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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31632 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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The "Twitter Censorship Files" (WSJ, archived link) promise to shed some light on the Hunter Biden's Laptop Saga:

The Twitter documents published by Mr. Taibbi include part of what appears to be a memo from James Baker, the Twitter deputy general counsel. “I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked. At this stage, however, it is reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that caution is warranted,” Mr. Baker wrote.

He continued that “there are some facts that indicate that the materials may have been hacked, while there are others indicating that the computer was either abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes. We simply need more information.”

With an election so close, any delay helped the Biden campaign, which was trying to squelch the Hunter Biden story that raised questions about what Joe Biden knew about Hunter’s foreign business dealings. Twitter went ahead and suppressed the story across its platform, going so far as to suspend the New York Post’s Twitter account.

Apparently, no light can be shed without heat. Matt Taibbi agreed to certain conditions in obtaining the files:

Very shortly, I’m going to begin posting a long thread of information on Twitter, at my account, @mtaibbi. [...] There’s a long story I hope to be able to tell soon, but can’t, not quite yet anyway. What I can say is that in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions.

The conversation is therefore veering towards journalistic ethics rather than the content. That WSJ op-ed I linked to above leads with the following:

Elon Musk’s release of internal emails relating to Twitter’s 2020 censorship is news by any definition, even if the mainstream media dismiss it. There will be many threads to unspool as more is released, but a couple of points are already worth making.

The first is that Mr. Musk would do the country a favor by releasing the documents all at once for everyone to inspect. So far he’s dribbled them out piecemeal through journalist Matt Taibbi’s Twitter feed, which makes it easier for the media to claim they can’t report on documents because they can’t independently confirm them.

See also PMCM’s commentary from the previous thread. I won’t go quite as far as he did, but I think he has the gist of it: no smoking gun, no government backchannel, “just” Twitter being reflexively partisan. It’s shitty management and removing the Post was an injustice, which is strictly less exciting than CEOs bending over for the Deep State.

The lukewarm coverage probably has something to do with all the sex and drugs. If you’re going to pick a headline that makes your paper look like a tabloid, I think the reflex is to try and justify it. Without a more salacious connection to Biden Sr., mainstream outlets find it easier to ignore.

NYTs has finally covered it

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/04/business/media/elon-musk-twitter-matt-taibbi.html

Ignoring the story, ironically, only drew more attention .

Now Elon is revolutionizing journalism, after cars and rockets.

So far he’s dribbled them out piecemeal through journalist Matt Taibbi’s Twitter feed, which makes it easier for the media to claim they can’t report on documents because they can’t independently confirm them.

Dribbling out documents piecemeal is standard procedure. Your opponent doesn't know that you may produce a document tomorrow that contradicts some excuse he gives today, so it's harder for him to lie about it. (Although that doesn't work so well if he doesn't have to lie because the media buries the story and he doesn't need to say anything at all.)

It was doomed from the start, from the second the media busted out the 'you have to release them all at once' shit they mercilessly mock any time they want to leak things and the government says that. Who, whom as always.

It is funny how establishment mainstream media is now clutching its pearls with journalistic ethics when they have the FTX fraudster running around in an "apology tour" and saying that he was bumbling buffoon, where there are court filings showing corporate malfeasance by the fraudster. We are witnessing corruption in the establishment political class of every color and the media is simply trying to protect itself with misdirection of their own corruption when it comes to Twitter! This is not about politics anymore it is about the powerful establishment doing whatever it wants without the interest of the public in mind anymore. So whatever I see more Twitter revelations I'll just consider it corruption, it is as simple as that.

Eh, what’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?

There’s more than one outfit covering the news. Some of them might even employ more than one reporter. Why would you expect coverage of a billionaire scammer to match opinions on coverage of censorship for a political hot potato?

Well if you think that WSJ has covered SBF the same way that the editorial board goes after Musk in various opinion pieces since the Twitter take over it is up to you. The point is that the billionaire scammer was a significant contributor to politicians that regulated the financial market which should be a political hot potato too, the same way that elected officials having back channel to remove tweets and twitter accounts is. But if you think that is unreasonable to hold politicians accountable for actions or inaction that obviously isn't in the public's interests, you are missing the point of journalisms role in a democracy.

