Jack Dorsey is finally starting to admit Twitter’s censorship problem - "CEO Jack Dorsey admits that Twitter made “a mistake” in censoring The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings. It’s a start. “We recognize it as a mistake that we made, both in terms of the intention of the policy and also the enforcement action of not allowing people to share it publicly or privately,” Dorsey confessed at Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. But he was still playing games, saying the move was “corrected” within “24 hours” — when Twitter actually kept The Post’s account locked for two full weeks... Earlier, it cited its policy against spreading hacked materials as leading to the ban. Yet The Post had reported that Hunter Biden left his laptop at a repair shop, which gained legal control of it when he didn’t return for it. Biden never claimed he’d been hacked, nor ever denied the veracity of the e-mails. “We made a quick interpretation, using no other evidence, that the materials in the article were obtained through hacking,” Dorsey claimed Tuesday. Huh?... As Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) noted, Twitter also suspended Customs and Border Patrol Commissioner Mark Morgan for his tweet trumpeting the success of the southern border wall just days before the election. “That was a mistake. We reverted it,” Dorsey said, pleading “heightened awareness around government accounts during this time.” As Lee wryly noted, mistakes happen “almost entirely on one side of the political aisle rather than the other.”"
Do you really believe a Hunter Biden painting is worth $500,000? - "Here is the good news for fans of ethical presidencies: The White House has come up with a plan to let Hunter Biden sell his art without him — or anyone in the Biden administration — finding out who bought the stuff. The idea is to discourage potential purchasers who might actually be more interested in buying favor with President Biden than in embracing the creative visions of his son. On the other hand, Hunter Biden's artwork is reportedly going to be listed for between $75,000 and $500,000... There are two likely reasons to spend more than a middle-class family's annual income on one of these pieces: You enjoy the kitschy appeal of owning a Hunter Biden original, or you want powerful people in President Biden's government to notice. Even with a nondisclosure rule in place, it's easy to think of ways one could let it be known that a purchase had been made. Oops! There's Hunter's painting in the background of our family portrait we posted to Instagram! Oops! We thought Hunter's painting was so fine we mounted it in the lobby of our corporate offices!... Real art lovers, meanwhile, should bide their time — you can probably get a discount on Hunter's paintings after his dad leaves office."
House needs probe of Hunter Biden art sales, Rep. Comer says - "The top Republican on the House Oversight Committee wants the panel to investigate the sale of Hunter Biden’s artwork — which could earn President Biden’s son millions — and he has contacted the gallery owner to divulge details of the ethics deal he reached with the White House."
Hunter Biden's ex-stripper baby mama was on his payroll while pregnant: texts - "The former stripper who bore Hunter Biden’s out-of-wedlock child — and who he claims that he has no memory of meeting — was on his consulting firm’s payroll during her pregnancy... And the first son made sure she was booted off the company insurance plan months after she gave birth... The messages, which are contained on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, shed new light on the relationship between him and Lunden Roberts, who gave birth to their daughter Navy Joan Roberts in August of 2018"
Mainstream media ignores lewd Hunter Biden N-word texts to his lawyer - "The news this week that first son Hunter Biden routinely used a racial slur in conversations with his white attorney as recently as early 2019 has been studiously ignored by the mainstream media... the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and CNN have all ignored the messages, which were revealed days after Hunter’s father, Joe Biden, became the first president to formally commemorate the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. The story did cut through on Twitter, where the phrase “#RacistHunter” began trending earlier this week. Many users questioned what the media response would have been if one of former President Donald Trump’s children used the N-word the way Hunter Biden did... charged language. Just last year, he told “Breakfast Club” radio show host Charlamagne Tha God that “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”"
Secret Service says it can't find Hunter Biden travel records for 2010, 2011, or 2013 - "In laptop emails, Biden said his Secret Service detail was annoyed when he ditched them to pursue business deals in Kazakhstan... White House press secretary Jen Psaki continued to refuse to answer basic questions about Hunter Biden’s role in a Chinese government-linked firm that has invested in companies sanctioned by the United States despite a lawyer for Joe Biden’s son saying he no longer holds his 10% ownership stake."
Schweizer: NYT's 'Turn' on Biden Family 'an Important Development' - "Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer, author of Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, reacted to The New York Times suing the State Department for access to Hunter Biden’s emails. Schweizer told FNC’s “Fox & Friends” that the media’s “turn” on President Joe Biden and his family’s overseas dealings “is an important development.” He added the media see “Biden is struggling as president” and know he is likely on his way out."
