Making sense of Hunter Biden’s Laptop from Hell.
Making sense of Hunter Biden’s Laptop
from Hell.
This is a scandal that isn’t going
away, but will likely not to go anywhere either. It has become hopelessly
complex in part because it's driven by the contradictory evidence, but mostly
because it has become a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy for a hyper-partisan clique
that is quite fond of dissembling. Many refuse to believe there’s anything to
this story at all because they are prejudiced by the lies told by those insisting
this is the be-all-and-all-of-everything, which it clearly is not.
Let’s start with the easy part, Hunter
Biden is an asshole. He’s got substance abuse problems, zipper problems, was
repeatedly over-paid for jobs he was unqualified for because of his last name,
at least three of his business partnerships ended in scandal, and he’s under
serious scrutiny by the IRS – though the IRS is trying to keep mum about the contents
of the investigation, I’m willing to bet even-money it ends in his indictment
for fraud. His scandals entered the public eye in 2013 when his cocaine
addiction ended his very short Naval career, and that was while his father, Joe,
was Vice-President of the United States. The fact that he’s still messing up is
life badly was evidenced in 2019 when there was a publicly reported drug intervention by
his loved ones, a paternity suit, and a couple of wrecked relationships and a
marriage that materialized with eye-brow-raising speed. Also, that year, Joe was
running for President.
The hard part of this story is that
there is a vital need for some to prove that Hunter’s corruption is proof of
corruption by Joe. What Hunter/Joe’s opponents need to prove, and have repeatedly,
embarrassingly, failed to prove, are the three following things, and it is
important to understand that they need all three, not only one or two, ALL
THREE!
11.)
That Hunter’s
business associations are founded largely on his partners’ wish for an
advantageous relationship with Joe. (I think we can all agree that’s been proven.)
22.)
That Hunter is
willing to sell access to, and/or engage in improper back-channel dealings
with, Joe, for the benefit of those associates. (I think we all believe Hunter
is willing, but the proof of this has proven to be a swamp of incoherencies.)
33.)
That Joe is
equally willing to engage in the same improperness. (Despite what many claim,
there’s no proof of this third, and that is the most important piece of the
puzzle.)
To explain this scandal, I need to remind
you of a similar one that neither man was involved in; the one concerning Billy Carter and his brother, then-President Jimmy Carter. Billy was also an
asshole. He had substance abuse problems (drank too much, but coke like Hunter), but maybe not zipper problems, he was
repeatedly over-paid for jobs he was unqualified for because of his last name, and
most of his business partnerships ended in embarrassment, and there were
scandals too, just not as many. I’m not aware of Billy having any major IRS
problems, but he did act as an agent for a terrorist-sponsoring foreign
government while his brother was President (his agency was technically legal,
but shockingly unethical). This humiliated Jimmy, who was then investigated
because of Billy’s chumminess with a dictator, but by all appearances Jimmy was
not guilty of any wrongdoing. What Billy appeared to be doing, improperly implying
he could sell access to Jimmy, was really selling a product he didn’t have in
stock.
If I wished, I could also make comparisons
between Hunter/Joe scandals to the dubious foreign business deals that the
Trump children and in-laws engaged in while Donald Trump was President and some
of his family were members of his cabinet, but I’m trying to be a little-less
partisan than usual. I must say though, that because partisanship is at the
core of why this scandal is such an incoherent morass, that we need to remember that
those who want to hang Hunter/Joe are often the same people who made excuses
for Donald, Ivanka, Donald Jr, etc. The dishonesty of this scandal’s advocates
should have no bearing on an objective assessment of Joe’s guilt or innocence,
but it does, because it has managed to make everything that actually happened as
clear as mud.
The heart of the current scandal
concerns the firing of a man whose name seems to have been lost in the morass,
Ukrainian Prosecutor
General Viktor Shokin. The USA and EU
were disgusted by Shokin because he was refusing to investigate/indict the most
powerful criminals in his country. Ukraine was an ally of the USA and EU that
was being threatened by Russia because Russia believed that Ukraine’s growing
ties to USA and EU were a threat to itself. The disfunction and corruption of
Ukraine’s government was a major embarrassment/obstacle to USA and EU efforts
to curb Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military adventurism/expansionism in
Ukraine and elsewhere. Back in 2015, then-Vice-President Joe had been tasked by
then-President Barack Obama with the get-tough-on-Ukraine policy and Joe later bragged
about facilitating Shokin’s termination.
