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Since it’s election denialism day. Let’s talk strategy on the Hunter laptop. I believe this is an accepted fact now: The FBI had possession of the laptop a year prior to the election and had verified it while being aware Guiliani and others had a copy. Hunter and Joe also knew he had a copy.
Guiliani’s behavior makes sense to me. You have a bombshell on the opposition so you release it last minute for maximum effect.
But what about the lefts/fbi play? The play they ended up choosing was do nothing until it’s released then claim it’s a Russian plant. Now the fbi ran with something going to happen from Russia that is misinformation to their media and social media partners. Those who did that I guess have plausible deniability they just meant a “general threat” and weren’t aware it was “Hunters verified laptop”. I have my doubts those people hadn’t been read in on the laptop.
My question is why wasn’t this leaked earlier? Prevent the October surprise by getting it out earlier? Ideally even perhaps the primaries so you just didn’t have to deal with Joe. All it would have taken is telling Warren or Sanders about it and then they go get a copy from Isaacs.
Instead the path chosen seems to have been let’s run a psy-op to protect Biden. It just seems like frequently when given choices people seem to be choosing let’s just lie to them.
I guess the conclusion I can come up with is the people with access to the laptop were not fans of a lot of the Democratic Party and weren’t fans of Trump.
I know the Sanders people have long thought the official DNC was against them. And I’m no Sanders fan. But the fact no one tipped them off to the laptop when it could have been used seems interesting. Along with what felt like a successful media-op which I guess was organized by the FBI.
Alternative strategy Guiliani actually have played it wrong and should have released it earlier to let it get digested instead of late to swing a few voters. And Isaac perhaps was more partisan since he didn’t get a copy to the left.
The FBI's behavior makes perfect sense if you assume a couple of things that I think are pretty evidently true:
Part 3 means that the corrupt actors know they can only communicate through "the blob". Via selective leaks to each other to indicate when to coordinate a thing. The perfect timing of a release of an "October surprise" is not something these things are good at. Deputy director of Delaware field office, no matter his/her partisanship, does not have confidence in his choice of perfect timing to leak obviously harmful information on his preferred presidential candidate. Thus, you default to not leaking, and hope it all stays under wraps till midnight on the 2nd Tuesday of November.
Then it leaks. But now the path forward is obvious to all the corrupt actors: Use your previously cultivated corrupt media fences to spread a cover up, as it only need last a few weeks, this is something intel agency leakers know they are good at coordinating.
So that is all you really need to think.
I largely agree with these type of takes. Honestly wish we had a Bernie bro or normie Dem to comment.
One thing interesting for these scenerios is it means normie Dems don’t think they have any bench of electable Dems at the national level. If they did they could have used this to push Biden aside.
The other interesting thought for these type of views is it means a large part of the beuracracy believes this is true:
Electing Trump is worse than lying to the American people and having a large part of America lose faith in Institutions.
A part of the reason for asking these questions is I would like a different explanation than a large part of our government is down with lying to Americans. Kristen Anderson is another person who from my view seems like he chose lie to Americans over honesty. It just seems like a lot of people are choosing this.
A part of me would be absolutely fine if these guys just ran with Biden is super corrupt but well Trump is uniquely bad. I might vote for that. But I’m voting against those who lie to me.
Hi.
I guess I’m what passes for a garden-variety Democrat, and I think you’re assuming some conclusions.
The FBI had spent four years losing credibility by investigating people too hard, not hard enough, or at all. Longer if you count the Clinton “re-opening” nonsense. When faced with yet another kingmaking opportunity, are you surprised they decided not to take the initiative?
More generally, I think you’re too inclined to view your enemies as monolithic. The continuum looks more like this:
Notice that only the last one requires lying! Combine that with some unthinking solidarity, and you will see people parrot a party line without any malice. Go team.
There are far more people as you go up the continuum. I’m personally in the third or fourth camp.
Edit for clarity:
I don't find it hard to believe that the last couple groups are overrepresented in the Intelligence Community™. I also think it's a mistake to draw conclusions about the Democratic Party, general bureaucracy, prospects for the country, etc. based on those guys.
If we include the Hillary Clinton "nonsense" it make it even worse. That was an own goal by making a bunch of special pleadings in her favor, instead of just charging her and letting her campaign from the courthouse/prison as Trump will be doing now on his documents case (also this easy step would have let them bring those Trump charges without being incredibly hypocritical).
But I do like your 6 levels of "understanding" as a tool. However, when applied to the FBI (which is the question in point) the FBI agents would be best categorized as a lvl 5/6 hybrid something like:
"Biden should be unqualified, but these are unusual times, so I will work to cover that up for the greater good.
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No rigorous definition of any of these terms seems possible, and the questions they exist to address are unavoidably important. The mechanisms we built to address such questions appear to have collapsed, and there does not seem to be a way to replace them.
I got called out for "doing a bit" yesterday, but I'm honestly not sure how anyone here or elsewhere thinks the conversation is supposed to go. There is no common ground sufficient to build a productive conversation on. You see a ton of people in this thread freewheeling because they can't get that through their heads; they still think we Americans are a "we", that the factual or philosophical or political or tribal markers they're trying to cash in still have something approximating an exchange rate. They think there's still ground under the feet, something firm, a source of traction, something other than empty air and a pavement rapidly approaching.
I understand the feeling; even now, reading your description of the situation, I want to start laying down the facts, because I know you're a reasonable person, and surely you can be reached... But reason isn't enough. I could claim it's because you aren't reasonable enough, unlike virtuous people like me, but the slightest amount of self-awareness shows that to be a clown's argument. You have facts of your own, those facts are assessed by worldview and axioms just as mine are, and that's that.