I don't think having journalists agree to terms is per se improper, and I also don't have reason to doubt that the general thrust of Taibbi's reporting (Twitter employees tried hard to make up reasons to suppress the Hunter story) is off-base, but I'm not really a fan of how this is being deployed. Musk has an obvious incentive to tar the previous management of his company in as bad of a light as possible, and he has a long practice of having his employees sign NDAs. He can't claim to be motivated by the noble pursuit of transparency here, and it's reasonable to be suspicious that he's potentially hiding some things. Taibbi is just one journalist, and he has his biases. Although I don't have reason to believe Taibbi is acting dishonestly, I can't think of an argument against having more scrutinizing eyes examine the document trove. It's needlessly giving ammunition to people who are already primed to dismiss the revelations.

The comparisons to Edward Snowden establishing conditions don't really match up. Similar to Musk, Snowden would be incentivized for his leak to be as much of a bombshell as possible. But if I recall correctly, Snowden had multiple journalist outfits examine the documents, and all of them were transparent about what conditions he set (namely, don't disclose things that could endanger current operatives or something) edit: this did not happen

But if I recall correctly, Snowden had multiple journalist outfits examine the document

You do not recall correctly. He took his leaks to the guardian, because he trusted Glenn Greenwald, and the guardian decided to involve the nyt because they were outside the British government's jurisdiction and the guardian was being threatened with legal action.

Also I don't understand what you are talking about re transparency about what conditions he set? Don't disclose things that could endanger current operatives wasn't the only condition, Snowden wasn't the only one who set conditions (both newspapers did too, and both had conversations with their governments about it) and there is zero reason to believe they were transparent about every condition.

You're right and I was wrong. It's true that several journalistic outfits had access to the data, but my recollection about how transparent they were about their publication decisions was faulty.

Mr. Musk would do the country a favor by releasing the documents all at once for everyone to inspect.

When Snowden leaked all the NSA files, he made the journos agree to terms as well, and knew well not to do a Bradley Manning. And as I recall the WSJ was of the opinion that this was prudent and that you should never just throw confidential material out in the open without the scrutiny of journalists.

Given we don't know the nature of the agreement, and that the same reasons might be operating here (Twitter is very much an intelligence asset and I'm almost completely certain there were spooks on staff), it seems like special pleading to me.

Covering the story around the story to avoid covering the story is the canonical way to bury scandals after all, as French politician Charles Pasqua would say: "when one is getting fucked by a scandal, one must induce a scandal-inside-the-scandal, and if necessary a scandal-inside-the-scandal-inside-the-scandal, until nobody understands anything anymore".

Covering the story around the story to avoid covering the story is the canonical way to bury scandals after all, as French politician Charles Pasqua would say: "when one is getting fucked by a scandal, one must induce a scandal-inside-the-scandal, and if necessary a scandal-inside-the-scandal-inside-the-scandal, until nobody understands anything anymore".

That's a good summary of the laptop story in general. Every time I try to figure out why we're supposed to care about the laptop, it's some amount of 'because look who suppressed the laptop story' and never 'because the following turned out to be on the laptop.'

Every time I try to figure out why we're supposed to care about the laptop, it's some amount of 'because look who suppressed the laptop story' and never 'because the following turned out to be on the laptop.'

It's supposed to matter because it's evidence that a former the the PUSA was, in his former role as Vice PUSA, accepting bribes from Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs. This was hardly a nothingburger then, and in 2022 it's more like a nukingburger.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-biden-censored

Hunter Biden was employed in highly paid positions despite being a very unstable guy. Joe Biden was a partner or possible partner in Hunter's business deals. Hunter Biden wrote in the emails insisting that most discussion of Joe Biden's involvement happen not in writing. We know that Hunter said that Joe Biden was going to be paid for his involvement in at least one business venture, although we don't know if that deal was ever completed. We don't know that it wasn't completed either. There may be other Joe-Hunter joint business ventures that weren't featured in the emails because of the aformentioned desire for them to be not-in-writing.

It seems like Hunter was getting money from these companies in exchange for favors from the VP of the US.

One such favor:

Concurrently, Biden was involving himself in ousting the Ukranian General Prosecutor for alleged corruption, an action that benefited Burisma.

"how Biden could justify expending so much energy as Vice President demanding that the Ukrainian General Prosecutor be fired, and why the replacement — Yuriy Lutsenko, someone who had no experience in law; was a crony of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko; and himself had a history of corruption allegations — was acceptable if Biden’s goal really was to fight corruption in Ukraine rather than benefit Burisma or control Ukrainian internal affairs for some other objective."

