Month: March 2022

This observation by the Intercept’s Robert Mackay is very important.

Russia lied about documents stolen from Ukrainian labs doing public health research, by calling them proof of secret bioweapons lab. What makes this disinformation is an orchestrated campaign to spread lies and innuendo about what’s in authentic documents

In 2016, the FBI review of emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop from his wife’s boss, Hillary Clinton, revealed zero evidence of crimes by Clinton, but it created the perception of criminality, stoked by Trump’s lies about what was on the laptop

“Pizzagate” was essentially a desperate (and wildly successful) effort to spread disinformation by lying that authentic but innocuous emails stolen from the Clinton campaign were secretly coded evidence of an imaginary child sex trafficking ring

In 2020, Trump supporters like Giuliani sought to create the impression of criminality by Joe Biden, first by seeking to force Zelensky to announce an investigation and then with lurid rumors about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Does the laptop prove criminality or not is what matters.

And we know that creating the appearance of criminality by one or both Bidens was the focus Trump’s pressure on Zelensky, because the demand was for him to deliver lines on CNN prepared for him by two US diplomats acting on orders from Trump and Giuliani

Originally tweeted by Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) on March 21, 2022.

This is not some organic phenomenon. It crops up from the fever swamps and from foreign agents but cynical political actors are the one’s exploiting it. And I think you know who I’m talking about.

Trevor Noah says it all:

I’m actually pretty shocked by the Fox news editorial line over this stuff. It’s one thing to be critical of “Biden’s handling” of the crisis. That’s totally expected for a partisan outfit. But criticizing the country that has been invaded for having Nazis in its population when Russia is a powerful dictatorship and has these guys:

or the US has these guys, for that matter:

The rise of the global far right, in all its permutations, in the last few years has been well documented. But when it comes to repressive, authoritarian nationalism, there are a few stand-outs and Ukraine isn’t one of them. Russia, on the other hand, is at the top of the list.

The pro-Putin faction in America is pretty slick. They are always “just asking questions” and giving “both sides” of the story, but needless to say, the emphasis and narrative tells the story they want to tell, even if they leave themselves an out when confronted with what they are doing.

Ukraine has a colorful fringe group of Nazis, it does, and they are good at getting attention. But they are not running anything in Ukraine, whether government or miilitary. There’s always a chance that Ukraine could go authoritarian when all is said and done. War opens up all kinds of opportunities for violent fascists. But Ukraine is not a fascist country at the moment which should be obvious.

And ask yourself why these Russia apologists would be upset about fascism all of a sudden when they love the Hungarian authoritarian leader Viktor Orban and seem to have nothing bad to say about Vladimir Putin.

This group is very confused. And that is being used very efficiently by Russian propaganda.

I thought I would share this short review of Timothy Snyder’s book of that name from Jamie Mayerfield:

If you want to understand Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I strongly recommend Timothy Snyder’s 2018 book “The Road to Unfreedom,” which I recently finished rereading. The Russia-Ukraine conflict is the book’s main topic, with a focus on the sources and motives of Putin’s behavior. Snyder’s prescient analysis makes powerful sense of what is happening now.

The book’s main theme is a warning against the “politics of eternity” on the one hand and “the politics of inevitability” on the other. The former constructs an innocent nation eternally victimized by eternal enemies. The latter holds up a simplistic formula, such as free markets, that is thought to set nations on a path of unstoppable progress, with no need of moral agency. (You can think of this as Snyder’s critique of neoliberalism.)The politics of eternity perfectly describes the Russian imperialist thought that has guided Putin and his advisors. Snyder spotlights the role of Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), the avowed Russian fascist quoted and venerated by Putin. The Russian imperialists are obsessed with Ukraine, and cannot bear the thought of it leading an existence apart from Russia.

A key turning point was 2011-12, when Putin used fraud to win presidential and parliamentary elections and was faced with widespread democratic protests. He responded by increasing domestic repression while ramping up imperialist discourse and figuring the West as Russia’s implacable enemy.Snyder argues that Putin saw the subversion of Western democracy and the European Union as necessary for his domestic political project. Snyder gives us the essential concept of “schizo-fascism” to describe the practice of actual fascists calling their opponents fascist. He provides many examples.

