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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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