"Third, the media rush to exonerate Biden on the question of whether he engaged in corruption vis-a-vis Ukraine and Burisma rested on what are, at best, factually dubious defenses of the former Vice President. Much of this controversy centers on Biden's aggressive efforts while Vice President in late 2015 to force the Ukrainian government to fire its Chief Prosecutor, Viktor Shokhin, and replace him with someone acceptable to the U.S., which turned out to be Yuriy Lutsenko. These events are undisputed by virtue of a video of Biden boasting in front of an audience of how he flew to Kiev and forced the Ukrainians to fire Shokhin, upon pain of losing $1 billion in aid."

"But two towering questions have long been prompted by these events, and the recently published emails make them more urgent than ever: 1) was the firing of the Ukrainian General Prosecutor such a high priority for Biden as Vice President of the U.S. because of his son's highly lucrative role on the board of Burisma, and 2) if that was not the motive, why was it so important for Biden to dictate who the chief prosecutor of Ukraine was?

The standard answer to the question about Biden's motive -- offered both by Biden and his media defenders -- is that he, along with the IMF and EU, wanted Shokhin fired because the U.S. and its allies were eager to clean up Ukraine, and they viewed Shokhin as insufficiently vigilant in fighting corruption."

I'm having difficulty summarizing. Just read the article.

A quick summary...

  • Biden had long been suspected of being in the pocket of the Russian mob with rumors to this effect dating back to the late 90s.

  • Biden's son Hunter, leaves his broken laptop at a one of those "Geek Squad"-type repair places and forgets to pick it up.

  • The tech snoops around the hard drive and in addition to a lot of sex and drug stuff they find correspondences that appears to confirm that Biden had been accepting money from foreign (mostly Russian and Ukrainian) oil oligarchs in exchange for political favors during his time as VP with his soin the conten acting as the intermediary. (Whether it was legal for the tech to go snooping in the first place is part of "the scandal within the scandal")

  • The tech contacts the FBI with the above evidence sometime in the spring of 2020.

  • On October 14th 2020 the NY Post publishes an article claiming that the FBI has proof that Biden has been accepting bribes and is actively working to suppress this information lest it help Trump win reelection.

  • 12 Hours later the NY Post's official Twitter account is suspended and the FBI raids the home of the article's author. Ostensibly for distributing illegally obtained documents. (see previously mentioned "the scandal within the scandal")

There's lots of talk in the moment about whether the FBI documents and alleged contents of the laptop's HD linked in the article are genuine and whether the NY Post violated journalistic ethics by publishing them, with the general consensus being "no", and "yes" respectively. The latest wrinkle is that it looks like that the FBI believed the documents and contents to be genuine and formally asked social media companies to suppress the NY Post story.

Edit to clarify: As to "why we should care" it's yet another instance in recent memory of the FBI acting as a partisan hit-quad. It also undermines the wider "Russian collusion" narrative by putting the media in the position of having to defend Biden against the very allegations that they had leveled against Trump.

There's lots of talk in the moment about whether the FBI documents and alleged contents of the laptop's HD linked in the article are genuine and whether the NY Post violated journalistic ethics by publishing them, with the general consensus being "no", and "yes" respectively. The latest wrinkle is that it looks like that the FBI believed the documents and contents to be genuine and formally asked social media companies to suppress the NY Post story.

This paragraph appears backwards, to me. My understanding is that the general consensus is that the FBI docs/HD contents are legitimate (as recognized by the WaPo last week), and that the NYPost did not violate journalistic ethics by reporting on them. Maybe I'm misreading but that appears to be the opposite of what the quoted paragraph implies.

Also, my read of the Taibbi release is that there was no official government pressure to censor the Hunter Biden story directly; instead, there were lots of internal Twitter T&S types running around desperately trying to backfill reasons for their own desire to squelch the story, and sticking by those reasons even when told by Comms that their reasons were wrong.

The Zuckerberg interview on Rogan, and now the Special Agent Elvis Chan deposition show that the FBI had told FB and other social media companies that they had reason to suspect a non-specific information op around the time they became aware of the Hunter Biden allegations, but I haven't yet seen any indication that the FBI specifically ordered the story in particular squelched. Instead, right now it appears to be yet more Moldbuggian effortless coordination, where the FBI could count on ideologically-simpatico T&S teams to squelch the Hunter Story if given any vague, non-specific excuse to cover their asses with.