One year prior to Shokin termination, Hunter was tasked by his employer, the law firm Boies, Schiller, & Flexner, to join the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian company that was a subsidiary of Brociti Investments, which is owned by the tremendously corrupt Ukrainian Oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky (as I write this, Zlochevsky is a fugitive from justice). Hunter was then only one-year out from his less-than-honorable discharge from the Navy, and clearly under-qualified for his over-priced post.
Joe’s opponents have attempted to argue Joe forcing the
termination of Shokin was part of a plot to protect Hunter, claiming that
Shokin was closing in on Zlochevsky, Brociti, and/or Burisma.
There is no evidence to support this, and much evidence to contradict this.
Shokin didn’t appear to be investigating any of the above and Shokin was fired
for not investigating pretty much anyone at all. Further, Joe’s actions were
consistent with Obama’s stated policies and desires, as well as those of the EU
and semi-EU member UK.
Then in 2020, a
Presidential election year, the Laptop from Hell brought this dismissed conspiracy
story back to life, but only for a short time, because the story of how laptop appeared almost immediately eclipsed the story it was supposed to buttress.
The laptop
story broke October
14, 2020, when the New York Post published an article about a
purported meeting between then-Vice President Joe and Vadym Pozharskyi, and
advisor for Burisma, in 2014, the same year Shokin was fired. Had that
meeting actually taken place, it might demonstrate that Joe lied when he
claimed that he didn’t discuss/engage with Hunter any of Hunter’s business
dealings or Joe’s foreign policy actions. When asked, Joe’s team said that the
meeting either never took place, or if it did, it was only a passing encounter
during a larger gathering. The “passing encounter” explanation was entirely
reasonable given Joe’s official duties in the Ukraine.
Well … entirely
reasonable, except …
The reference
to this meeting were found on a laptop allegedly owned by Hunter. That laptop had
allegedly been dropped pf at a small computer repair here in the USA in 2019 and then abandoned
by whomever who dropped it off, presumably Hunter. The repair shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, who was a supporter of then-President Trump whom Joe
was running against in the up-coming election. Isaac apparently searched the
emails on the laptop and found the above-referenced one as well as other
incriminating material. Isaac then ghosted the hard drive and handed the laptop
over to the FBI. As the Presidential election grew nearer, and the scandal he
had uncovered hadn’t broken yet, Isaac contacted Trump’s personal Attny Rudy Giuliani.
There are a lot of
questions regarding why Isaac would spend the time pouring over the emails of a
customer who simply wanted water damage to be repaired. He also made some contradictory
statements to the press. He claimed that because he was legally blind, so he
couldn’t definitively ID Hunter as the man who dropped that laptop off, but
still described the encounter in great detail. This was the beginning, but not
the end, of the problems with the laptop and its data’s providence.
Giuliani wanted to use the laptop to spring an “October Surprise,” an eleventh-hour revelation that would change the course of an election, so he began shopping for major news outlets that would run with it. Giuliani was once one of the USA’s most admired politicians, but his increasingly paranoid and bizarre behavior, his advocacy of insane conspiracies and association with shady people, and specifically his trips to the Ukraine to purchase exactly this kind of dirt against Hunter/Joe from back-alley sources (Giuliani's antics in Ukraine have made him the subject of a Federal investigation), additionally put the legitimacy of the laptop in question.
Giuliani was rejected
by multiple news agencies, including ones that were pro-Trump had had a history
of extreme partisanship. The story finally did find a home at the New York Post,
a paper with a large circulation, friendly towards Giuliani for almost fifty
years, pro-Trump, but also, unfortunately, had little-in-the-way of a national
news reporting infrastructure. The Post is a local paper, best known for its
sports coverage and amusingly splashy headlines.
The laptop story
apparently caused outrage within the Post paper, with senior reporters refusing
to write it, or demanding their names be removed from it, because of the
complete lack of verification of the improbable sourcing. The Post made
themselves look worse by not opening up their evidence to other papers’ fact-checkers,
so it wasn’t just unverified when first run, it was impossible for anyone to
verify it in the weeks and months that followed. It looked like the Post itself
didn’t believe their own story.