The concept of actually reaching some productive level of agreement on the problems at hand is, at this point, completely laughable. If it's not possible at our current level of escalation, it's not going to get easier two or ten or a hundred escalations further down the line. The very concept of reconciliation has passed beyond the bounds of plausibility.
Sorry, I might not have been clear with that.
What I was trying to say is: the FBI managed to piss off most everyone in the preceding years. General Republicans by soft-balling Hillary. Hillary supporters by going after her at all. Every other Democrat by failing to bury Trump. Diehard Trumpers by going after him at all.
Yes, this is stupid and contradictory. It's also sufficient to explain why the FBI might try to avoid commenting on the veracity of a source.
Anyway. I'm not sure I follow you, regarding the fruitlessness of discussion.
Maybe I just feel like the pavement has always been there, always approaching. Each child born around eighty years from splattering across an alarming area. Might as well have some fun while we're at it, no?
If you're like me, you get some satisfaction from writing. You struggle, sometimes, to arrange the words just so--but it is the right kind of struggle. Other humans on the screen trigger interest, confusion, perhaps even disgust or righteousness. You desire to express those emotions. Here we have a forum that tells you to do so, by all means, so long as you can follow certain constraints. This selects for certain emotions more than others. You come to the Motte when you want to experience that cluster of thoughts and feelings.
If this doesn't resonate with you, then why are you here? What drives you to come and prognosticate? When people accuse you of "doing a bit," they are confused at the mismatch between your sentiment and your actions.
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So then what’s your response for them taking an active position instead of remaining neutral and keeping their mouth shut?
It’s a bold lack of strategy, Cotton. They kind of picked the worst option.
No, I think the FBI is more likely to be low down on the continuum. Including flailing around with half-assed denials, regardless of what they know is true.
Not sure what you mean. But it sounds like your saying slider your not a conspiracy theorists they did lie to you and knew they were lying to you. Since when I google your meme it comes up as a bold strategy that worked.
I actually don’t mind saying Trump is bad and I’d prefer not to vote for him but I think we could have a lot of healing if more on the left started saying this was a bad thing our allies did to them.
That's what I was suggesting, yeah.
There's a Venn diagram. One circle, people who knew ahead of time. The other, people who loudly insisted it was fake. The guys in the middle are your conspiracy. I think this overlap is pretty small, but yeah, screw those guys.
The more I look...I dunno. I'm getting the impression that the FBI clammed up and thus mostly stayed out of the second circle. Still looking for examples of official statements.
Interesting. I had never seen before that someone from the fbi said it was real. But ya the intel thing I’ve seen.
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The FBI knew what was on the laptop and they knew it was real the entire time. They sat on it and did nothing because they did not want to prosecute Hunter Biden, as that would make the election of Joe Biden less likely. This is why they put out a signed statement saying that the laptop was fake Russian disinformation - because they wanted to suppress reporting of it before the election and make sure that it didn't change anyone's minds. Their strategy worked, and there's been a decent amount of polling that suggests the election would have gone the other way if this didn't happen. And as for plausible deniability... https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-4393-d7aa-af77-579f9b330000
(for some reason copying the letter caused formatting problems, please excuse any that I failed to correct).
They were talking about the laptop. There's no plausible deniability here at all - they explicitly went into public and put their names on a document which lied about the facts. They took care not to say "oh we don't know for sure" but that's not how the letter was interpreted or used in the resulting discussion and suppression of information.
Sanders and Warren are not serious players or contenders for the top office. Why wouldn't they want to have to deal with Joe? He's a nakedly corrupt empty suit who has largely checked out cognitively already. He has to be given incredibly simple instructions in plain English in order to appear in public and frequently makes bizarre gaffes and mistakes. This makes him the perfect candidate for President, as he will allow the deep state/MIC free reign to govern as they please, while simultaneously being non-offensive to the majority of the population.
They haven't "long thought" this, they've known it and had explicit evidence that this was the case for several years. Why was Donna Brazile fired? Why was Debbie Wasserman-Schulz forced to resign? This isn't a conspiracy theory or anything, you can just go and read the emails where the official DNC makes it extremely and undeniably clear that they are against the Sanders people. Nobody tipped them off because nobody with power actually wants them to win or gain any control over the DNC - right now the DNC is (amusingly) not actually that democratic, and the people in charge want to keep it that way. I think one of the problems with talking about "the left" in general is that it really isn't a homogenous or totally aligned group. The DSA and the DNC are extremely different and have very different goals - my perspective is that the DNC is ostensibly the manifestation of the political goals and desires of the base, but has since been co-opted and corrupted and no longer actually represents that base in any real way. The DNC does however have a lot of inertia, and a lot of low-information voters who support the party because it is their team - throw in the fact that the state is very firmly supporting the DNC and we have a situation where the goals and desires of the DNC and their base are extremely different. This is the case on the right as well, but more of the base is loyal to Trump the man as opposed to the party (not to mention that he's been motivating the base a lot more than any comparable figures on the left), which is why the deep state and machinery of government have been cracking down on him so hard.
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There is also a longshot theory that the FBI 'reformed' and suppressed the Hunter laptop story because they were worried it was going to be another Steele Dossier situation. Assuming the FBI was acting politically neutral they may have been worried that Giuliani was manipulating them like the DNC had manipulated them with the Steele Dossier. However, this doesn't seem to be consistent with the FBI positively claiming the laptop was Russian disinformation. I think there is a big difference between looking at a situation skeptically and taking positive action to spread falsehoods. When they were asked about authenticity of the laptop it seems they could have just gone for some cop-out where they don't affirm or deny the authenticity.