[Edit: okay, so it appears that one of the Twitter people responsible for the decision to kill the Hunter Biden story was James Baker, former general counsel for the FBI, and who appears to have been key in keeping the Russiagate hoaxes going, including laundering the false Alfabank story through the press. I take it back; no particular coordination between FBI and Twitter was necessary. There was an inside man.]

This paragraph appears backwards, to me. My understanding is that the general consensus is that the FBI docs/HD contents are legitimate (as recognized by the WaPo last week),

The general consensus now may be that the laptop story is probably legitimate but back in October of 2020 is it was pretty much impossible to bring up the topic of the NY Post getting banned from twitter without someone linking some variant of this story in response.

FWIW there are a couple users here from whom I'm still waiting on an apology. Or at least an acknowledgement.

Ah that makes sense.

This sounds about right. No idea if it reflects the consensus among media outlets. I think the OP was skewering them as dishonestly running damage control.

It’s just the GOP version of the Russian collusion hoax- it justifies their base’s preexisting prejudices and looks ridiculous to the opposing tribe.

Whether either is accurate is completely irrelevant.

You could say the same thing about the Watergate scandal. The initial story was small potatoes compared to the actions to suppress it that followed, but in the end it felled a US president.

I don't think the initial story is small potatoes. The initial story is the VP of the US trading money for influence.

But that's all incidental details on top of 'some guys broke into a building' which is obviously illegal to anyone watching.

William Clinton was done in for a blowjob. Nationwide riots errupted due to a drug using felon. Sometimes the underlying thing is unimportant, but the way it is dealt with arouses concern.

William Clinton was done in for a blowjob

If he hasn't gone on TV sitting next to his wife and lied about it to the American public he wouldn't have suffered for it as he did.

Nationwide riots errupted due to a drug using felon

... getting murdered slowly in front of a camera.

Seeing a pattern here?

I'm pretty sure that was the point @huxley5000 was in fact trying to make.

I'm also a little confused about the importance of the laptop. I thought the publicly known facts were damning enough. Hunter Biden got a cushy very high salary job with a company in Ukraine, and Hunter Biden's only real qualification for that job was that he was the Vice President's son. It seems pretty clear that he was selling insider access to the US political process.

Hunter could plausibly have lied to foreign companies about influence that he would never deliver on, and Joe could have been 100% ignorant that Hunter was doing this.

If Hunter was giving Joe a 10% cut, funneling the money to him by paying his credit card bills, Joe not being on the take or being in the dark becomes very implausible.

It’s about tying it to Biden Sr.

Hunter is thoroughly damned and will never hold public office in America, but that isn’t a strong attack on Biden. Failing to control/raise/whatever his kids is a legitimate criticism that’s too decoupled to disqualify him from the Presidency. If the VP was personally involved in delivering his son a cushy job, that’s a lot more ammunition.

So long as the laptop remains “suppressed,” it gets to be a Mueller report, sure to destroy Democrats’ faith in Joe Biden. It turns out most people don’t really want to see pictures of Hunter’s dick, so hard-hitting investigative reporting has been...limited.

Hunter could possibly have gotten a cushy job for nothing and then done nothing; given his personal history, that seems like it should be the default assumption. But this would have only looked especially bad for Hunter Biden, and no one was voting for him.

At the very least, the laptop includes cryptographically-signed e-mails from Pozharskyi, a Burisma executive, thanking Hunter for an introduction to his father in 2015, which the White House denied and continued to deny after the e-mail was first released. There are some ways that this might not be illegal, and a far greater number where it's the sort of illegal that doesn't actually get prosecuted (who wants to learn about FARA today, not fucking me), but it's still much stronger evidence of a scandal involving Joe Biden.

Separately, there's evidence included that is almost certainly violation of the law for Hunter, in ways that mouching off international executives might not be, and that had connections or funding from Joe Biden. The first half of that's not new -- getting the kid glove treatment when a drug addict was throwing around handguns was an older story -- and while it's improper it's one of those things that's got a long history. The latter is a more serious issue. I don't think Joe realized he was funding Russian-linked prostitution rings when wiring his son cash, but it's also a pretty big oopsie.

FYI the URL that the text "archived link" points to is the same as the one "WSJ" is pointing to.

Thanks! Fixed it.

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