When Hunter made his
public statement regarding the laptop, he did so through his Attny, and said he
wasn’t sure that it was his computer or not. As suspicious as that sounds, it
is a matter of record that he stoned-out-of-his-gourd during much of that time
period, and Isaac talked with glee about how drunk the alleged Hunter seemed
when he showed up at the store. Wisely, Joe refused to publicly address the
laptop at all.
Except for the most
hard-core pro-Trump news outlets, virtually everyone was dismissive of the
story, and with good reason, it couldn’t possibly be true. It’s really
important to keep in your mind that in 2020, weeks before the most
consequential Presidential election in generations, this story couldn’t
possibly be true BECAUSE before this is over, I will be explaining that it
likely is true, even though it still seems impossible.
One of the problems in
explaining this story is that it is impossible to do so without engaging in constant
asides. A really important one (or two, or three) concerns the 2016
Presidential election, where Hillary Clinton was running against Donald Trump.
Clinton was blessed
with an exceptionally potent “October Surprise” when a then-more-than-ten-year-old
Access Hollywood video, the “Grab by the Pussy” tape, was leaked to the press.
On it, Trump proved himself disgustingly misogynistic and bragged about committing
sexual assault.
It looked like the Trump campaign was
finished, but then, just after that, Trump was granted an “October Surprise” as
well: Emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee were
counter-released. The anonymous leaked of the Access Hollywood tape was clearly
from the USA and the source was either pro-Clinton or, at the very least,
anti-Trump. Meanwhile the leaks of the DNC emails were provided by the
foreign-based Hacktivists of Wikileaks, and they had received them from Russian
Intelligence Agents who were trying to manipulate our Presidential race. The
emails were touted as evidence that the Democratic Primaries were rigged, but proved
nothing of the sort, though they did demonstrate a number of high-ranking
Democratic operatives were assholes towards Clinton's challenger in the Democratic Primaries, Senator Bernie Sanders.
The email October Surprise obscured the “Grab
them by the Pussy” October Surprise, and this was followed by a second, more
substantive, Clinton email scandal, more about her personally, showing she had
a total disregard for National Security procedures, maybe even hinting at Obstruction
of Justice. This third October Surprise arrived while Clinton was trying to put the second was put-to-bed,
and just after that, while Clinton was still trying to put-to-bed. The third was actually part of the second, so let's call in October Surprise 2.1, it was unleashed when the husband of one of Clinton’s closest
aides proved to be an on-line sexual predator (too complicated to explain here) and the FBI seized his computer that his wife sometimes used (that's the connection to the second October Surprise, and there was some other stuff too, and, well, Trump became President.
It was also a year where news-trackers demonstrated
that fake-news stories out-trended real-news stories again, and again, and
again. Plus, the leading fake-news stories that were either pro-Trump or
anti-Clinton led the pro-Clinton or anti-Trump stories by something like a
ten-to-one margin. Further, many of those fake-news stories proved to have been
sponsored by Agents of Russian Intelligence.
Not long after
winning, improper contact and co-ordination between members of the Trump Team
and Russian Agents was exposed. Though treasonous collusion couldn’t be proven,
several of Trump’s closest associates were arrested, indicted, and convicted, but then suspiciously pardoned by Trump. There was also evidence of Trump attempting to obstruct an FBI and then Special Council investigations laid bare in public.
Further, Trump spent the next four years threatening to use the criminal
justice and/or regulatory system punishments against his political opponents, our Free Press, and even comedians.
So, by the time
the Laptop from Hell scandal broke, the press was hyper-conscious of how badly
they were manipulated in 2016 and mostly sick of Trump. Add to that the obvious
impossible-ness of the story, and a situation developed where we not only saw
this story dismissed, but a couple Social Media companies attempted to suppress
its dissemination on their platforms. I mean, that was the only responsible
thing one could do given that it was so obviously a hoax.
It was so
obviously a hoax. In 2020. Not now. Have patience, I’ll get to that.
OK, Trump loses
in 2020. He’s now facing numerous Criminal Investigations and damaging Lawsuits,
many of which concern his misconduct during the 2020 election cycle and his
incitement of a violent riot in January 2021, which was really an incompetent attempted Coup, that left at least six dead of injuries, suicides, and/or natural causes.
(A riot responsible for death by natural causes? I know that sounds odd, but
it’s true, but let’s not get lost in another aside.)