Meme - Alex Griswold: "the level of apology and disclaimer required to report on wrongdoing from the president's son"
INSIDER: "Hunter Biden isn't Trump, but what's he's up to is bad and deserves your attention - even if you hate Fox News"
Mike Lee on Twitter - "Four years ago BuzzFeed posted the Steele Dossier, filled with lies and misinformation, and twitter and Facebook happily spread their fake news. Now these platforms are blocking transmission of a New York Post story critical of a Democrat. The hypocrisy is not sustainable."
Wag the Poso on Twitter - "How can Joe Biden be trusted with our national security when his son is the biggest blackmail risk in US history?"
Unearthed video shows a naked Hunter Biden claiming Russian drug dealers stole his laptop - "Hunter Biden claimed Russians stole another one of his laptops for blackmail while he was close to overdosing in a Las Vegas hotel room, DailyMail.com can reveal. The alleged incident would mean Hunter lost a total of three computers - the first abandoned at a Delaware computer store and the second seized by federal agents - each likely to hold sensitive information on President Joe Biden and the embarrassing pictures, videos and communications of his son. The third laptop still appears to be missing – and was taken by Russian drug dealers after they partied with Hunter in Vegas, he told a prostitute in a conversation caught on camera... The prostitute asked Hunter if he was worried the Russian alleged thieves would try to 'blackmail' him. Hunter replied: 'Yeah in some way yeah.' 'My dad [inaudible] running for president,' he told her in a hushed voice. 'He is. I talk about it all the time. 'If they do, he also knows I make like a gazillion dollars.'"
Facebook is blocking shares of this story but somehow there's no story on their censorship
Hunter Biden: Joe Biden's son Hunter made money from Russia, China: Donald Trump - "during Biden' s tenure as vice president, Hunter, 50, received a USD 3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, the widow of Moscow's former mayor Yury Luzhkov. The report further alleged that Chinese nationals lavished Hunter and other members of the Biden family with money, giving Hunter and Biden' s brother James credit cards for a USD 100,000 international shopping spree."
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "Last night Twitter acknowledged that it made an error in aggressively censoring the Hunter Biden article, and those who shared it. Presumably they will no longer censor news articles with ‘hacked’ information or block those who link to the news articles. Before Twitter changed course it had blocked a news story in a major American newspaper and disable the accounts of anyone who linked to the story including the White House press secretary, several members of Congress, and an official presidential campaign account."
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - NPR: "Why haven't you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post's Hunter Biden story? Read more in this week's newsletter"
"When something is newsworthy enough that you have to explain why you’re not covering it."
New York Times covers for Swalwell and Democratic party misdeeds - "In the days after the election, after the "safe harbor" deadline had passed by which states' election certifications were final, the Biden Harris transition team released a statement from Hunter Biden which said that he was under investigation. It turns out that he declined to report $400,000 in foreign income received from Ukrainian oil company Burisma. This statement, a clear indicator that Biden's foreign affairs were not entirely on the level, was widely reported by the press. In fact, many mainstream media outlets ran stories on the new revelations regarding Hunter Biden's alleged misdeeds as though they had never publicly declined to run the previous allegations at all. NPR, The New York Times, and the Washington Post all conveniently memory-holed any refusal to cover alleged Biden family corruption prior to the election. The reason they didn't run it before is that they did not want to do anything to jeopardize a Biden Harris win. They discredited reasonable reporting from the New York Post, diligent research, because they wanted their boy to win and they didn't care what they had to cover up to do it. Perhaps they felt plagued by their 2016 decisions to run with stories about Hillary Clinton's email server mishaps, where it turned out that she was not keeping safe confidential national security information. This time around, they unwilling to accurately report on information that could have changed people's votes from Biden to Trump."
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "As you may recall from last fall, Twitter blocked the New York Post’s account for publishing a link to its story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. It then refused to allow links to that story. The reason given at the time was that the story was likely false. Now Hunter Biden has acknowledged that the laptop may have been his and NPR has issued a correction for their reporting that US intelligence had discredited the story. It hasn’t. Which generates all kinds of questions about how these anonymous intelligence sources keep getting discredited when information becomes public"
MSNBC host totally confused by revelation that the Hunter Biden laptop story is real - "MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes reached out to Twitter to find out if all the hype about this Hunter Biden laptop is really a thing. "So, like, did we ever find out the actual deal with the Hunter laptop?" Hayes asked... Raheem Kassam of The National Pulse recalled having invited MSNBC to have a look at the hard drive, which they had obtained a copy of, only to be rebuffed... Shortly after the laptop was released, the Biden campaign spouted off nonsense that it was the product of some sort of misinformation effort, or Russian hacking. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that the information gathered was the result of a hack, a premise which he later had to walk back when it turned out to absolutely be a false assertion."
