Title : How the NYT and the Washington Post have caught up on the New York Post Hunter Biden story.
link : How the NYT and the Washington Post have caught up on the New York Post Hunter Biden story.
How the NYT and the Washington Post have caught up on the New York Post Hunter Biden story.
The NYT has this story, which, it says, went up 11 hours ago: "Allegation on Biden Prompts Pushback From Social Media Companies/Joe Biden’s campaign rejected assertions made in a published report that were based on unverified material from Trump allies. Facebook and Twitter found the story dubious enough to limit access to it on their platform."The Biden campaign on Wednesday rejected a New York Post report...
The word used in the headline and the first line of the article is "rejected." Not "denied." That seems to indicate that they know the material isn't fake and they simply don't like the report.
... about Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter that the nation’s leading social media companies deemed so dubious that they limited access to the article on their platforms.
"Dubious" means it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously (presumably partly because we're hearing this so late that there's too little time for the Biden campaign to respond).
The report, appearing just three weeks before the election, was based on material provided by Republican allies of President Trump who have tried for months to tarnish Mr. Biden over his son.
That is, the report is dubious because it is coming out so late. Trump supporters have wanted to get Biden over his son Hunter all year, so why is this only coming out now? It looks like a last-ditch effort, resorted to because Trump is losing, done to cause damage by being difficult to refute at the last minute.
It claimed that the elder Mr. Biden had met with an adviser to a Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden served. A spokesman for the Biden campaign, Andrew Bates, said that Mr. Biden’s official schedules showed no meeting between Mr. Biden and the adviser, Vadym Pozharskyi.
That's not to say there was no meeting, only that the official schedules showed no meeting.
“We have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place,” Mr. Bates said.
Would Bates know that there was no meeting if there were but it was left off the schedule?
The Post story cited an email Mr. Pozharskyi allegedly sent to Hunter Biden thanking him for “giving an opportunity to meet your father” and to spend “some time together.” The authenticity of the email correspondence cited by The Post could not be independently verified.
So it could be completely fake?! It's awfully convenient, and it's so precisely the smoking gun the Trump campaign would want. That's why I held back from blogging the NY Post story all of yesterday (and only posted about the Twitter/Facebook suppression at the very end of the day).
Hours after the Post published its article, Facebook said on Wednesday that it had decided to limit the distribution of the story on its platform so it could fact-check the claims. Twitter said it was blocking the article because it included people’s personal phone numbers and email addresses, which violated their privacy rules, and because the article violated their policy on hacked materials....
The NYT is making the Twitter/Facebook suppression sound reasonable. Why didn't the NY Post present a cleaner report of the newsworthy portion of the email? Did it want to provoke the censorship?
Both Bidens have said that the two did not discuss Ukraine with each other. An investigation by Senate Republicans — and significant scrutiny of the issue over the last year — found no evidence that Mr. Biden, the former vice president, engaged in wrongdoing over his son’s business dealings. Asked about the prospect of even a brief encounter with Mr. Pozharskyi, a Biden campaign official said that was “technically possible” but very unlikely.
That's a good defense. Denial that there was a meeting, but an explanation ready in case there is proof of a meeting, assuming the meeting would turn out to be small enough to be characterized as a forgettable trifle. It might mean a lot to the Ukrainians to get to Joe Biden at all and be worth a lot to Hunter Biden to make that happen and, at the same time, seems like nothing at all to Joe Biden. That's the story, I suppose, if the email turns out to be true.
The official said there was “no indication at all” that such an interaction had happened, and that regardless, Mr. Biden would not have discussed anything tied to Burisma....
It didn't happen, but if it did, it didn't matter. The story is in place.
The Post report described a circuitous and unusual path by which the newspaper had obtained the email correspondence that involved two of Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies: Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer and a former New York City mayor, and Stephen K. Bannon, a former White House adviser. The article said the emails were part of a trove of material on a laptop computer that was dropped off for repairs at a shop in Delaware, Mr. Biden’s home state, and never retrieved....
That's all quite strange!
The Post reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had seized the computer and the hard drive in December but did not specify what the authorities might be investigating....
If they've had it since last December, why has nothing come of it? Why is it coming out now through Giuliani?
The article also does not explain any connection between the store owner and Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert J. Costello, or why the owner would give a copy of the hard drive to him.... Initially, when no one came to retrieve the hard drive for 90 days, Mr. Costello said, the source examined the contents, believed they were troubling and then called the F.B.I. After the documents failed to emerge in the Trump impeachment hearings, the source grew agitated and began reaching out to lawmakers who failed to return his messages, Mr. Costello said. It’s unclear why it would take over nine months, however, for the person to reach Mr. Giuliani in September....