Turning to Europe, Snyder punctures “the fable of the wise nation,” a false history of self-contained nation states learning from experience to renounce war. In actual history, these were former imperial powers that could survive in a post-imperialist age only by means of regional integration.

Snyder reminds us that for decades the Russian government has been built on a foundation of slick propaganda and media manipulation. He dissects the false framing that Russia successfully exported to the rest of the world regarding Ukraine.

He is unsparing in his criticism of the right-wing and left-wing pundits – including Seumas Milne, John Pilger, Stephen Cohen, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Lyndon LaRouche, and Ron Paul – who spread Kremlin propaganda. He writes: “Those who spoke so freely of conspiracies, coups, juntas, camps, fascists, and genocides shied from contact with the real world. From a distance, they used their talents to drown a country in unreality.”In 2013-14, ordinary Ukrainians came together in large numbers to defend their freedoms. At an immense cost they succeeded in bringing about a democratic revolution. But Westerners circulating Kremlin propaganda erased their achievement by casting the event as a Western-backed Nazi coup.

Snyder writes: “The Maidan began as Ukrainian citizens sought to find a solution for Ukrainian problems. It ended with Ukrainians trying to remind Europeans and Americans that moments of high emotion require sober thought. Distant observers jumped at the shadows of the story, only to tumble into a void darker than ignorance.”

He continues: “It was tempting, amidst the whirl of Russian accusations in 2014, to make some kind of compromise, as many Europeans and Americans did, and accept the Russian claim that the Maidan was a ‘right-wing coup.’”The last chapter is an indictment of inequality in the United States. Snyder understands the Trump phenomenon as the product of the politics of inevitability leaving a desolate social landscape that creates the conditions for a politics of eternity (Make American Great Again). He reminds us of the close ties between Trump and Putin-backed oligarchs in Russia.

Snyder emphasizes the danger of lies and propaganda, so blithely encouraged by the Republican Party. “Many Americans did not see the difference between someone who constantly lied and never apologized and someone who almost never did and corrected his or her mistakes. They were accepting the description of the world offered by Surkov and RT: no one really ever tells the truth, perhaps there is no truth, so let us simply repeat the things we like to hear, and obey those who say them. That way lies authoritarianism. Trump adopted the Russian double standard: he was permitted to lie all the time, but any minor error by a journalist discredited the entire profession of journalism.”

The book is very informative, so you will learn crucial factual background to current events. It is also theoretical rich. I think that scholars in my own subdiscipline of political theory can learn by studying and engaging with Snyder’s ideas.

I am anything but an expert on this subject but I have read a lot of Timothy Snyder (not this one, yet) and I find him to be very persuasive. I am confident that whatever he has to say on this subject is worth reading.

When people will do anything to make money, no matter how unproductive, like using money to make money from money for the masterbatory purpose of making even more money, we’ve really disappeared down the behavioral sink.

Michael Lewis once described the blowback he received from Wall Street over “Flash Boys.” The book describes men who exploit computers and super-fast internet connections (high frequency traders, HFT) to make millions off stock trades. It works not unlike the way The Sting‘s Henry Gondorff and Johnny Hooker used delay the delay of “the wire” to con Doyle Lonnegan. They cheat.

Lewis explained that “anyone in an established industry who stands up and says ‘The way things are being done here is totally insane; here is why it is insane; and here is a better way to do them’ is bound to incur the wrath of established insiders, who now stand accused of creating the insanity.”

Like bitcoin mining. US News explains it for those interested. Frankly, it’s not worth my time. But in East Tennessee about 40 miles north, it’s become an immediate nuisance (Washington Post):

LIMESTONE, Tenn. — It started as a low hum one day last spring. Then it got louder, and soon some residents said the noise was like a jet engine idling on a nearby tarmac.

The unincorporated clutch of homes and churches at the base of the Appalachian Mountains offers expansive vistas of lush farmland, thick woods and towering ridges in all directions. Neighbors know one another. Most residents have family bonds spanning generations or moved to this tranquil patch to escape city noise.

Instead, the noise came to them in April last year when the Tennessee-based firm Red Dog Technologies opened a plant in Limestone to mine (or create) new bitcoin, the original and still-largest cryptocurrency.

The process relies on massive computers performing complex calculations — all while kept at a constant temperature by equally massive cooling fans — and that can get noisy.

