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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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