From the WaPo story:
The Washington Post was unable to verify the authenticity of the alleged emails and other correspondence that the New York Post published Wednesday and said had come from the younger Biden’s computer and hard drive. Neither Giuliani nor Bannon responded to multiple requests to review the hard drive and other materials for verification, nor did they respond to phone calls and emails on Wednesday seeking interviews. An attorney for Giuliani responded to an email on which he was copied to ask what outlet the reporter represented. There were no further replies....
This forefronts the possible fakeness, and next comes the idea that if it is true, it's not important:
The report Wednesday did not markedly advance what is already known about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, other than to suggest that at one point he gave Vadym Pozharskyi, a Ukrainian business colleague, “an opportunity” to meet his father....
Back to the potential fakeness:
Thomas Rid, author of “Active Measures,” a book about disinformation, said hacking, forging and leaking information selectively are among the most effective disinformation methods, and raised suspicions about the material the New York Post published. “Usually when emails are leaked, what investigators look for is the actual email file, and we don’t have that here,” Rid said, raising alarms that the emails do not include metadata, which can be used to verify the date, sender and recipient. When an email is presented without the metadata, he said, “then you become suspicious.”
We get background on the repair shop owner:
John Paul MacIsaac, who said he owns a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Del., told The Post on Wednesday that the laptop in question was one of three damaged computers brought to his shop in April 2019. Repairing it required an involved process, he said, so he continued working on it using the password the customer provided.
It's hard for me to believe that — if the computer contained the material the NY Post said it did — Hunter Biden would entrust it to what seems like a random computer shop. He gives this treasure trove, with the password, to the shop owner to futz around in? An argument in Biden's favor is that his son can't be that stupid.
[MacIsaac] said he determined the data could be moved to an external hard drive and asked the customer to return and provide a hard drive, which he said the customer did. MacIsaac, who described himself as legally blind, said that he was almost certain the customer was Hunter Biden.
That's just so convenient.
“I’m 99.9 percent sure it was him, but because of my visual impairments I’m not going to lie,” he said. “I can’t be 100 percent sure.”
Well, many people do have a hard time recognizing faces. I think I wouldn't be 100% sure I was looking at a particular celebrity if I didn't know him personally. How often have you seen someone and thought, hey, I think that might be _________? How many stories do you know about someone who is mistakenly recognized as a celebrity? Personally, I know my father was greeted as if he were Frank Sinatra, and I once had a restaurant dinner intruded on by an ecstatic woman who needed to hug my friend "Bruce Springsteen." All I'm saying is, it's normal — legal blindness or not — to fail to know if a person is or isn't a celebrity you don't personally know. It's possible that a fake drive was created and this legally blind computer repair person was selected to launder the fakeness into something that could be taken as true.
MacIsaac said that he made several attempts to get in touch with Hunter Biden, but that after the equipment was still in his hands 90 days later, he became curious. (MacIsaac said his standard contract gives him possession of a device after 90 days.)
Those facts fit a theory of fakery: MacIsaac was used.
MacIsaac said that he saw some of the contents, including what he described as multiple files, and contacted at least three members of Congress, whom he would not name. He also said that he contacted the FBI using an intermediary, whom he also would not name. He said the agents initially told him they didn’t want to take possession of the hard drive and instead made a copy of it, but returned later in the year with a subpoena to take it....
In late 2019, before he handed the equipment to the FBI, MacIsaac — who says he is fiscally conservative and socially liberal — made a copy of the contents of the hard drive. He grew frustrated that the contents of the laptop hadn’t become public, and over the summer he decided to contact Giuliani, who had been traveling to Ukraine and attempting to find compromising information about the Bidens. ...
I'm now convinced of the dubiousness of this material. Should it have been allowed to fly all around the world yesterday? The effort to stop it was damaging to the reputation of Twitter and Facebook and it didn't even work to stop the virality, since the suppression effort independently and strongly demanded attention.
The article ends with an appeal to the reader's empathy:
As recently as the Sept. 29 presidential debate, Trump ridiculed Hunter Biden, which led his father to make an emotional defense of his son that acknowledged his past drug addiction. “My son, like a lot of people at home, had a drug problem,” Biden said. “He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him, I’m proud of my son.” Biden has been adamant that he was unaware of his son’s business dealings and took no part in them, telling reporters in September 2019 that “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” He also pledged last year that his family would not engage in any foreign business activities if he is elected president.
Between Joe and Biden there's a fierce love and a reliable wedge — that's the feeling WaPo wants to leave us with.
My position: Cruel neutrality. What you see above are my genuine reactions as I read the 2 news articles in real time. Am I for Biden or Trump? No. I am abstaining in the 2020 election.
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