Hunter Biden

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118841049#Comment_118841049

I'm aware of Ukraine and that some people have problems understanding what I said.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118841069#Comment_118841069

I'm glad, because I am one of them I think.

I took it that you were implying that people are rushing to make the hunter Biden story bigger than it needs to be.

Because that would be mad if that was what you meant.

If you don't think the hunter Biden story is a big deal....well then you ain't black, aren't paying attention

rossie1977

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118840562#Comment_118840562

Quite serious is nonsense. A Republican committee already looked into this and *shock horror* found nothing https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/us/politics/biden-inquiry-republicans-johnson.html

This is just more Russian misinformation that the right have clung unto but unlike Clinton's emails which insanely the MSM spent months upon months of wasted time making it the biggest story when there was nothing they thankfully are not falling for this bulls**t.

The business practices of Ivanka Trump and her husband and Eric/Don Jr are far more murky than Hunter Biden and they played key role in Trump Whitehouse unlike Hunter Biden who is a complete nobody.

Yurt2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118841085#Comment_118841085

What exactly is big about it?

Not making fun of his issues in saying this, but he was a crack addict that was trying to trade off his family name until people handing him money copped he was a bullsh*tter quarantined from Biden et al by handlers.

He had a laptop with, presumably, documents relating to his no-show job in Ukraine and (apparently) videos of him with brazzers.

Apart from being a tremendous personal embarrassment to the Biden family, what's the earth shattering scandal?

If this falls flat on its face, which I'm predicting it will, are you willing to eat crow and concede you were getting a chubby off the back of American right wing media and residual Trumpite conspiracy theorists?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118841104#Comment_118841104

It's a very important story because it's the son of a now sitting president who had an extremely high paying job which he was grossly under qualified for, in a country which was known for ridiculous levels of corruption, a country which his father laughed and joked about withholding money from.

It was also big because of how anyone referencing the story was treated like a mad "trumpite" conspiracy theorist (you couldn't help but reference trump again I see).

Until now, when it's gone from not being a lie, to true, but not important.

It's a big story. No matter what way you look at it.

And no, i won't "eat crow" or concede I was getting an erection if the story of it turns out to be less than incredibly important.

Why would I? I see the way the media treated this story as very important and genuinely telling as to how people have reacted to it. Regardless of whether you like Biden or not, you should be appalled that the media didn't do their due diligence, or that they purposely buried the story to benefit Biden.

It's the job of the media to tell us the **** news. Not suppress it. This news was undeniably suppressed.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118841085#Comment_118841085

He is a tool to say the least and he's already been looked at multiple times including the Republicans who found nothing, lets see what this brings. Either way it is a handy talking point for some, same as the complaints about nestle not providing formula as a look over here tatic coming out of Russia.

Snake Plisken

Ahh the Hunter Biden Laptop New York Post Story that was suppressed by Twitter and to a lesser extent Facebook during the run up to the 2020 elections. Those who think this doesn't show that Biden snr is compromised due to his son's dealings in Ukraine Of interest is Hunter sitting on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings where he was being paid thousands of dollars yet wasn't qualified for the role. An email on the laptop indicated Hunter introduced his father to an adviser, then vice president tomert an advisor on the board of Burisma.

The usual Biden apologists will try and dismiss the story or try and deflect with the old look over there at Trump!

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118841165#Comment_118841165

Lol what?

Is that a dig at me because on a different thread, I said I wouldn't criticise nestle for supplying baby food to russia?

You do realise that isn't at all the same as complaining that they aren't providing baby formula? It's actually almost the opposite.

You do realise that don't you?

Yet you accuse others of using a look over here tactic.

Jesus. The delusion is strong in this one.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118841180#Comment_118841180

Nope it is a point that what could be most politely described as the person who made the idiot like claims that Zelenskyy wants Russian babies to starve, when he never said that, and are now all over this with the same level of accuracy and understanding, while claiming everyone else is delusional.

