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The Carter Page stuff was bad, but ultimately more as a factor against the FBI than to the broader investigation as a whole. Carter Page was not indicted, nor did he feature particularly prominently in the final report compared to people like Papadopoulos or Manafort. Then there's the issue of whether that stuff meant the investigation was started from partisan motives, but similar accusations have been levelled in the reverse direction for Hunter. It's also pretty easy to point to Giuliani, who was one of the leading proponents of the Hunter stuff since it's inception, as Giuliani isn't exactly the cleanest guy himself. Or heck, even the recent deposition stuff, where House Republicans initially said they'd accept any type of deposition with Hunter, before reneging and saying they'd only accept a closed deposition, something Hunter specifically wanted to avoid due to the likelihood of the Republicans selectively leaking testimony to present a skewed picture.
Of course he wasn't indicted! That's the entire point I was bringing up - the Carter Page warrant was transparently a figleaf designed to let the intelligence agencies surveil Trump and his entire campaign while delivering intelligence reports based on that surveillance to his political opposition. Again, I struggle to believe that you've got a real understanding of the situation if you think the problem with the Carter Page warrant was that he wasn't actually indicted. The problem was that the Trump campaign and early days of his presidency were under hostile surveillance by the intelligence agencies, and the fruits of that surveillance were given to his political opposition... and all of it was based on a document that everyone involved knew was fraudulent.
No, this isn't an issue at all. The investigation was started from partisan motives, and if you're familiar with the documents in question and the outcome of the Durham investigation, there's not really any debate to be had on this subject.
In order for this equivocation to be valid, the republicans would have had to have manufactured Hunter's laptop and all the evidence on it, selectively leaked portions of it to the media, used it to get a FISA court warrant to surveil Biden's whitehouse, then given regular copies of the intelligence summaries based on the information they gained to the Trump campaign. Hunter Biden's laptop became an issue because he took a lot of photos of himself committing crimes, along with a bunch of records of him selling influence and access to his father, then got super blitzed and forgot about dropping his laptop off to be repaired, then ignored the repeated messages saying "please come pick up your laptop or it becomes our property".
The problem with this line of thinking is that Carter Page certainly wasn't the only reason the investigation started, as Papadopoulos was also an early target and would eventually be convicted. After it started, it was clear there actually was quite a bit of wrongdoing by Trump's campaign, including even the chair of the campaign, Manafort. Not sure what "fruits of surveillance given to his political opposition" is specifically referring to here, so I'll let you clarify before I address it.
The Durham Report (which itself was created/elevated at the behest of Trump to discredit what he saw as the "Russia hoax") didn't even explicitly accuse the FBI of bias, since that's a fairly difficult bar to reach. The final report actually discusses more about confirmation bias than on political bias. It's personally pretty clear to me that political bias was probably a factor, but again it's hard to prove definitively.
If you zoom in too closely then obviously there are object-level differences between the two "scandals", but I never said they were identical. Giuliani's involvement still allows Democrats to point to the blatantly (biased) political nature of how the investigation started, from a man who is verging on lunacy, who claimed the election was stolen by the heckin Commies, and who likely committed crimes himself for which he is now being charged. The laptop stuff has long been his personal project, and the fishing expedition ultimately failed to prove anything related to the president himself. You'll obviously say that's a ridiculous interpretation, but plenty of leftists use something along those lines to dismiss the Hunter story, while seeing the Russia stuff as far more damaging. Again, there's clear symmetry there.
Also, while I'm enjoying the more substantive parts of this discussion, I'd urge you to drop the high and mighty attitude you've been displaying so far. I've discussed this topic with several other people on the Pro Trump side, and each one comes at it from a different angle which makes it difficult to have a single uniform rebuttal. Saying things like "I struggle to believe that you've got a real understanding of the situation" or "you haven't done the required research" or "dishonest to even imply it" or "lazy thinking" or any of that obnoxious crap is not helpful and makes me not want to engage with you. Again, I have done quite a bit of research on this, maybe not as much as you, but enough to know a fair deal. Keeping that in mind would be helpful so that you might ask for clarification if you've misunderstood the argument I was making, instead of leaping to ad hominems that I'm some foolish idiot who "hasn't done the research".
My apologies - I was dealing with a rather annoying issue at work and that most likely bled through to my posting on here.
I said you hadn't done the research not because I thought you were an idiot but because I thought there were gaps in your knowledge. I don't blame anyone for not keeping up to date with this story because it has gone on for more than half a decade and involved copious amounts of misdirection, legal wrangling and media perfidy. But if you're going to try and make authoritative statements on the matter, you owe it to yourself to go and do that research. I actually made sure to ask you if you were sure, because I was politely giving you a chance to back down and go do the research before we progressed and I had to say you hadn't done it.
Trump's initial crime was becoming the GOP candidate while espousing a set of policies that were in direct opposition to the DC Consensus/wishes of the deep state/etc. The Clinton campaign then had the Steele dossier manufactured, and that dossier was then selectively leaked to the media in order to retroactively add enough credibility to the claims contained within that it could be used to get a FISA warrant (Kevin Clinesmith, one of the lawyers involved, was prosecuted for fabricating evidence that was used in the warrant application). The surveillance of Trump's campaign, and the intelligence product produced as a result, went to Obama's whitehouse in the PDB (this is what I meant when I said "fruits of surveillance given to his political opposition"). Trump's campaign was actively surveilled by the intelligence community on the basis of a document that they knew to be fraudulent (the steele dossier), and even publicly stated had not been corroborated when they got that warrant!
This is why the two situations are just fundamentally not comparable. The Russia connection was fictional from the start, and known to be fictional by the government as it was used as the basis of a surveillance operation that continued even after Trump became the president-elect. The people involved in this surveillance are the exact same people who were then assigned to the Mueller special counsel in order to both clean up their mess and do their best to hamstring the Trump administration's ability to hire staff and function. The Hunter Biden laptop story, in contrast, is a case where the government simply did not want to investigate obvious corruption and wrong-doing. The FBI totally ignored the reports of the computer store owner, and it was only after he gave the contents of the laptop to Giuliani that the government got interested and seized the drives - not because they wanted to investigate, but because they wanted to make sure Biden wasn't embarrassed any further. There hasn't been any substantive prosecution or even investigation of Hunter as a result of true, verified and impeccably well documented evidence of him committing multiple felonies, because these felonies implicate his father and multiple high-ranking members of the intelligence community. Not only did the government fail to investigate, they put out a statement claiming that these actual photos were the result of a Russian intelligence campaign, when the chain-of-provenance and validity of the evidence is crystal clear. They even went to the tech companies and had reporting on this story suppressed, which at least one study has determined changed the outcome of the election.
On the one hand, you have a case where fraudulent evidence is used as the basis for a malicious investigation and prosecution of a sitting candidate for president, which continued after he was actually elected. On the other hand, you have a case where real, verifiable and publicly available evidence of multiple well-documented felonies is simply slow-walked, ignored and publicly discredited with no factual basis in order to shift the outcome of an election. These two cases just aren't comparable in the way you were suggesting.
Read the Strzok/Page messages if you want proof. I also don't think political bias will really be provable here simply because the relevant axis is not republican/democrat but Trump/DC Blob, and that's not really a distinction that the law recognises to the best of my knowledge.
None of the stuff about Giuliani is relevant - and they actually have proved things related to the president. There are multiple whistleblowers testifying to the identity of "the big guy", along with multiple photos showing him meeting with Hunter's clients. The intelligence community hasn't prosecuted him, but why would they?
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