I think there is also a chance that this might end up being used as a 'defence' for the FBI's institutional behaviour if there is an investigation into what went on. "We learnt a lot from the IG report into Crossfire Hurricane about dealing with politically sensitive individuals where information is brought to us from people who have clear conflicts of interest but we just went overboard in the wrong direction and this caused us to make mistakes when dealing with the Hunter Biden situation."
The FBI knew about the laptop well before Giulani got a copy of it, and were able to authenticate it before that date. They would have had absolutely zero concern that Giulani was manipulating them in this context because they had the laptop in their possession already and knew that the contents on it were genuine.
I don't know if you can actually blame the FBI, but the "intelligence officials" who sent out the letter about Russian disinformation were absolutely taking positive action to spread falsehoods and deceive both the public and important people in social media companies, in order to hide a story that would be bad for their preferred candidate. It is actually that open and shut when you know all the details.
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Fair take.
I don’t believe the fbi positively identified it as Russian. Ex-CIA made a broad pronouncement it was with the small print explaining they knew nothing. The FBI said they expected something to drop to social media and to be prepared as potential misinformation. So whether you think those doing this had been read into the laptop at some point is a big deal. From a plausible deniability point they were just sending out a general warning. Or they were read in and were pre-debunking. Honestly something we need investigated. As far as being “false” a unit of the fbi had connected it I believe to Hunters iCloud account. So I feel like you would need a story that the unit policing social media was naive to the laptop versus were being careful on provenance.
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Just a reminder. I’m aiming for more of the discussion on why did people choose these strategies to deal with the laptop under the assumption the Trump and Biden camps were both relatively aware the laptop was coming out and it’s content. The discussion (which I did participate in) about the contents and eventually ends in well whatabout Kushner has been covered a lot.
The one thing I’d add is I think Rudy going full election denial makes more sense since he was sitting on the laptop so long. Lots of money coming from all over the place to the Bidens and then it’s just culture warred into Russian plant on him. He’s probably a true believer that Joe is bought and paid for by the CCP. I think there’s a lot of interesting debate on trying to figure out why people did what they did.
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I wonder if this was a response to Comey and Hillary; first, he was the worst person in the world and an enemy of the people, and then he was a hero of the republic.
Were I an FBI big-wig I'd presume "Whatever I do with this is gonna bite me in the ass, sit on it until someone else makes a move".
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A bit of a tangent, but I'd like to point out this is an excellent example of a real conspiracy that wasn't leaked. So many people on here act like conspiracies are impossible because someone will leak it - clearly not!
I'm not sure I'd consider this a "conspiracy" outside of the most trivial sense of the word as the FBI, and law enforcement in general, tend to be loathe to reveal details on active investigations or even if there is an investigation going on.
So people not revealing they are investigating Hunter Biden and they have his laptop is just standard operating procedure, the same behavior they'd do for essentially any other crime they suspect went or is going on.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hXjLqhtnIRI
If you're the person that Biden is bragging about ordering the firing of, is this a conspiracy? It sure seems so to me.
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I mean that explains why they didn’t release hunters laptop early, but it doesn’t explain why they decided to lie about it when it came to light.
Did the FBI itself actually lie, or was it people associated with the FBI?
Fair, but the FBI itself was clearly willing to be associated with the lie.
I’m not sure the FBI could announce the laptop was verified on the eve of the election.
Presupposing the whole Russian disinformation thing was done in good faith.
The FBI announcing the laptop was real would be truthful but meddling in an election.
The FBI declining to comment, or just saying ‘no results yet’ would be politically neutral mistruths. But they decided to lie in a partisan manner instead.
The FBI told social media of a general threat of misinformation. I do believe your belief. But you can’t prove the ones issue the warning knew about the laptop being verified and were referring to it. Which means they may have acted in good faith or they were super partisan and made sure to maintain plausible deniability.
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I would say that there's a time component involved. Can something be kept under wraps for some period of time? Probably. Given the involvement of enough people, what is the chance that it eventually leaks out? Probably pretty high. P is a function of both the number of people required and the time since the event; to maximize the chance that you can have a successful conspiracy, keep the former absurdly low (lower than you think); to understand historical events that would have required large groups, just let the latter keep ticking for a while.
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Giuliani was naively trusting an honest and traditional democratic system. He didn’t expect that the institutions and public forums would conspire together to thwart the democratic process from unfolding. This was the largest escalation of the culture war in history: information indicating that the Vice President’s own son took bribes from foreign adversaries to influence his father’s politics was hidden from the voter’s access through a cabal of anti-democratic figures behind the scenes at major tech companies and news websites.
This is why I don’t care at all if “Republicans lied about the election!” My response is, “brother, the Republicans should be out there telling the Public the most persuasive possible lies they can conceive”. That’s the natural response to the anti-Democratic manipulation we saw in 2020. It is morally permissible, in fact obligatory, to match your enemy’s escalation when that very escalation thwarted the democratic process and destroyed the fabric of American democracy. When you destroy the rules of conduct, we go back to millennia-old idea of just proportional response — this is the nature of “just [culture] war” theory. The Republicans ought to be treating Democrats like we treat Russia: you have violated the borders and agreements, we will do whatever we can to push you back and reestablish a rules-based national order.
There was no indication in any of the laptop data that Joe Biden took bribes from anyone. There was evidence that he was once briefly in the same room as one of the Burisma guys (and witnesses to that exchange confirmed that the conversation was limited to pleasantries), and there's some China stuff that took place when Biden was out of office. Any suggestion that Joe Biden was influenced by any of his son's business dealings is nothing more than conjecture at this point.