Jump forward to
2022 and we learn that Hunter has been under investigation since 2018. These
are related to his IRS troubles, but might also concern illegal lobbying, so this
does creep a little closer to the three things that Hunter/Joe’s opponents must
prove. Hunter’s dubious hirings and scandalous partnerships were already public
record, and now, maybe, even though no details have been made public, there
might be evidence that he tried to sell access to, and/or engage in improper
back-channel dealings with, Joe. BUT as we already know Hunter is an asshole
and it's entirely possible that when he gets indicted (if he gets indicted) it
may have nothing to do with Joe. The bridge between Hunter’s corruption and Joe’s
conduct remains both all-important and profoundly elusive.
Oh, and the
laptop is back. Un-named Federal Agents leaked to Politco and the New York
Times the emails from the laptop are being taken seriously by Federal Investigators,
and if the Feds are taking them seriously, they might be real. After that, the
New York Times and Washington Post got access to the data (for the life of me,
I don’t know why this took almost two years), and their computer experts
verified at least some of the emails were real. Some of the emails, only
recently made public emails, seem exculpatory (hmm…did the New York Post
supress the inconvenient ones?). But wait, in my reading of the exculpatory
ones, they seem like they might also be incriminating. Exculpatory and
incriminating, both at the same time? Well, everything in the story seems like
that.
For example, in
April 2014,
Hunter wrote to a business partner that then-Vice-President Joe’s pending visit
to Ukraine should "be characterized as part of our advice and thinking—but
what he will say and do is out of our hands … [and that Burisma officials] need
to know in no uncertain terms that we will not and cannot intervene directly
with domestic policymakers, and that we need to abide by FARA and any other
U.S. laws in the strictest sense across the board … [Joe’s visit] could be a
really good thing or it could end up creating too great an expectation. We need
to temper expectations regarding that visit…” But the same email also promised
his law firm Boies, Schiller, & Flexner, would engage in, “direct
discussions at state, energy and NSC."
Among the emails that have been confirmed
to be legit is the one concerning Joe meeting Pozharskyi that made headlines in
2020.
It is still not impossible that these were
faked, but they would’ve needed to be faked by someone with significant
resources and skills, a hacker penetrating not the laptop itself but either Hunter’s
law firm’s or Burisma’s servers in order to then plant faked evidence on
Hunter’s laptop. That is too ornate, too improbable,
too difficult…
Wait, we already know that Russia engaged
in an extensive cyberwar that interfered with the 2016 Presidential Election and launched similar campaigns against several members of the EU, that’s been known
to the public since 2017 and confirmed in the Mueller Report in 2019. Because
of that, nothing is too ornate, too improbable, too difficult, anymore.
But now a new
illogic arises, the bizarre stupidity of how this hoax was executed seems to
undermine the sophisticated plot needed to create the hoax. Do we really
believe that Russia’s elite Cyber-Warriors created a true masterpiece of
disinformation, but then hand-over their Mona Lisa to complete idiots? Suddenly, the same circumstances that screamed “hoax” in 2020 seem
to suggest “not hoax” in 2022.
Also, lost in all this, is the most
important question. Let’s say the laptop is real, what does it really prove?
Well, apparently a lot of it is damaging to Hunter, but its real importance
lies with what it does, or doesn’t, reveal about Joe. What if the alleged meeting
with Pozharskyi really did take place, but it was, as Biden’s Team suggested, a
“passing encounter”? Does either of the
above-mentioned emails, or any of the other ones not mentioned here, really
mean any of the things people say they mean?
Just today, as I was revising this, another headline-story broke. This headline is from Fox
News, owned by the same people who own the NY Post:
“ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC ignore voicemail Joe Biden allegedly
left for Hunter Biden on business dealings”
The body of the story claims that it proves
then-Vice-President Joe lied in his repeated denials that he never discussed Hunter's business ventures with him, but on June 27 the
Daily Mail first published a bombshell voicemail that many feel contradicts previous
claims. The voicemail was on the Laptop from Hell and recorded in 2018 and
concerns an article just published by the NY Times:
"Hey
pal, it’s Dad. It’s 8:15 on Wednesday night. If you have a chance give me a
call. Nothing urgent—I just wanted to talk with you. I thought the article
released online, it’s going to be printed tomorrow in the Times, was good. I
think you’re clear."
I don’t think that transcript says what Fox or the Daily Mail says it
says.
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