The Limestone mine operates day and night, growing louder at night and on weekends when bitcoin’s electricity-hungry computers can take advantage of down time and lower prices on the electricity grid and ramp up their algorithmic-solving power.

And the social benefit is what? Keeping neighbors awake at night? Limestone has only buyer’s remorse. The county has sued Red Dog.

Kent Harris, a Washington County commissioner, looks back on his vote authorizing the Limestone crypto mining operation and shakes his head.

“It looks like a German POW camp,” Harris said of the bitcoin mine, which is surrounded by barriers, cameras and fencing topped with razor wire.

Forget the sounds of birds chirping and creeks (branches) babbling that people in rural areas cherish. There’s funny money to be made. In Cherokee County, N.C. in an abandoned factory in Marble about 80 miles east, there’s another bitcoing mining operation:

Phoebe Thompson, a Bowdoin College environmental and oceanic sciencesgraduate, moved to the adjacent town of Murphy two years ago. Her family founded the publication Bird Watcher’s Digest and are active environmentally. She laments the damage to the area’s wildlife and peaceful character.

“I grew up where I heard birds, insects, frogs; the quiet here was a huge draw for me,” Thompson said. She said the quiet has been smothered by the whir of the mine and created an “ecological dead zone” that disorients wildlife.

[…]

“The mine operator said this mine was in the middle of nowhere, but to us, it is not the middle of nowhere; it is our home,” Harris said.

Tough. You snooze (or don’t snooze), you lose.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

People are dropping their masks in the Cesspool of Sin. The Covid positivity rate here has dropped below 5%. Hospitalizations and ICU utilization remain low. About half the customers wore masks at the grocery store on Saturday. (A week earlier, I didn’t see if the local stopped trying to enter Trader Joe’s with his seeing-eye miniature horse* wore one, or his horse.)

But just when you thought it was safe to go back into the brew pub, another Omicron variant is headed around. It’s been about six months since the last boosters. A knowledgable friend (a.k.a DocDawg) is looking for another:

April was too late for this gentleman:

Jeff Wise writes at New York magazine:

Omicron BA.2 is similar to the variant that caused this winter’s spike, BA.1. But it has 20 different mutations, four of them on a crucial region of the spike protein. These disparities are likely part of the reason BA.2 appears to be considerably more transmissible than the original Omicron — 33 percent, according to one Danish study. BA.2 is also thought to infect vaccinated people more easily than its forebear, though, fortunately, it does not appear to be any deadlier. First detected in the Philippines in November, the variant spread widely in South Africa and India in December and has since become the dominant strain around the world.

As unworldly as it seem out there lately, the U.S. is still part of it. It will show up in your town.

A couple of epidemiologists Wise cites urge calm. The new variant is not that much changed and the old vaccines still protect against it. B…u…t CDC wastewater monitoring has picked up an increase in SARS-CoV-2 RNA at a quarter of its sites over the last 15 days, an early indicator another rise in cases is coming:

If U.S. cases follow Europe’s trend, what lies in store for us might well be worse than for them. U.S. vaccination and booster rates are significantly lower than most European countries. No more than two-thirds of eligible Americans have been fully vaccinated, and about half of the Americans eligible for a booster shot still haven’t gotten one, including a third of seniors. America’s relatively low vaccination rates probably explain why the first Omicron wave hit much harder here than it did in Europe. During the peak of that wave, the U.S. suffered ten times as many COVID deaths as Germany, despite having only four times as many people.

Don’t toss the N95s just yet.

Fourth shots may finally be on the way as well. Just this week, both Pfizer and Moderna announced they were seeking emergency FDA authorization for a second booster shot.

It may be time to go shopping for one.

* That’s how the TJ’s staffer described the encounter to another shopper.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

I’ve written quite a bit about the Independent Legislature Theory over the past year or so and it really does look like it’s going to be seriously contemplated by the Supreme Court. This is a pretty good explainer on what that might mean:

Legal experts and voting rights advocates warn the independent state legislature doctrine could radically alter election administration across the country, and siphon power away from courts and toward the legislatures that write election law. That would leave partisan politicians, rather than independent administrators, overseeing elections — possibly even overturning results they don’t like.