There are texts talking about “the big guy” and, most damningly, the following text —
https://nypost.com/2023/06/22/hunter-biden-used-joe-as-leverage-in-china-biz-deal-text/amp/
The solution was to allow the voter all information, so they can decide how to vote according to their own judgment. If they are fine with text messages showing that the candidate’s son admitted to or claimed to be influencing the policies of his father for the direct benefit of our geopolitical rival, well, so be it. I am personally more concerned about the fairness of reporting than the potential corruption. Hunter is just BS’ing? Very possible. But if the media had these texts from Trump’s son, they would have reported the information in catastrophic and dramatic way.
Again, this is all stuff that happened in 2017 and 2018 during the brief period in Joe Biden's life when he was neither in public office nor running for public office. To be clear, I have no problem with this stuff being investigated, I just haven't seen anything come out of the investigation that would suggest there's any ethical concerns let alone criminal liability. It's a political question, and while people are certainly free to come to the conclusion that Biden's relationship to these deals was too close for comfort, we need some perspective here. The evidence presented so far suggests that Joe Biden may have had peripheral involvement in a couple of his son's business ventures that ultimately went nowhere. Then you have his likely opponent, who had extensive business dealings with Russians for a period that lasted nearly 30 years and continued well into his presidential campaign, which campaign was staffed by a few people who had their own questionable dealings with Russians. And yet Trump supporters were furious at the mere idea that anyone would even think this worthy of investigation. So unless you're only voting Republican if someone like Tim Scott wins the nomination, I don't see how this factors into the equation much given what we know now.
No he didn't.
The Trump campaign did not collude with Russia and there's no ambiguity here. If you think that there was any serious collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, put your cards on the table. Show me the concrete actions that Trump took in furtherance of a Russian agenda and point out where Russian money or influence played a part. In addition, please explain why Peter Strzok said that "There's no there, there" when describing potential collusion between Trump and Russia.
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press,”
Said by Trump at a live press Conference on 27th July, 2016. 5 days previously, Wikileaks had published the results of the GRU hack of the DNC and DNCC servers. Based on the publicly-available information at the time, a Russian hack was the most likely explanation of how Wikileaks got the info (as it in fact turned out to be the case). Wikileaks had passed advance information on their plans to publish the data to the Trump campaign via Roger Stone, who was aware that the source was probably a Russian hack. So this wasn't an innocent joke. Nor did the GRU treat it as one - that night they launched another cyber-attack on Hilary Clinton's personal e-mail accounts.
That is collusion. Russia helped Trump, Trump asked for additional help, and Russia attempted to provide it. The collusion continues into October, but the evidence gets murkier. It is reasonably clear (but not proved to a criminal standard) that Roger Stone continued to act as a go-between between the Trump campaign, Wikileaks, and GRU-controlled internet persona Guccifer2.0. Does Trump condemn Roger Stone after he publically congratulates a GRU agent for hacking and leaking additional DNC e-mails? Of course not, because Stone was working for Trump.
[Source for all facts above is the bipartisan Senate report ]
It is also the case that Trump's campaign manager at the time (Manafort) was working without pay, and his primary source of income was a consultancy arrangement with pro-Putin oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Was Deripaska making an under-the-table donation to the Trump campaign? I don't know, but it's definitely a card I am happy to put on the table.
Was there an explicit quid pro quo - probably not. Trump had visited Russian on several occasions, both to seek Russian investors in his US projects and to discuss possible Trump-branded developments in Moscow. He had met various Russian elites who could have passed information on to Putin. I think Putin liked and respected Trump and thought (correctly) that they be able to work together as world leaders. In addition, Trump was the more NATO-sceptical of the two candidates, so there is a direct and obvious benefit to Russian foreign policy from a Trump victory.
So in my model we have Putin deciding that he benefits from a Trump victory, Putin helping Trump, Trump enthusiastically accepting the help, and Putin and Trump working together via plausibly deniable proxies to maximise the impact of the help. I call that collusion. It isn't a crime - in fact it is almost certainly all 1st amendment protected activity - but it should tell you something about Trump's patriotism and fitness for office.
What does a responsible, patriotic candidate do if a hostile foreign power wants to help their campaign with hacked opposition research. At a bare minimum, you performatively condemn the hack "whoever did it" and call for an investigation. Ideally you specifically say that you don't endorse the hack and are not working with the hacker (this isn't a big sacrifice in terms of election-winning chances - sympathetic media would have been all over the Wikileaks drops even if the campaign wasn't). But Trump wanted everyone to know he supported the Russians interfering on his behalf.
Strzok believed - correctly - that working on the Trump-Russia investigation would be bad for his career, and didn't want the job. If he was thinking of the investigation as a criminal investigation, then he also might have believed - correctly - that there were not any actual crimes to discover. If it wasn't for the good fortune that Cohen and Manafort turned out to have committed tax evasion and mortgage fraud - in Cohen's case entirely independent of any involvement with Trump-Russia - then the investigation would have come up with bullshit process crimes.
I don't think you understood Trump's comment here. He's not talking about the emails that Wikileaks released(which weren't from her account anyway!), but the missing emails that she used Bleachbit to remove from her server. These emails have actually never been found and it would have been impossible to acquire them by hacking into her devices or accounts at all, unless she lied about deleting incriminating emails. To fully establish the context for this situation, remember that Hillary used a personal private email server in order to avoid legitimate government oversight and protect her from FOIA disclosures. This private server, which had none of the security provided by the US government, was compromised almost instantly by at least one foreign state actor. When the server was discovered and Clinton was asked to hand over the emails on this server (these included SAP information, and these breaches of security were actually extremely substantial), she simply went through and deleted 33 000 emails which she claimed were "not work related". There wasn't any oversight or supervision of this deletion at all, and there was at least one report that the deleted "personal" emails were not actually personal.