Rjd2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118841104#Comment_118841104

The issue is how the story was buried rather than Hunter's behaviour tbh. You can argue sincerely that Hunter when all said is done is no worse than the Trump kids, but its still an astonishing journalism failure how the story was supressed and laughingly dismissed as " Russian propaganda by some.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118841216#Comment_118841216

Lol who made that claim?

macvin

Didn't know that there were so many fervent Trump/Putin cheerleaders here on boards

You'd almost think they were searching for diversionary tactics.

Maybe look a lot closer to home - Jared Kushner and his Russia links.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118841316#Comment_118841316

Start a thread about kushner. This one is about Hunter biden.

pjohnson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118841316#Comment_118841316

Yep this thread explains why there are so many Putin cheerleaders. Its amusing to see them pile on defending their heroes!

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118841370#Comment_118841370

That's a strange thing to say.

It's even more telling to see that any criticism or any belief that there is more to the hunter Biden laptop story is automatically likened to supporting Putin or Trump.

I've seen no defense of Putin here.

pjohnson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118841385#Comment_118841385

Of course you havent.

Yurt2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118841126#Comment_118841126

None of your post addresses where exactly is the earth shattering scandal.

It's been with the FBI at least since 2018, been subject to a Republican Senate investigation.

All we have is Hunter with a bullsh*t no-show job, and some alleged sex tape.

No evidence that he induced government wrongdoing or anything that implicates anyone that isn't a crack addict.

The 'biolab angle' I will call out now as complete horsesh*t from Russia, neatly tied in to covid conspiracy peddlers.

I'll eat crow if there is any substance to that, but you need to be prepared to eat crow when nothing comes of it.

Get your head screwed on. There's a war on where one of the parties is a dictatorship is known to use every dirty trick in the book, including sowing nonsense tinfoil hat stories in the Western media environment and seeing what will flower and what morons will run with it.

Hunter was a crack addict trying and failing to peddle his name for money. If there's evidence of malfeasance on US government officials or even Joe Biden himself, let it be known and let it be prosecuted.

But for now, you'll have to accept all you have is a crackhead with a bullsh*t job and videos of him with hookers. You're welcome to spend your days trying to convince people this is some sort of Watergate moment, but I'm welcome to point out you're far more likely to be wasting large parts of your brain with a Russian disinformation project.

MisterAnarchy

The crux of the matter is that Joe Biden originally dismissed the laptop as a Russian plant and a bunch of garbage.

He knew then that what he was saying wasn’t true. He knew the contents were real. He lied to the American people.

The matter was buried by the Mainstream media, Twitter etc for the best part of 18 months.

I see the usual suspects are in early to the thread, no longer are they labelling someone who disagrees with them a Trumpist, the new compliment is Putinbot. Classy as always.

Overheal

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118841952#Comment_118841952

If they’ve killed it why are you an expert on it?

Overheal

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118842032#Comment_118842032

You’re making a lot of assumptions: did Joe Biden know it was true? We have no evidence of that.

wishful thinking above by the anti Biden crowd

Yurt2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118842032#Comment_118842032

I'm still no clearer as to what the scandal is, and how it relates to the White House administration.

There's a whiff of a puffed up Billy Carter situation about this.

And have no doubt, there is a concerted effort, foreign and domestic to make this a story.

Once we reach the point there is evidence of illegality induced by Hunter Biden in the government and especially if that is linked to his father, then you have my attention. ,

Until then, I and most citizens will be getting on with the business of the real world and not getting caught up in tall tales the right wing of the Republican party and (yes, you should probably accept this) the Russian government want people to believe.

EDIT: And there's a very close correlation between Trumpists and Putinbots this weather. Both credulous, both prone to conspiratorial thinking, both under-read and angry for no particular reason at all.

Rjd2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118841952#Comment_118841952

That's exactly it. I don't even have much of an issue with the Biden team going on the offensive and trying to bury the story as that is how politics work, but the problem is how quickly the media took the bait in censoring and shutting it down .

Its possible to acknowledge that this was a major journalism failure and before the tedious whataboutism from the Biden cultists, yes Trump's kids and Jared have probably done much worse than Hunter but again its not even Hunter that is the issue its the media shambolic coverage of the story.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118842746#Comment_118842746

You forget being generally fu*ked up in the head and being scrotes from your list, but apart from that pretty good analysis.