Constitutional scholars have widely panned the theory, arguing that it advances an inaccurate interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and pointing out that it has never been embraced in past rulings. State courts, they contend, have long been able to act as a check on the state legislatures, ensuring lawmakers follow the spirit of the state’s constitution.

“The legislature is created by the state constitution, so it must be limited by it,” said Carolyn Shapiro, a professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. “The notion that [lawmakers] are freestanding entities to do anything they want in this context is inconsistent with constitutional democracy.”

If U.S. Supreme Court justices were to legitimize the theory in a ruling, the move would transform the way elections are governed, virtually giving state legislatures a blank slate to set voting rules and to draw congressional maps, said Joshua Douglas, professor at the J. David Rosenberg College of Law at the University of Kentucky.

“It’s concerning for our concept of representation,” he said. “It means that those who are most self-interested in retaining their positions also have the most power now in dictating the rules of the game.”

This is where it’s heading:

The Pennsylvania lawsuit pits a group of Republicans, including a county commissioner who helps oversee local elections, against Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and his administration. The GOP group is represented by Jonathan F. Mitchell, the lawyer behind a six-week abortion ban in Texas that is enforced by private citizens. The U.S. Supreme Court has so far allowed that law to stay in place.

The justices declined to hear the Pennsylvania Republicans’ emergency map petition on technical grounds. The case was assigned to a three-judge federal court panel.

At issue is a citizen-submitted congressional map picked by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in February following months of debate and an impasse between the Republican-led legislature and Wolf, who vetoed a GOP-passed proposal because of its partisan bias.

Citing the independent state legislature doctrine and population differences among districts, the Pennsylvania plaintiffs filed an emergency application asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reject the map and instead implement at-large elections — which would let all of a state’s voters cast ballots for each seat — for the 2022 midterm elections.

Attorneys for the Wolf administration argue that at-large congressional elections are illegal under federal law and that courts are obligated to redraw maps when the state legislatures fail to do so. The lawyers cite a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a similar case in Mississippi, in which the legislature failed to pass a new map and a federal district court adopted one.

In 1967, Congress passed a law that banned at-large congressional elections following a series of election changes that included the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“The problem with [at-large congressional elections] is that it violates federal law,” said Bertrall Ross, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law who studies constitutional law. “I don’t see how that remedy can be adopted.”

For that reason, he said, it’s unclear what would happen if the U.S. Supreme Court removed state courts from the redistricting process and a governor and legislature reached an impasse on a map.

At the request of the Wolf administration and the citizen group that proposed the map selected by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, the federal district court recently dismissed much of the suit — including the claims citing the doctrine. The Republican plaintiffs lacked standing, the court found.

In North Carolina, the state’s high court earlier this year ruled the congressional map picked by the GOP-led legislature was gerrymandered. A superior court in Raleigh adopted a new map, and the state Supreme Court refused to block it.

The North Carolina Republican lawsuit argues that the state court’s actions were unconstitutional and, under the doctrine, only Congress has oversight over state election rules.

The group filed an emergency application asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the map. The court rejected that request, but four justices appeared open to considering a formal appeal next year — enough to potentially secure the case’s place on the calendar.

It’s a big roll of the dice for the Supreme Court to hear this case. Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch are ready to go. Kavanaugh didn’t go with it this time but indicated that he was open to it. All they need is Barrett or Roberts and we will have taken a giant leap into the abyss.

Yeah:

Here’s a little primer on Peter Thiel, the vampiric Big Tech fascist who is making his presence felt in the fascist GOP. Tim Miller’s “Not My Party” is the most enjoyable way to learn about such creepy phenomenons.

Except for missing “compassionate conservatism”, which I don’t, I agree with everything in this thing. There have always been very wealthy wingnuts backing the Republican Party and they’ve often very fringe. But this guy is something else.

Seriously, he is just so incredibly dumb:

Donald Trump claimed that there is “a lot of love” behind Russian President Vladimir Putin’s devastating invasion of Ukraine, which has already resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties. 

The former president’s bizarre remarks came during a Sunday radio interview with Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, who asked Trump about the deadly incursion. 

“He’s got a big ego,” Trump said of Putin. “Again, I know him very well … I understand he’s gotten rid of a lot of his generals.” 