These are the 30, 000 emails in question - emails that had already been deleted and could not have been acquired by any active efforts to break into an existing account unless Hillary was lying under oath and had forwarded copies of these emails to herself (committing further crimes in the process). If the GRU actually did launch an attack on her personal accounts (I have seen no actual evidence that this took place beyond evidence-free assertions from people with direct political incentives to make such a claim) it wouldn't have had anything to do with the Trump comment. If Russia did actually have copies of these emails they would have had to acquire them several years prior, and given that Trump's comments did not travel backwards through time to reach the GRU (though it was supposedly China that actually compromised the clintonemail.com server) there's no possible way for this to qualify as collusion.
That said, I personally believe in the Seth Rich conspiracy theory regarding the source of the DNC emails - I haven't seen any convincing debunking, though if you've got real data and evidence proving it was the GRU rather than him I'd be more than happy to update (note: Crowdstrike does not count). If you're going to post Politifact or some other debunking, please make sure you go through and read it thoroughly first - partisan outfits and fact-checkers are really worse than useless when it comes to matters like this, like the claim that Trump was lying because he stated true figures but made implications that the fact-checker didn't like. Also, as an aside, "bipartisan" is also effectively meaningless when it comes to issues like this. There are plenty of people on the conservative side of politics, like most of the establishment GOP, who actively wanted Trump to lose because despite being on their "side", he represents opposition to the culture and policies they actually support.
This is a meaningless "just so" hypothesis that doesn't even reach the same level as a palette-swap that just replaces Clinton with Trump. She was incredibly corrupt and actually engaged with Russian sources to get opposition research on Trump, so you have a direct connection between her campaign and Russian election interference. I think Putin liked Clinton and understood that she was motivated purely by self-interest, and hence would have been easy to understand and easy to compromise. There's a saying in rationalist circles that when you tell a lie the truth becomes your enemy, and Clinton would have been so compromised in so many ways that she would have been incredibly easy to blackmail by any adversary that had access to those 30k missing emails. But unfortunately that explicit quid pro quo is what you need to justify a claim like "Trump colluded with Russia". Without it, those accusations and stories are worth exactly what my hypothesis above is - nothing at all.
Actually, the only campaign that dealt with the Russians to get opposition research was the Clinton campaign, who used it as the basis for the Steele dossier that went on to justify a whole lot more impropriety. But to take your claim more substantively, Trump absolutely did what a "patriot" would have - Clinton committed serious crimes that put a lot of people in danger and put the nation at risk in order to make it easier for her to personally enrich herself. The emails that she deleted constitute evidence of serious wrongdoing and harms done to the nation(SAP information is incredibly serious and involves unrevealed US capabilities) and claiming that looking for evidence of this is somehow unpatriotic is absurd. If someone committed identity theft against your father and stole a bunch of his personal information and trade secrets, would you refrain from investigating them because you love your father and this criminal has your father's name on the internet and therefore deserves your trust? Clinton abused her office to personally enrich herself and then deleted the evidence when she was subpoenaed - prosecuting her for this is actually the patriotic thing to do, and Trump wanted Russia to furnish the emails because he (correctly) believed that the FBI was With Her and wanted to downplay her crimes (to head off an objection that I foresee coming, Comey actually made the announcement he did because he thought Clinton's victory was a fait accompli and he didn't want her to be under a cloud of suspicion when she took office).
This doesn't answer the point at all. He thinks it would be bad for his career because there isn't any substance to the allegations - you can just go back and read the context around the message. Furthermore, he actually did get to work on the Trump-Russia investigation and was actively enthusiastic about doing so, only being removed from the Mueller team when his anti-Trump animus was made public knowledge. You're making comments here that are just wildly at odds with the leaked text messages and what he actually did afterwards. When you read the actual texts, it is pretty clear that his primary concern is taking down Trump - this is a man who complained he could "smell the Trump support" when he went to a Walmart.
Also, I don't understand what you're talking about at the end there - that's all they could come up with and it has absolutely nothing to do with Trump and Russia. There wasn't any criminal collusion, and the entire affair was created in order to retroactively justify the warrantless surveillance and illegal wiretapping of the Trump campaign during Crossfire Hurricane. Bullshit process crimes and unrelated financial misdemeanours are all they could come up with - and none of it even reached the same level of seriousness as failing to declare your income from influence-selling in Ukraine.
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I don't think he colluded and never said he did. I said he had extensive business dealings with Russians, which is well-documented and uncontroversial. The fact that Joe may have had a stake in something involving the Chinese doesn't point to corruption barring other evidence, and no one has shown me other evidence.
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How do people continue repeating this lie? You are wrong.
Here is one of the people involved: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2zLfBRgeFFo
"10 Held by H for the big guy"
H is Hunter, "The Big Guy" is joe. This isn't conjecture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controversy?useskin=vector&useskin=vector
Why do people say stuff like this with such conviction when it is so easily verifiable that it's wrong. I'm sorry to get unnecesssarily upset at this but this entire topic is infuriating to me. Downthread in the discussion about January 6th, you also have a person asserting things about the riot that took place on that day, then exclaiming that "wow I had no idea who Ray Epps was, that is really weird. Huh".
Why do people do this? If you haven't bothered to do the bare minimum of research about a topic, please stick to asking questions about it or offering opinions on the stated facts, not asserting facts which are obviously incorrect.
I think I'm the guy you're talking about. What obviously incorrect facts did I assert?
