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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.
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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