Beasty

Just to be clear this thread is about Hunter Biden

If you do not want to discuss Hunter Biden then do not post here

If you want to discuss Joe Biden, we have active threads where you can do so

If you wish to discuss Donald Trump we have a active thread on him

If you wish to ignore these instructions you can expect to be told not to post in this thread and may face further sanction

Yurt2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118842790#Comment_118842790

Biden cultists? I seriously don't see much evidence of a personality cult surrounding Biden. Even the staunchest of supporters recognise the man has limitations. He's an unadorned steady hand establishment Democrat and a creature of Washington. That's most people's take on the man and if you had your head screwed on after the years of chaos of the Trump presidency, probably what was necessary for America.

On the media: what's missing from their coverage? Once again, I completely fail to see the smoking gun. We have a crack addict son of a former vice-President slumming it in Kyiv trying to turn a buck with big talk, and an alleged sex tape. That's about it.

If I was the member of the fourth estate I would have sifted through the evidence as presented, then if the story didn't turn up anything compromising officialdom, left the lurid tape and crack smoking angle to the tabloids. Which is where it ended up - and pretty much remains.

Overheal

Some reporting from a credible source

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/30/hunter-biden-china-laptop/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fb_news_token=kKiRDqsQn8TDRNa1QkjaoQ%3D%3D.O%2F5KxeS5c2kww54XhfoTp0wSro9zJaxe7b6PH4n8Pv0o53o7A4kul0pyH5qNMmyWXBLOyutYRBQ%2Fw2iWVbK9aBr1545oBGwA9csRdTB73Ntl68liuJyY6mvdr74pskoYvR8vqNnmHv%2B5jUXhw7Mew54GBOl4QAoqB0tIcxzZ82rCaGZA9LlIe22xrvRMu%2F8wj8cyUqDxs5wSUGu2FqCYbsLT1qPrdHFsffo1z5abjacqv1UCCwuo%2BFSFJP4q9xOBk0THebcZze9YeXJWJFhUWApndyi9RVRmE5lbnGETqw0oyrM7akSRrRMOm9bS5al4Q2pt%2Fr%2BHzATX1QGsE%2BhlFQ%3D%3D

While many aspects of Hunter Biden’s financial arrangement with CEFC China Energy have been previously reported and were included in a Republican-led Senate report from 2020, a Washington Post review confirmed many of the key details and found additional documents showing Biden family interactions with Chinese executives.

Over the course of 14 months, the Chinese energy conglomerate and its executives paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and his uncle, according to government records, court documents and newly disclosed bank statements, as well as emails contained on a copy of a laptop hard drive that purportedly once belonged to Hunter Biden.

The Post did not find evidence that Joe Biden personally benefited from or knew details about the transactions with CEFC, which took place after he had left the vice presidency and before he announced his intentions to run for the White House in 2020.

But the new documents — which include a signed copy of a $1 million legal retainer, emails related to the wire transfers, and $3.8 million in consulting fees that are confirmed in new bank records and agreements signed by Hunter Biden — illustrate the ways in which his family profited from relationships built over Joe Biden’s decades in public service.

As to remembering why this story smelled like bullshit at the time, WaPo writes:

After the New York Post began publishing reports on the contents of the laptop in October 2020, The Washington Post repeatedly asked Giuliani and Republican strategist Stephen K. Bannon for a copy of the data to review before the election, but the requests were rebuffed or ignored.

Perhaps if Trumps lackeys had shared the drive with more outlets the story would have gained more traction. WaPo found no evidence Biden knew about Hunters China dealing. But anyway, we now have a more corroborated idea of what the fuss is all about.

Edit: free to view link https://wapo.st/3Dq845x

Overheal

Oh, to clarify the above reporting, WaPo could not authenticate all the emails, but were able to authenticate 22,000 of them.

https://wapo.st/3LtQtwa

The Washington Post asked two computer security experts to review a portable hard drive that purportedly contained data from Hunter Biden’s MacBook Pro computer. The Post obtained the drive last year from a conservative political researcher who had once worked for former Donald Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon.