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Note the date. Joe Biden was not in office in 2017.
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Hunter held equity on behalf of the "big guy". I don't know how much more clear it could get; Joe Biden directly took bribes from these people, at least according to such emails.
Joe Biden had been out of office for months at the time that email was sent. You can't bribe a private citizen.
I really have trouble treating this as a serious claim. Do you actually, really, seriously mean that someone should be free to accept as much money for as many quid pro quos as they can arrange while in between their Vice Presidency and Presidency, so long as money doesn't change hands while they're in office? If, right now, Vladimir Putin just openly offered Donald Trump a billion dollars in cash, that wouldn't be a problem if he wins office in 2024?
You speak as though Biden's presidency (and candidacy, for that matter), was a fair accompli. In May of 2017, there wasn't even much media speculation about who the Dem nominee would be. If Trump gave Putin a million dollars right now, it would certainly be a problem, but it would be more a political problem than a legal one unless there were actual evidence that Putin expected something in return. Even then, the insinuation would be different; it's a political problem because Trump has a record of appearing soft on Russia and this opens him to accusations that he's not exactly disinterested when it comes to certain foreign affairs questions. I have yet to hear anyone on the right make the argument that these alleged deals have had any impact at all on how Biden deals with China. It's a lead balloon as a political question so they're trying to dress it up as a crime when it isn't.
You speak as if it is obvious it wasn't a reward for past behavior.
And yes. Biden's public actions in China and Ukraine seem fairly corrupt.
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There is a million dollars of actual evidence. I assume you meant Putin giving Trump money. No political figure just arbitrarily gifts another large amounts of money out of the goodness of their heart. We don't need to know the specifics to know something is wrong, and certainly we don't need to know the specifics before evaluating whether to inform the public of what is known.
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If you'll forgive the blatant whataboutism (though given that I'm swimming in whataboutisms it seems like that's just the way the game is played 'round here these days), do you feel the same way about Kushner taking 2 billion dollars from Saudi Arabia months after playing a major role managing US relations in the middle east in Trump's white house?
Joe Biden's net worth is something like 9 million dollars. His tax filings are public. He isn't taking millions of dollars worth of bribes from foreign officials. At best you could argue that Hunter Biden (net worth 250 mil) is doing the dirty work of selling influence on Biden senior's policy choices, as others have in this thread, although that doesn't square very well with the '10 held by H for the big guy' narrative.
Wait, Hunter has 250 million dollars? That raises my probability estimate for corruption substantially. The guy is tits on a boar, and I could see him running some fake-influence scam enough to fund his crack habit -- but that is serious dollars. If he's being paid that kind of money and not delivering, he'd be dead in a ditch by now.
I had the same realization the other day as I was comparing Xi Jinping (1.2 billion) and Putin (200 billion) to Biden's 9 million, before idly checking Hunter's net worth. It's lamentable how much more talented the autocrats are compared to our feckless western leaders.
But, why do you think Hunter is so useless? Drugs and guns aside, he has a law degree from Yale. He was a consultant and VP at a banking company, a lobbyist, tapped by Clinton and Bush for various roles and a hedge fund manager all before Joe was veep. It's not an unimpressive CV, or at least it wasn't before all the drugs and congressional investigations caught up to him.
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What exactly does this text message mean in the context of your statement? Hunter Biden is on the record complaining about how Joe takes half of his salary, so we know that there's a direct relation between the money that Hunter has been making and Joe's financial resources.
Why was Joe Biden using lines of credit set up by Hunter? I don't see how you can square your view of the situation with the texts and emails that we actually have access to thanks to the laptop.
I don't have a satisfying answer, although the text you're citing isn't what was given as evidence a couple posts above.
The flip side to that question is, if true, where is the money going? Hunter Biden is worth 250 million, so we're talking a 7 figure salary, no? Joe Biden's net worth is estimated to be 9 million, so if Hunter is kicking him back 5 million a year, where is the money going? Presumably not real estate and cars, unless he's got a couple dozen lambos tucked away in the Delaware batcave.
Digging into articles on the subject, they don't exactly paint a picture of Hunter funding Joe's lavish lifestyle:
Don't know. Curious to see what they were buying, or if there's any evidence that Joe was actually making extravagant purchases anywhere in the ballpark of what you're alleging.
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Yes. Kushner and Trump should be investigated for it.
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Although he accepted the money after potentially influencing the behavior of the state and not before, I feel comfortable saying this is extremely suspicious and in absence of further information, a strong indicator of corruption in my eyes.
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Why doesn't that square well? Makes sense to me.
Maybe I misread it. I initially parsed it as Hunter holding '10' temporarily with the intention of passing it off to Joe. I suppose the more likely reading is that he just holds it...although I don't know why you would make that reference at all in that case.
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Straightforwardly - yes. I don't feel inclined towards any equivocation, I think it's very bad!
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If there's nothing wrong with it, why not give the equity to Biden directly? They clearly thought it would look bad, and they were right.
Besides, you absolutely can bribe private citizens in many different ways. Bribe someone just before they win an election, bribe someone to ensure a corporate deal goes your way, bribe someone so that your words reach the right ears--bribery is absolutely a thing in the private sphere. The first is the most relevant--it's really not that hard to bribe a few presidential candidates, and then you'll surely have their ear if one of them makes it into office.
Moreover the whole scheme is do something for someone when in office, and they take care of you when out of office. If they don’t take care of you, then you tell others and they are fucked.
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You can bribe private citizens in the colloquial sense but not in the criminal sense, which is the only sense that matters here. It's also unclear what Joe Biden was supposed to have done in return. It also seems noteworthy that Joe apparently turned down the offer.
