it was obtained. Conspiring with a hostile adversary to release damaging information about a political opponent is also political malfeasance.
The circumstances of how the information was obtained is incredibly suspect and that deserves scrutiny, even if the information is legitimate and actionable.
> The focus on crack smoking hookers getting clapped by Biden isn't as interesting when it comes to political malfeasance.
That's kind of my point: why was that stuff leaked and spread when there was actually damning evidence? To me, it seems like the point was to release as much damaging and embarrassing content as possible to harm Joe Biden.
Every single one of these claims is false. Hunter Biden gave his laptop to a repair shop, the repair shop shared its contents with the New York Post and the FBI. At no point was any foreign agent involved, at no point was anything "hacked"