I’ve seen some crazy things on Fox News, but this has got to be the most cray cray. It starts with Tucker Carlson complaining about the extensive redactions in the Mar-A-Lago Search Warrant affidavit and it just spirals out from there into pure nutty-butter land.
So significant portions of the affidavit are redacted in order to protect the identity of witnesses who certainly would be at physical risk if revealed, to protect grand jury developed information — which is the law -— and to protect the intimate details of the investigation while it is still ongoing so that potential targets can’t use that information to hide or destroy remaining evidence.
But not according to Tucker Carlson. According to him, the redactions are proof that Biden’s FBI is trying to hide their true motives — which are of course political — to undermine Trump’s ability to run in 2024. Even though the actual affidavit lays out a nearly air-tight case that the search warrant was the result of missing information detected by the national archives, and the location of 184 classified documents within the 15 boxes of information which were returned in January — none of that matters to Tucker. All that matters is the conspiracy against Trump.
And it’s a conspiracy that apparently started long before Joe Biden was even President.
Quickly after mentioning the affidavit Tucker pivots to his real subject: Hunter Biden.
Following a recent report, he proclaims that the FBI is “hiding things” in the affidavit because they’ve supposedly been hiding things for years about the corruption and crimes of Hunter Biden. He argues that Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted on Joe Rogan — why the fuck is he on Joe Rogan? — that the FBI has waved them off from reporting and distributing “a dump" of stories that were supposedly “Russian Disinformation" and somehow this led to Facebook downplaying the stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Yes, people, this is a thing. Most recently it's a story that's been repeated by Josh Hawley.
"So the FBI preemptively warned Facebook off Hunter Biden laptop reporting," Hawley tweeted along with a Fox News article on the story. "This same agency effectively laundered Russian disinfo in the 2016 election in the form of Steele dossier. And later lied to a court to get wiretaps."
But Hawley's framing of Zuckerberg's words is misleading. In his interview with Rogan, the Facebook founder said that the FBI came to his platform before the 2020 election with a general warning about an upcoming Russian propaganda campaign. At no point during the interview did Zuckerberg say that the FBI specifically mentioned news reports about Hunter Biden's laptop.
Maybe they downplayed it because it’s a dumb story reported by a legally blind computer repair guy who can’t confirm that the person who dropped off 3 laptops was Hunter Biden, and can't confirm that he later gave those laptops to the FBI under subpoena. Hunter's signature on the form doesn't match up, he can't produce a copy of the subpoena and he can't confirm that the various manual copies of the hard drive he created haven't been manipulated and modified after he finished his work on it.
And also 50 former intel experts have all said that the Hunter email story is Russian Disinformation.
More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
The letter, signed on Monday, centers around a batch of documents released by the New York Post last week that purport to tie the Democratic nominee to his son Hunter’s business dealings. Under the banner headline “Biden Secret E-mails,” the Post reported it was given a copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive by President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who said he got it from a Mac shop owner in Delaware who also alerted the FBI.
While the letter’s signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case” and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin’s hand at work.
“If we are right,” they added, “this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”
So the story told by Zuckerberg happens to basically dovetail with the letter signed by these Intel experts. This story was an attempt to smear Biden and his son and damage his chances in the 2020 election. And I mean, it’s not like Russia didn't do largely the same thing with emails from and to Hillary Clinton in 2016. It’s an MO. It’s a known tactic of theirs.
But Tucker says this is a lie. He doesn't have any proof of that. He doesn't have years and years of intel experience -he just says so.
It's questionable whether there was really a laptop — because the Mac IT guy is fracking Blind — but it's known that there are copies of the hard drive of something. Only the WaPo analysis of it said they couldn't confirm anything on it because it was a copy of a copy of a copy, and that the emails couldn't be confirmed because they didn't possess proper header and trailer information. All that they could confirm was the Spam emails that had travelled though Google. They couldn't confirm anything sent by Hunter, or received by Hunter.
The only “crime” they seem to be able to identify is apparently an email sent by one guy to another — neither of which is Hunter — that says “10% goes to the Big Guy.” Who is supposed to be Joe Biden.
So the crime is that Hunter shared some of his pay with his dad? Uh huh. How is that a crime? From what I've read Hunter does pay for upkeep at his dad’s home. It would only be a crime if Biden took the cash and failed to report it on his financial disclosure forms. Does anyone have any proof that he did that? I mean, unlike Trump’s taxes — Biden taxes and financial disclosures are on the web. It should be easy to prove — so why don't you?
Wonder why nobody has so far?
Hunter is actually a Yale Law School graduate who was working with David Bois law firm as Burisma’s attorney before they brought him on as a member of their board. He absolutely was qualified to do that job - which was to advice them on abiding by U.S. law considering their reputation and the allegations of corruption and self-dealing — which were NOT investigated -- by their founder.
It's not like we didn’t see — with our own eyes — Russian-friendly Ukrainians leading Rudy Giuliani around by the nose chasing Hunter Biden scandals. There was Dmytro Firtash — who is a fugitive from U.S. law — who told him the wives tale that Biden had pushed to fire a prosecutor for trying to investigate Burisma, the Ukrainian company that had Hunter on their board. Except that story is nonsense and Firtash had long been an asset of the Kremlin.
It was Firtash who was leading Rudy around by the nose chasing after Hunter Biden and Burisma. He was taking advice on corruption issues from a guy wanted on corruption charges in the U.S. This of course led to Trump’s infamous phone call with Zelensky where he asked him to "do us a favor” of announcing a fake investigation into Hunter and Burisma which would lead nowhere because the prosecutor that his father had ousted hadn’t been investigating Burisma for possible corruption. Instead, he had been sitting on his hands, and that's why the US, EU and IMF wanted him replaced in the first place. He wasn’t removed because he was a threat to Hunter and Burisma, he was removed because he wasn't doing his job.
And still, Tucker is skeptical that Russia has something to do with this? Russia has everything to do with this.
Here, Lev Parnas — who has been convicted for fraud — describes how he acted as a go between for Giuliani and Firtash in their scheme to frame Hunter Biden.
All of this is why Trump was originally impeached, it was this attempted plot to derail the Bidens candidacy with these smears.
But Tucker, not surprisingly, ignores all this, and calls the links between Russia and the Hunter smears “a lie" and then reverses the script and says that the FBI — which was still under the control of Trump at the time — plotted with Facebook to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story — and THAT is what disrupted the 2020 election results.
Really, man?
And apparently, the FBI serving a search warrant on Mar-A-Lago because he stole 180 pages of classified documents from the White House — is all the same thing. Even though neither Joe Biden or Donald Trump happens to be on any ballot anywhere right now.
This is their play. Despite how I've extensively detailed the
many times the FBI threw their own cases under the bus for Trump's benefit they argue: That Donald Trump's FBI with Chris Wray in charge and with BIll Barr as head of the DOJ helped STEAL the 2020 election away from Trump by blocking a report about Hunter Biden's laptop from being shared on Facebook. Because that would have been a decisive issue right in the middle of Trump blowing the Covid response. Why that's almost as hard to believe as Russia using troll farms to flood Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to reach 180 Million Americans with disinformation about Hillary Clinton and her emails in order to depress the turnout for her in 2016 and cause her to lose by just 70,000 votes.
Right, something like that could never happen. I mean, which scenario is really more likely?
And we should pay no attention to the affidavit burning right under Trump's nose.