The colloquial sense absolutely matters here. If the people are to be governed by agents they select to carry out their wishes through the mechanism of the state, evidence that those agents may have accepted payments to enact the wishes of another party through the mechanisms of the state seems to me to be relevant to the people's decision making process.
Likelyhood of defection is highly relevant in optimizing agent selection.
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No, the criminal sense is not what matters here. What matters is whether Biden was influenced by the bribes that he took to an undue extent. BTW the original poster didn't even mention Joe taking bribes but rather Hunter, who certainly seems to have accepted some in exchange for peddling influence. When you're an octogenarian one is just as good as the other.
Yes, what Joe was supposed to do in return is unclear, but apparently the people doing the bribing had something valuable in mind, and that's all we need to know. There's no way they paid 6-7 figures just for a banal conversation about the weather with Joe.
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It’s a little past that if the reports from Archers testimony are honest. Now you have on the record that Burisma wanted Shokin out. Then Shokin was out. You are correct that plausible deniability still exists as you don’t have Joe on video discussing.
We probably should offer immunity to Shokin and the Burisma execs to get them on the record.
More than that, you have another source saying the same thing and indicating Joe got money for it.
That is evidence. It isn’t necessarily proof. But it is absurd to say “there is no evidence”
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A better response to any misgivings about the FBI is to have R politicians probe the organization and gradually escalate if it's found to be breaking the law to assist Dems. On the other hand, saying "the enemy's misdeeds justify our own lies" is pure toxoplasma.
Sure, but, it is not illegal to slow walk an investigation or selectively enforce laws. They could be egregiously partisan and also not breaking the law.
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Did the FBI break any laws here? I don’t think so. But they (and ex CIA people) heavily tilted informational warfare in favor of the Dems and against truth.
Are there serious ethical and spirit of Democracy things at play - yes. Illegal probably not. FBI doesn’t seem to have been neutral as they are suppose to be but that isn’t illegal.
I don't know if they broke laws specifically, but if they did then that's an easy target to nail them for. If they didn't, then it's just another battle of "why are almost all institutions left-leaning?"
The latter is why a bunch of us advocate for raising the temperature and just playing the same games. Lie. Because there’s no other choice besides acceleration. Or a bit of a Russian tactic of offensive for peace.
That logical endpoint of that sort of escalation is a violent right-wing insurgency like the Troubles in Ireland, but with every major institution aligned against them the conservatives will almost certainly lose.
The US' track record with insurgencies hasn't been that great. It will be an even bigger shitstorm when the insurgency is coming from inside the house instead of being on some one else's hell blasted sand box.
Conservatives won't engage in any insurgency. They'll just keep ceding territory until they're left with the afterlife and nothing more.
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I mean, the IRA did get significant concessions.
The IRA wasn't universally loathed by every institution within Ireland though.
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This is just the “left will always win rhetoric”. But it wouldn’t need to devolve to Troubles. You can ruin the political culture to force reform hopefully.
Hardly. I'm saying this particular strategy seems like it will fail. A better strat would be to fight for control of institutions, undercut woke methods of power, and vote for R candidates who actually give a damn about culture war stuff instead of Romneycrats who "compromise" on it to get tax cuts for the rich. Hanania writes a lot on this sort of stuff.
What? How would that work? This sounds like
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Yes, because Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell are exactly who I trust to investigate things, and to tell me if they uncover damning information about the FBI and the intelligence apparatus.
It has to be an outsider. There is a uniparty, and Trump isn't in it. That is the true reason for this indictment: he won in 2016 and wouldn't play ball. He keeps going off-script and he's impossible to control. If he had played along, if he had been controllable, then he'd be treated better.
And then there's JFK, who wanted to destroy the CIA, and then the CIA murdered him and got his VP to cover it up. Fortunately, our deep state is loathe to murder politicians these days like they were willing to in the 60s and 70s, or Trump wouldn't live to see the trial. Hell, we still don't have any guarantees.
I don’t think an inquest led by Trump would be any more credible. Who else do you think is a valid outsider?
As for JFK—I want to know what you think is wrong with the normie explanation. It looks like you’re just spouting a generic conspiracy theory.
There have been a number of people I would consider outsiders. Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, Donald Trump. I'll throw Bernie in there, too, although I'm less than pleased with his conduct since 2017.
It's only generic since it's been sixty years, and was itself the foundational "conspiracy theory" (a term I reject as a psychological operation to discredit anyone questioning the official story).
If you want to know what's wrong with the normie explanation, I suggest reading Noel Twyman's Bloody Treason. That was the book that convinced me that there was a cover-up perpetrated by the federal government, specifically Johnson, Hoover, and Dulles. It convinced me that the Zapruder film was doctored. It convinced me that the "normie" explanation simply could not hold, and another explanation was necessary.
As to what that explanation is, well, you heard what I think. Maybe I'm wrong about the specifics, but I don't think I'm wrong about the cover-up, and it's the cover-up that recasts the whole affair as a palace coup by the MIC.
What exactly are we referring to as "the normie explanation" because where I'm from the notion that JFK was assassinated by the Mob, Communists, and/or Deep State is pretty uncontroversial. It's just taken as a given that Lee Harvey Oswald's death at the hands of Jack Ruby was somebody "tying up loose ends." As such I'm curious, are you talking about Warren Commission's "findings" or one of the wackier second gunman on the grassy knoll stories?
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What makes you think that JFK wanted to destroy the CIA?
