Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

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> "horrifyingly, took the lead in falsely branding the Hunter Biden archive as “Russian disinformation”"

Calling it an "archive" is laughable at best, the provenance of the supposed Hunter Biden laptop which was left in the custody of a randomly chosen computer repair shop guy who has ties to Giuliani and the Trump apparatus is clear. The entire thing was an intelligence plant that Greenwald swallowed hook, line and sinker.

There's a reason why dozens of highly respected, experienced investigative journalists took a good look at the information supposedly retrieved from this "laptop" and decided not to proceed with publishing any of it. Because they didn't want to embarrass themselves by publishing obvious fabrications.

From USA Today:

"John Paul Mac Isaac — owner of The Mac Shop — told reporters that a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden brought three liquid-damaged laptops to his repair shop in April 2019, per the Delaware News Journal.

The man left one laptop for repair and never returned to retrieve it.

Eventually, Mac Isaac gave a copy of the laptop's hard drive to Brian Costello, an attorney for Rudy Giuliani, who is the personal lawyer for President Donald Trump. Mac Isaac said he turned the hard drive over to Costello because of fears for his safety."

What are you talking about? The story was worth reporting and it wasn’t until the election was over and verified that major news sources decided to push it to the public.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/09/politics/hunter-biden-tax-inv...

Greenwald was right in calling the bias.

So either the "laptop" was given to Giuliani, or to the custody of the FBI, which is it? If it was given to the FBI, how did Giuliani come into possession of a large number of files supposedly retrieved from it, and share them with any journalist who would listen?

The laptop was given to the FBI first and then someone from the FBI leaked it to Giuliani after the investigation was not moving. Once it became public a senate committee verified the validity of the evidence and the investigation made it to the public.

Edit: I stand corrected. The repair shop owner shared an image of the disk with Giuliani, after first sharing it with the FBI.

If I recall, it was the repair shop owner who shared an image of the hard drive with Giuliani's people. He thought the FBI wasn't doing enough with it.

Edit: Source https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2020/10/14/meet-wi...

Digital data is not hard to duplicate. Both can be true.

The repair shop made disk images (part of the repair process), then gave the laptop to the FBI, and then shared the disk images.

> What are you talking about? The story was worth reporting and it wasn’t until the election was over and verified that major news sources decided to push it to the public.

"Hunter Biden" is not one monolithic story. IIRC, Giuliani's story was all about that laptop (and trying to make it look like Joe Biden was involved), but that laptop may in fact have nothing to do with this tax probe. The existence of the latter doesn't necessarily validate the former.

According to the story you posted:

> Hints of the investigation emerged after President Donald Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, helped orchestrate news stories centered on a laptop purported to belong to Hunter Biden and said to include his business documents and other personal material.

> The FBI took possession of the laptop in late 2019, according to a computer repairman in Delaware who showed reporters a copy of a subpoena. The subpoena is real, according to people briefed on the matter, but the FBI and prosecutors in Delaware have refused to confirm the existence of the investigation.

> It's unclear whether the laptop's contents are relevant to the ongoing federal probe and whether investigators can even use them, given potential chain of custody requirements for evidence.

Pay attention to that last paragraph.

It was actually Hunter’s business partner Bobulinsky that went on Fox News to claim that he was working for Biden, and first met him during a scheduled time that has been redacted from Biden’s public calendar.

No mainstream press with access to Joe Biden ever dared to ask Joe a question so that he could at least defend himself from the allegations.

From your link: > It's unclear whether the laptop's contents are relevant to the ongoing federal probe and whether investigators can even use them, given potential chain of custody requirements for evidence.

It really doesn't pass the smell test that it was actually Hunter's laptop. Unless he's majorly stupid (I suppose that's a possibility...), why would he just choose a random computer repair store and leave his laptop(s) there. According to snopes.com, the owner didn't even see Hunter drop off the laptop: https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/10/15/hunter-biden-laptop-g...

If I were Hunter Biden, I would certainly have connections who I can call and ask about fixing a laptop which has secret information, and I would check that they're not a Trump supporter first. OTOH, if it really was Hunter Biden and he wasn't an idiot, then him giving the laptop to some stranger would mean he was sure there were no secrets on that laptop. (Then again, people don't understand tech and he might've thought deleting a file removes all traces of it).

But Twitter and Facebook censoring the story isn't that neutral either, it's obvious who they wanted to win the election.

Hunter has suffered through documented periods of crack addiction and it was during one of these episodes that he lost the laptop.

Got a source for your assertion?

https://www.businessinsider.com/hunter-biden-opens-about-add...

That link doesn't suggest he was battling addiction in April 2019. Got a source that tells us he was in one of this episodes in April 2019? Or are you just another Twitterer who throws "facts" into the dumpster fire?

From Snopes: The Post reported that the saga started in April 2019, when a man identifying himself as Hunter Biden dropped the laptop off at a computer repair shop in the Biden family’s home state of Delaware. The laptop had been damaged by water.

Regardless of your politics, it doesn't take much to believe that a person known to have months-long crack binges went on another binge. Recovery is hard.

Sure, it's not impossible to believe, but DevKoala up there saying "yeah, he did that" with no evidence/verifiable sources, I'll assume he's just talking out of his ass.. (a trait shared by a certain political side)

You are right, it was wrong of me to assert he handed the laptop while intoxicated. Perhaps what I should have said is that given his recent history of addiction, his competence when handling important materials is in question.

Also, the laptop repair shop owner has gone on court to fight for his version of the story.

https://www.businessinsider.com/hunter-biden-laptop-repairma...

Thanks for the acknowledgement, sorry that I threw assumptions at you.

Greenwald's sources for his claim that (initially none, then walked back to no active) parler users weren't involved in the Capitol attacks was an un-named Parler exec, a claim which he published with zero fact-checking, since if quickly emerged there were rather a lot of active Parler users involved.

At this point he's just a laundering service for far-right scumbags.

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