Yesterday, MSN presented to me over and over again a story about how the “liberal mainstream” media is finally acknowledging that Hunter Biden’s laptop is real. So I turned to Daily Kos to help me put this thing into perspective, to help me make some sense of it.
The only thing I could find was “Hal Sparks Expertly Destroys WaPo Story on Hunter's (presumed) Laptop” by essar1. Unfortunately, “destroys” is the wrong word here. No matter how much this idiocy gets debunked, it will continue to gain traction.
The video is almost two hours. After some housekeeping, Sparks reads a line of the Washington Post “analysis,” then pauses to let the stupidity of what he has just read sink in.
I’m going to take a similar approach here. After a quick recap of the laptop myth, I will go through the analysis line by line for as long as I can stand it. Then I’ll offer my own explanation.
Supposedly, in 2019, Hunter Biden, son of future President Joe Biden, dropped off a MacBook at a repair shop and never reclaimed it. Okay, so far, this sounds plausible. I wouldn’t leave a MacBook like that, but for Hunter Biden it might have been like forgetting an umbrella at the theater. You just buy a new one.
Then someone thought that the laptop might contain incriminating evidence that Hunter Biden did something or other corrupt in Ukraine. Okay, sure, could happen. So they copy the laptop’s hard drive over to a portable hard drive.
Now the Washington Post hired “experts” to review what is presumably the first copy of the laptop’s contents and concluded that the cryptographic signatures somehow prove some of the e-mails were sent from the laptop, but apparently these experts haven’t looked at the laptop itself first hand.
Of course that’s not how Fox News is reporting it. “Washington Post authenticated emails from Hunter's infamous laptop on Wednesday.” The Washington Post headline is hardly any better: “Here’s how The Post analyzed Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
Because “How The Post had two self-described experts analyze a copy of the hard drive purported to have come from Hunter Biden’s laptop” just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
If you have any free Washington Post articles left for the month, don’t waste them reading this Biden Hunter laptop hogwash. I read it on Stars & Stripes.
Thousands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son, are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures from Google and other technology companies, say two security experts who examined the data at the request of The Washington Post.
Ooh, cryptographic signatures. Can’t argue with those. Sounds like technobabble from Star Trek: Voyager. Might as well have thrown in “algorithms” for good measure.
The verifiable emails are a small fraction of 217 gigabytes of data provided to The Post on a portable hard drive by Republican activist Jack Maxey. He said the contents of the portable drive originated from Biden’s MacBook Pro, which Biden reportedly dropped off at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Del., in April 2019 and never reclaimed.
So… not the actual laptop itself.
The vast majority of the data - and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained - could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post. Neither found clear evidence of tampering in their examinations, but some of the records that might have helped verify contents were not available for analysis, they said.
How convenient. But don’t let that stop you from writing a sensationalist headline.
The Post was able in some instances to find documents from other sources that matched content on the laptop that the experts were not able to assess.
I wonder if “creating documents from scratch” counts as “finding documents from other sources.”
Among the reasons for the inconclusive findings was sloppy handling of the data, which damaged some records. The experts found the data had been repeatedly accessed and copied by people other than Biden over nearly three years.
And surely those other people wouldn’t take the opportunity to add manufactured incriminating evidence, would they? Perish the thought!
The MacBook itself is now in the hands of the FBI, which is investigating whether Biden properly reported income from business dealings.
Okay, that sounds bad, but why not put it in the headline? Why bury it so many paragraphs down? Because this hatchet job by Craig Timberg, Matt Viser and Tom Hamburger is not journalistic malpractice, it is a deliberate attempt to smear Hunter Biden with vague innuendoes and nebulous accusations.
The Washington Post’s forensic findings are unlikely to resolve that debate, offering instead only the limited revelation that some of the data on the portable drive appears to be authentic.
The “limited revelation that some of the data” on what might not even be a direct copy of Hunter Biden’s actual laptop “appears to be authentic.” See, we’re technically not lying!
Many of the nearly 22,000 verified emails were routine messages, such as political newsletters, fundraising appeals, hotel receipts, news alerts, product ads, real estate listings and notifications related to his daughters’ schools or sports teams.
What an evil criminal! Exhausted yet? I’m going to skip ahead a little.
The computer repairman who turned the laptop over to the FBI (complying with a subpoena) made several copies of the hard drive, in case he got thrown under the bus by Hunter Biden. Which is a reasonable precaution if Hunter Biden was really the evil boogeyman Fox “News” has made him out to be.
But if Hunter Biden knew the laptop had such incriminating evidence, why not destroy it himself Ted 2-style? Well, he wanted to recover some data, supposedly to continue his already profitable criminal schemes. But surely someone as well-connected as Hunter Biden would know a data recovery expert he could trust to act with discretion?
And here’s a very interesting tidbit that Fox won’t repeat:
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 Bannon for a copy of the data to review, but the requests were rebuffed or ignored.
So the “liberal mainstream” media wanted to run with this story in 2020, and would have been happy to if only someone had provided them the data. Now that they can run with this story, they’re being blamed for a failure of due diligence in 2020 that was not their fault.
The Republican who delivered the portable hard drive with the supposed direct copy from the laptop admitted that plenty of other people had accessed the files. After scrolling the article more than halfway down:
“The drive is a mess,” [Matt] Green[, a Johns Hopkins University security researcher who specializes in cryptography] said.
That seems a far cry from “authenticated.”
Neither expert reported finding evidence that individual emails or other files had been manipulated by hackers, but neither was able to rule out that possibility.
So maybe the “Hunter Biden laptop” really belonged to Hunter Biden at one point. But maybe it’s stolen rather than abandoned property. Some Republican operative stole the laptop and worked to plant incriminating evidence on it.
Sounds farfetched, doesn’t it? I think that it’s a much better explanation than that Hunter Biden would give such an incriminating device to someone he could not count on to keep his findings to himself.
Meanwhile, how’s the investigation into Matt Gaetz’s human trafficking going? Did Ivanka Trump tell the committee anything useful or did she just take the Fifth like innocent people always do?
If the laptop had any genuine evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, it would have been cracked wide open by now. All we have here is the appearance of wrongdoing milked for maximum effect.
Friday, Apr 8, 2022 · 6:08:26 PM +00:00
·
Alonso del Arte
Fox News is still at it with the Hunter Biden laptop myth. Despite all the caveats in the “analyses” of a portable hard drive with files supposedly copied from the actual laptop, “reporters” at Fox News continue to claim that the laptop has been “authenticated” by “liberal” newspapers.
On that basis, they want reporters at CNN and MSNBC to admit they were wrong about the laptop. Maybe some at CNN and MSNBC were slightly wrong about the laptop. Why should those reporters apologize? So that Fox can take the admission of a slight mistake as proof of being completely wrong? Hell no.
The Fox and Friends brought on some kid who confronted an Atlantic reporter for ignoring this “important” story. The reporter probably did not want to be perceived as bullying a child. That was probably the point of sending a boy to do a man's job. However the reporter responds, the Fox people are ready to scream.