Trump also speculated that the Russian president felt “cornered,” suggesting that Putin might commit “unspeakable” acts of warfare if the invasion doesn’t go his way. 

Later in the segment, the former president argued that Putin is on a conquest to restore the Soviet Union. 

“You say, what’s the purpose of this? They had a country,” Trump explained. “You could see it was a country where there was a lot of love and we’re doing it because, you know, somebody wants to make his country larger or he wants to put it back the way it was when actually it didn’t work very well.”

WTF does that even mean? And why is this man in politics?

I will never get over the fact that tens of millions of people and the entire Republican establishment think this cretinous moron was a good president and should be president again. It makes me feel crazy. It’s like a recurring bad dream.

I don’t even want to talk about this latest so-called “revelation” by the NY Times that the Hunter Biden laptop is real (which we already knew, fergawdsakes) because it’s such a classic right wing smear job: incomprehensible, irrelevant and dumb. Those of you who remember Whitewater know what I’m talking about. This one featured lewd pictures of Hunter Biden during his drug using years which was what they really wanted to get out in order to make Joe cry like Edmund Muskie.

Anyway, I think Adam Davidson of the New Yorker, who did stellar work on the Trump Organization’s ccriminal behavior, says it all:

In 2018, I went pretty deep into the Burisma hole.

I felt that, since I was reporting so much on Trump’s international corruption, I should give serious look into Hunter Biden.

But the story just wasn’t there.

It’s definitely lame that the children of politicians can get lucrative gigs off their last names.

I wish that didn’t happen.

But it was absurd to compare Hunter/Burisma to any one of the Trump deals I covered.

Now, I think I–and my editors–would have written as much as we could if we found that Hunter Biden did something illegal, bad, etc.

But we didn’t.

So, we used our news judgment to not write about this nothing issue.

To be clear: I hate the way politicians use their positions to make money. I think it’s really bad that Obama and Clinton became wildly rich after leaving office.

And I really hate the nepotistic aspect.

BUT, there is no comparison to the Trump Org.

I don’t care what the Manhattan DA says, the Trump Org’s core business model since 2009 has been working closely with money-laundering oligarchs to facilitate their money-laundering.

There is zero comparison between that activity, which actively undermines the US …

and hurts the victims of corruption in other countries.

On a scale of 1 to 100, Hunter Biden is, I dunno, a 20? It’s pretty lame to get sweetheart deals on your dad’s name, but also very, very common.

The Trump Org is a profound outlier among US companies.

I’d say a 95 on that 1 to 100 scale.

They KNOWINGLY participated in and helped a money laundering operation that was almost-certainly for Iran’s National Guard’s WMD efforts.

Alright, I’m bumping that 95 up to a full 100.

Hunter Biden’s laptop has gotten, roughly, infinitely more coverage than Trump’s actual work for an actual enemy power of the US.

What the fucking fuck?

Originally tweeted by Adam Davidson (@adamdavidson) on March 19, 2022.

I am publishing the story by the Washington Post’s Philip Bump that Emptywheel references in the tweet above in case you want to know the whole story:

When the New York Post reported on Oct. 14, 2020, that it was in possession of emails between a Ukrainian businessman and Hunter Biden, son of the then-Democratic presidential nominee, it would have been hard to predict what followed. This was less than three weeks before the election itself, and the content of the report was soon subsumed to the odd way in which the paper obtained the information. Mainstream outlets and social media companies balked at elevating the story’s claims, triggering frustrations on the right that remain to this day.

New reporting has re-elevated questions about how the story emerged and was handled. In light of that resurrection, it seems useful to articulate exactly why there was suspicion about the story’s origins — suspicion that itself has not entirely been resolved.

There are at least four questions that arose from the initial report. Those are:

-How did the information published by the New York Post purportedly get from Hunter Biden to the paper?

-Was that information legitimate?

-Was the media’s skepticism about the chain of custody and the information warranted?

-Was the social media blackout of the Post’s story warranted?

In this article, we’ll only look at the overlap of the first and third questions: Was the sourcing for information sufficiently dubious to justify caution by mainstream outlets? The answer, it seems clear, is yes.