When today's "misinformation" is tomorrow's truth. Of course if you don't trust the media, you are a dangerous far right conspiracy theorist
Twitter’s ban almost doubled attention for Biden story | MIT Technology Review - "When Twitter banned, and then unbanned, links to a questionably sourced New York Post article about Joe Biden’s son Hunter, its stated intention was to prevent people from spreading harmful false material as America heads into the final stretch of the election campaign. But thanks to the cycle of misinformation—and claims from conservatives that social-media platforms are deliberately censoring their views—Twitter managed to do the opposite of what it intended."
"Misinformation" is what elites don't want you to know
The Media Do Not Want You To Read, Share, or Discuss The New York Post‘s Hunter Biden Scoop - "the New York Post published an attention-catching original report: "Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad." In the previously unreleased email, which was allegedly sent on April 17, 2015, an executive with Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas company, thanks Hunter Biden for "giving an opportunity" to meet Joe Biden, according to the New York Post. It's a story that merits the attention of other journalists, political operatives, national security experts, and also the public at large—not least of all because there are serious questions about its accuracy, reliability, and sourcing. And yet many in the media are choosing not just to ignore the story, but to actively encourage others to suppress any discussion of it. Indeed, two mainstream reporters who acknowledged (and criticized) the Post's scoop—The New York Times' Maggie Haberman and Politico's Jake Sherman—faced thunderous denunciation on Twitter from Democratic partisans simply for discussing the story... This is the work of journalism—to ask questions, to probe, to find and share the truth. Haberman and Sherman were right to let their audiences know that the New York Post story exists, and they were right to challenge it. Many others in the media apparently believe the public cannot be trusted with such a challenging article. They have not merely shamed people for sharing it online, but also want to make it difficult for people to read the report at all. Facebook Communications Director Andy Stone, a former Democratic staffer, announced that the social media platform would limit the article's distribution pending a fact-checker's review. He directed users to Facebook policy, which states that "in many countries, including in the US, if we have signals that a piece of content is false, we temporarily reduce its distribution pending review by a third-party fact-checker." While Facebook is within its rights to take action against content it believes is factually misleading, this seems like a tough standard to enforce evenly. News articles in the mainstream press frequently contain information that is thinly or anonymously sourced, and sometimes proves to be inaccurate. It's one thing for social media platforms to take swift action against viral content that is very obviously false or incendiary, like conspiracy theories about coronavirus miracle cures or voter fraud. It's quite another for the platform to essentially make itself a gatekeeper of legitimate journalism, or a very selective media watchdog that appears to be more concerned about bad reporting when it comes from right-leaning outlets than left-leaning outlets, given the partisan leanings of social media company's internal policy setters. The obvious result will be a double standard, and an unsustainable one: The right will claim (correctly) that social media companies are biased against questionable conservative content, while the left will claim (also correctly) that plenty of misinformation eludes the moderators... In defending his decision to publish the Steele dossier, which contained unverified, dubious, and speculative information, then-BuzzFeed News Editor in Chief Ben Smith (now a media critic for The New York Times) wrote the following: "You trust us to give you the full story; we trust you to reckon with a messy, sometimes uncertain reality." That's a lesson the entire media should take to heart, and apply evenly, no matter the inconvenience of the narrative."