The Post asked the two experts, Matt Green, a Johns Hopkins University cryptologist, and Jake Williams, a faculty member for the information security research group IANS, to determine if the information on the drive was authentic.

Hunter Biden’s laptop has been the subject of intense debate since October 2020, when the New York Post first published accusations that the laptop contained information suggesting that Biden’s business deals had also enriched his father, now President Biden. Republicans have hailed the laptop as evidence of wrongdoing, while Democrats have suggested it had been manipulated and may have included misinformation planted by the Russian government.

The examinations of the portable drive by Green and Williams were largely inconclusive. Both researchers, who worked independently of each other, determined that the data contained on the drive was so compromised by a variety of factors that definitive conclusions about most of its contents were impossible.

But they did agree that nearly 22,000 emails contained on the portable drive were authentic — meaning they contained cryptographic signatures that indicated they came from the accounts that they claimed to be from and and had not been manipulated in some way.

This was determined by examining what’s known as the headers of the emails. Headers are rarely visible to people reading their emails, but they contain what is known as metadata that includes information about an email’s sending account, its recipient and its path through the Internet. In some cases, headers also include a series of letters and numbers that appear unintelligible but, in fact, are cryptographic signatures that can be used to verify an email’s sender and contents.

Green and Williams between them were able to use cryptographic signatures to verify 22,000 emails out of the nearly 129,000 on the portable drive.

They also agreed that they found no clear evidence that data on the hard drive had been tampered with, but said that it was difficult to reach a conclusion on the data on the drive as a whole. The ability to verify it, they said, was undermined by the fact the hard drive had been handled over the years in a manner that damaged some key files, making them unusable for the purposes of forensic examination. As Williams noted in his technical report, “several key pieces of evidence useful in discovering tampering were not available.”

In writing about the emails on the drive, The Washington Post applied a two-part test. One was whether the emails could be cryptographically verified by the experts. The other was whether there was outside information confirming the validity of the emails.

For example, like other news organizations, The Post received records from the Swedish government that confirmed emails related to office space that Hunter Biden rented. In other cases, The Post relied on bank documents acquired by Senate investigators that confirmed the substance of email traffic and financial documents on the drive. The Post also confirmed emails with other recipients.

Williams accepted payment from WaPo for this effort, Green refused payment.

It's the cover up which is worse than the crime. Two weeks before the 2020 election, corporate and social media engaged in the biggest misinformation campaign in history labelling the Hunter Biden Laptop as "Russian Disinformation". Twitter accounts were suspended while FB suppressed the story all in the name of ensuring that the preferred candidate was elected as opposed to reporting the truth.

The next time you hear someone claiming that disinformation comes from Trump boomers on Facebook or QAnon sites, watch this propaganda video Huffington Post spread all over the internet just before the 2020 election that contained nothing but blatant lies.

https://youtu.be/eGYFWNtW2QA

Over and over and over, the media corporations that claim to oppose "disinformation" spread it more aggressively than anyone. People who still trust them are irrational. They threw away every last standard in the name of stopping Trump.

Overheal

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118862111#Comment_118862111

Except when you recall that Rudy wouldn’t let anyone in the media see this evidence. They just kept trying to drip drip drip photos via newsmax and such. Washington Post asked for a copy of the files right away, so they could verify what, if anything Rudy was claiming was true. He refused. What were they supposed to report, other than the claims could not be verified, while mentioning the very outlandish story about Rudy finding Hunters laptop in a blind mans computer repair shop?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118862133#Comment_118862133

Not true. The NY Post (oldest newspaper in the U.S.) verified the emails and published a story about the laptop and their twitter account was suspended. Glenn Greenwald who was a journalist with the intercept at the time (a media organisation her co-founded) who has alot of experience in publishing email archives with the Edward Snowden story and stories he covered in Brazil, was censored from publishing his story at the intercept because his media outlet didn't want to harm Biden. Greenwald left the intercept over the incident and now publishes independently on Substack.