You’ll remember the story. Hunter Biden allegedly showed up at a computer repair shop with three water-damaged laptop computers. According to John Paul Mac Isaac, the proprietor of that shop, one of the three computers was beyond repair, one simply needed an external keyboard and one required data recovery. Mac Isaac recovered the data, but no one ever came to pick the machine up. Eventually the data from the computer made its way to Rudolph W. Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal attorney. It was Giuliani that gave it to the Post.

That summary excludes a lot of detail, some known at the time the Post story broke, some that only emerged afterward. Here, in the form of a timeline, is detail that seems salient to our current consideration of how the Post got the material from the laptop as well as what was known at the time.Advertisement

The 2016 election. It’s critical to remember what happened in the 2016 election cycle. Then WikiLeaks published two large clusters of documents stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee’s network and from John Podesta, a top aide to the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. The Podesta material in particular was released in tranches for days beginning Oct. 7, 2016. It was real information, understood even then to have been a product of Russian efforts, that became fodder for criticism of Clinton.

After the election, we learned the full scope of Russia’s involvement in the election. Suddenly, the coverage of the WikiLeaks material took on a new light: It was stolen by a foreign government to try to influence U.S. politics. Media companies reconsidered their coverage; should there have been more caution about playing into the hands of a foreign influence campaign?

This question was very much on people’s minds in the months before the 2020 election — particularly given indications that Russia was again hoping to aid Trump’s election.Advertisement

The 2019 impeachment. The other overlapping factor coloring the release of the Post story was the investigation into Trump’s effort to leverage Ukrainian aid to damage Biden the previous year.

Giuliani was central to that effort. In late 2018, he began exploring the idea that Biden, as vice president several years before, had improperly tried to influence Ukraine to block an investigation of Burisma, a company for which Hunter Biden served as a board member. This story, promoted by an investigator targeted for termination by the U.S. government, was later debunked, but it seemed a promising line of attack. On April 1, 2019, a writer linked to Giuliani named John Solomon wrote the first of several stories about the allegations.

On April 12, the laptops were dropped off at Mac Isaac’s repair shop. Mac Isaac is legally blind and was not able to identify Hunter Biden by sight. One of the laptops, though, bore a sticker for the Beau Biden Foundation, an organization dedicated to Hunter’s late brother.Advertisement

At some point in the middle of this month, Hunter Biden left Burisma’s board. Presumably he was by that point aware that questions were being asked about his role. If not, it became very clear on May 1, when the Times elevated the Burisma question in its coverage.

In the meantime, Volodymyr Zelensky had been elected president of Ukraine, and efforts to pressure him to announce an investigation into Biden began. In early May 2019, Giuliani planned a trip to Ukraine to dig up information that might damage Biden — a plan that was covered in the press. After broad outcry, he scrapped the trip. But the signal was sent: Giuliani was seeking information deleterious to Biden.

Later that month, someone in Kyiv was approached about buying Hunter Biden’s emails. This was not reported until Oct. 21, 2020, a week after the Post’s story about the laptop.

“The two people who said they were approached with Hunter Biden’s alleged emails last year did not know whether any of them were real and they declined to identify who was behind the offers,” Time’s Simon Shuster wrote. “ … The two people said they could not confirm whether any of the material presented to them was the same as that which has been recently published in the U.S.” At least one, though, said the material in the Post was “familiar-looking.”

It’s not clear what this was or what the source was. It could have been from Biden’s business partners in Ukraine. It could have been from a hack of Biden’s account; his primary email address was an Apple iCloud account, meaning that emails and photos probably sat online where hackers might be able to access them. In mid-September 2019, the other person who spoke with Shuster was offered similar material.

When the Post first reported on its possession of material from Hunter Biden’s laptop, it shared a PDF of an email included in that material. That PDF carried metadata indicating that it was created on Oct. 10, 2019, meaning that either it was created on a machine that had the wrong date set or that it was created after the laptop came into Mac Isaac’s possession.Advertisement

It’s possible that Mac Isaac himself created the PDF, as the beginning of the impeachment investigation into Trump for his interactions with Ukraine had begun the previous month. Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender reported in his book “Frankly, We Did Win This Election” that Mac Isaac, hearing Hunter Biden come up as part of the impeachment investigation, asked his father for advice on the laptop. Eventually, a connection was made to the FBI and, on Dec. 9, the FBI appeared with a subpoena for the laptop and for a hard drive. It’s not clear what was on that hard drive, though it may have been a backup made by Mac Isaac.