From the Bay of Pigs Invasion article. Never mind the next sentence…
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If you're convinced establishment Republicans won't help you, then vote them out and get people in office who will. And if those new people don't do a good enough job, vote them out as well and get new people in. A big part of the problem for conservatives is that they kept voting in Romneycrats prior to 2016 who did almost nothing to help win the culture wars. Instead of fixing the problem, they developed learned helplessness like "Cthulhu always swims left".
Trump was a step in the right direction, but had clear flaws. Instead of trying to get a more reliable candidate though, most Republicans seem content to turn the party into Trump's cult of personality.
I am not able to vote out any Republican politicians because none represent me.
Trump is completely reliable. I can rely on him to fight.
If you consider tweeting and grandstanding followed by policy reversals when things are criticized on cable news, then sure, Trump is your guy.
That doesn't seem like a very good strategy to win though. Hence why most of Trump's limited accomplishments while in office came from McConell appointing conservative SCOTUS justices, i.e. stuff any Republican president with a heartbeat could have done.
He didn't appoint any squishes to the supreme court which is better than virtually all Republican presidents before him in recent memory.
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How much of that is the federalist society created a pipeline?
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TBH there’s some smaller scale stuff he did like reviving the federal death penalty which may not have happened under President Jeb!
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I mostly buy Nixon-related conspiracy theories with regard to deep state subversion. Nixon was paranoid about people being out to get him because people really were out to get him. If that's correct, the spooks had already gotten cleverer about how to rid themselves of meddlesome politicians by the 70s.
I do not think that the Deep State would have succeeded in removing Nixon if he had run his re-election campaign honestly, rather than hiring the former Plumbers to ratfuck McGovern. It is entirely possible that the Deep State would have failed to remove Nixon if he had used fewer bad words while on tape plotting the Watergate cover-up.
Apart from Spiro Agnew's conviction for tax evasion, essentially all the big Nixon-era political scandals relate to the activities of Liddy and Hunt. He didn't need them, and would have done better without them. A lot of the smaller scandals relate to the over-enthusiasm of John Dean in pursuing petty feuds. Given that Dean eventually ratted Nixon out over Watergate, he would have done much, much, better without Dean.
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Escalate to... what, exactly? Just getting rid of the whole organization due to its history of misdeeds ranging from MLK to Whitey Bulger to modern political interference? When I look at something like the Strzok text messages and his role in the Russia-baiting, I arrive at the conclusion that this organization cannot be salvaged.
As long as you have federal crimes you need someone to investigate them. And if it's not the FBI it's going to be someone even more political, like the local US attorney, or even more disliked by the right (any votes for giving the ATF more power?). It's like the calls to eliminate the IRS that don't realize that unless they want government spending limited to customs revenue, any other tax collector is going to be just as bad.
If someone discovers that the local police force is astonishingly corrupt and has just been taking money from the mafia in order to allow them to run their protection rackets and deal drugs with impunity, "But who will investigate crimes?" is not a meaningful response to the argument that the current police force needs to be replaced.
It's an argument in favor of firing corrupt people, not of disbanding the department entirely.
If the corruption is deep enough, the difference is probably negligible. Especially if the corrupt people are running the show.
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Big parts of the right consider declining federal state capacity to be a good thing- either because they want to live in Montana collecting machine guns in peace, or because they live in places that would strongly benefit from capital flight.
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Killing the FBI entirely is certainly a nuclear option, but yes it should be on the table if things get that bad. R's want to abolish large parts of the federal government including entire agencies, so I don't see why the FBI would be considered off limits.
Trump should campaign on dismantling the FBI and the ATF. Can't imagine a more redmeat sort of deal for his base.
Trump doesn't need to offer red meat to his base. His base already love him so much that they are still supporting him even after he has been indicted twice for serious crimes of which he is obviously guilty (and once for some bullshit process crime in NY). His problem is that his base are not close to a majority of the electorate - they are barely a majority in a Republican primary.
Trump either needs to convince more NeverTrump Republicans to hold their noses and vote for the crook, not the Democrat, or to convince more Reagan Democrat types that trannies are more of a threat to their kids than Russians.
...These are a thing?
Per Wikipedia, the term referred to non-Southern white working-class voters who switched from D to R for culture-war issues, particularly (in the 1980's) crime. Obviously that group has continued to drift right since Reagan to the point where most of them voted for Trump, but it isn't really part of the Republican base the way rural voters, small business owners, or the white South are.
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Because their strategy worked. Just sit on it and then claim its Russian disinformation, suppress it on social media, and call anyone that thinks that's pretty weird a conspiracy theorist. The result is that Biden is, in fact, President and that if I bring up the Hunter laptop, most people outside of Trump country will roll their eyes at me. I wouldn't have had the stones to implement that strategy, but that's why I'm not getting paid the big bucks to run disinformation campaigns.
It working happened but I couldn’t predict it working in advance. Also not sure these guys get “paid the big bucks”. What does C-level fbi get paid?
Part of me wants to think this was how all of us were when we were students. You wait till the last moment to do your work then scramble for whatever you can. Versus 4-D chess playing though it doesn’t sort of look in retrospect they played 4-D chess.
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I think Guliani definitely played it wrong. The underlooked angle is that because Guliani played his hand in the most opportunistic way, after years of being kicked in the shins by Trump the establishment felt no ethical need to be straight on it. That's just what can happen when you play hardball after making a ton of enemies.
If they had it early and didn't leak it I would assume that they were just biased to do nothing if they generally wanted Trump to lose, especially since the other moderates weren't that strong of candidates.
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I think your facts undersell. The government in connect with their NGOs literally ran simulations with social media and one of the simulations was relating to a leaked Hunter Biden laptop. They didn’t just debunk a true story post hoc. They prebunked it.
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