At the time, incidentally, Giuliani was in Ukraine looking to dig up dirt disparaging Joe Biden. That included meeting with a member of the Ukrainian parliament who was later sanctioned by the Treasury Department as a Russian agent.

In spring 2020, Joe Biden secured the Democratic presidential nomination.Advertisement

At some point, Giuliani came into possession of the material from the laptop. The Daily Mail reported in December 2020 that the material was turned over to Giuliani’s lawyer no later than May of that year. According to Bender’s conversation with the lawyer, Robert Costello, that didn’t happen until August — purely by chance.

“In August 2020 — on a whim, as Costello described it to me — he asked Giuliani’s assistant to keep an eye out for any strange political tips coming into the email boxes for Giuliani’s various companies. Costello had a couple of dozen emails within a few days, including one from J.P. Mac Isaac,” Bender wrote.

We do know that by September 2020, Stephen K. Bannon, another ally of Trump’s, was bragging about having it. On Sept. 28, he gave an interview with a Dutch television network hyping his possession of the laptop.

There were already strange rumblings about Hunter Biden at the time. Earlier that same month, someone was passing around a lengthy dossier of allegations about Hunter Biden’s business dealings with China, created by a nonexistent entity. That document was shared, among others, by an employee of the Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui.Advertisement

Guo is also the owner of the boat on which Bannon had been arrested for fraud in August 2020. After the Post report on Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Daily Beast uncovered claims promoted by outlets linked to Guo focused on a Hunter Biden laptop.

“3 hard disk drives of videos and dossiers of Hunter Biden’s connections with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have been sent to Nancy Pelosi and DOJ,” one tweet read. “Big money and sex scandal!” That was published Sept. 28, the same day as Bannon’s interview with Dutch TV. Similar allegations had been made days before.

The first time the Post saw the material was on Oct. 4. By Oct. 11, Giuliani had handed over the entire duplicated contents of the hard drive and the newspaper began debating how to handle it.

The Times would later report that this was contentious even at the conservative publication. Fox News had already passed on it, apparently in part because of the questions about provenance. A number of Post employees questioned whether the paper had done enough to vet the material. Speaking to the Times, Giuliani insisted that this was exactly why the Post was given all of it: “either nobody else would take it,” he said, “or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.”

After the story came out, the Post didn’t share the material with other outlets for them to do their own investigations. In other words, coverage necessarily depended on taking the Post’s word for things, which is by itself a disincentive for other outlets.

After the story published Oct. 14, media outlets tried to assess its credibility, without luck. Mac Isaac gave a lengthy, odd interview to reporters that same afternoon in which he repeatedly gave evasive answers and appeared to change his explanations for how he knew whose laptop it was and how it got to the FBI. In the days that followed, the Time and Daily Beast reports reinforced questions about how the material was obtained and how it was being used explicitly to aid Trump’s campaign.

Even today, the full story isn’t clear. Is the story straightforward — Mac Isaac obtained a laptop, thought it might be relevant to national politics and then found only one taker, Giuliani, for the material? Was the material reportedly circulating in Ukraine the same stuff? Nonexistent? Obtained from an iCloud hack independently? Did Guo learn about the laptop from Bannon, with mentions of the material in September following from there? It is of course always easy to ask infinite questions when you’re skeptical, but that the answers to this aren’t known now reinforces the reasons for skepticism 18 months ago.

The reticence to aid possible Russian interference probably had one unintended effect: It made the contents of the drive itself as reported by the Post seem more important than it would likely have been considered otherwise. But that is a subject for a different article.

It’s such a classic ratfuck. And the echoes of the whole Anthony Weiner laptop brouhaha in the last weeks of the 2016 election were just too good to be true.

I agree with Davidson that the trading on the family name aspect of this business is gross. But there is zero evidence that Joe Biden did anything untoward — in fact, the administration took actions that would have hurt Hunter’s business, which Biden expressed publicly. But that never matters in these stories. It’s just about smears and lewd innuendo.

The chutzpah of these right wing asshole pushing this (and the press now running with it) in light of the criminal Donald Trump and his disgusting spawn running all over the world literally selling access to the US president for money — in broad daylight for 4 long years! — is just too much. They need to stop.