No News Is Good News: Media Willfully Ignore Hunter Biden Scandal - "a Senate Intelligence Committee report detailed how the son of a major presidential candidate, who has an extensive history of shady foreign business dealings, received a $3.5-million wire transfer from the wife of a Russian politician. The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and most major media outlets didn’t cover the wire-transfer story at all. Four years ago, not reporting such a story was a possibility too absurd to even contemplate – but then again, no one would have predicted the candidate with the shady Russia ties is not Donald Trump, but Joe Biden. People often talk about how Trump is responsible for destroying political norms, and that’s a valid concern. However, one of the truly frightening things about the Trump era is how institutions have exploited a perceived crisis in truth-telling to justify abandoning their own standards by blaming it on Trump. Increasingly, we see major stories break where the media establishment decides on a collective omertà because the story undermines its own credibility or might sway voters in directions it doesn’t approve of. When that happens, no news is good news. The problem with hiding the truth is that you can’t suppress it forever, let alone a week, in this news environment. After the initial blackout, we are finally starting to see some coverage of Hunter Biden’s suspect wire transfer – but only after Trump himself raised the issue in the recent presidential debate and forced the media’s hand. The little coverage the issue has received is instructive, and not in a good way. When Trump raised the issue at the debate, Joe Biden responded by saying the claim was “Totally discredited. Totally discredited.” Given that it’s a direct allegation in a government document and Biden is flatly denying it, you’d think this would be a perfect opportunity for the media to dig in and sort out the truth of the claim. Instead, they have essentially punted on the issue... For Joe Biden to tell the American people this accusation is “totally discredited,” when the media hadn’t even touched the story, well, honest fact-checkers would tell it like it is: Joe Biden stood up in front of tens of millions of Americans on Tuesday night and told a self-serving lie – a lie that would have been called a four-alarm trouser conflagration if Trump had said it. Naturally, there are consequences for the decision not to report major news such as the Hunter Biden story until you are forced to. The most obvious one is that media credibility takes a huge hit. The media have adopted a fairly jejune attitude toward their own institutional decline, blaming it on an increase in partisanship and polarization, but they’re quick to mix up cause and effect. They never seem to ask how much their skewed coverage is fueling that same polarization. Exhibit A here would be the media’s QAnon fascination – the right-wing, largely pro-Trump online cult centered on a bunch of deranged conspiracies about a pedophile ring running the country. There’s a case to be made that the blizzard of media coverage has vastly overstated the influence of QAnon, but it’s caused enough real-world problems that the media are understandably baying for relevant Republicans and conservative activists to make it clear this lunacy is “totally discredited,” in the literal, as opposed to Joe Biden meaning of the phrase. The rise of QAnon, however, is also partially a result of a media environment where supposedly authoritative sources of information aren’t credible. If you can’t trust, say, the New York Times to do straightforward reporting on Hunter Biden’s obvious corruption, you’re going to be a lot more inclined to stumble across fringe sources of information while searching for facts online. Unfortunately, the Hunter Biden story is practically the new normal in terms of how it illustrates media willingness to suppress or ignore inconvenient truths. The credulous groupthink coverage of Trump-Russia collusion, as well as the unwillingness to pursue Jeffrey Epstein – an actual pedophile cabal involving very powerful people – also goes a long way toward making QAnon’s nutjobbery seem more credible than it should be... For once, the media were handed a Russian influence-peddling scandal on a silver platter and the vast majority of major outlets declined to even mention it. Such bad behavior makes the calculus for determining who’s a bigger threat pretty clear for a lot of Trump supporters. Even if the president does and says things that make them uncomfortable, he’ll be gone in four months or four years. A media that hides the truth this brazenly is going to be much harder to get rid of."
Hunter Biden to teach university students about 'fake news' - "Tulane University announced that President Biden's troubled son will help teach students as a guest lecturer in a class that covers 'fake news' later this year... Biden is one of many guest speakers lined to contribute to the course during the Fall 2021 semester. Out of the seven listed, only one is from a conservative-leaning news outlet. The inclusion of Hunter Biden is puzzling, since he is not a member of the media in any capacity. Tulane University has not made it clear exactly why he was chosen. Perhaps the justification is that recent stories related to the President's son have been presented quite differently by different media outlets"
Cooper: One in six Biden voters would have changed their minds if they had known the full story - "45.1% of Biden voters were unaware of the financial scandals of Biden's son, Hunter Biden, and how Hunter's business had been wrapped up in Biden's work in foreign affairs while vice president under President Barack Obama. It further showed 35.4% of Biden voters were unaware of his former aide Tara Reade's allegation that Biden sexually assaulted her on Capitol Hill in the 1990s, and 25.3% of his voters didn't know that Sen. Kamala Harris, D-California, Biden's vice presidential running mate, was ranked America's most "progressive" senator in 2019. Meanwhile, the same voters were clueless about Trump's accomplishments because the national media refused to tell them. More than half of those surveyed, 50.5%, did not know the United States became a net exporter of oil for the first time in 2019. Nearly half (49%) of Biden voters had no idea economic growth rebounded by 33% in the third quarter, which was a record, albeit one caused by the global pandemic lockdown that forced a 31.4% plunge in the second quarter. Further, 45.3% of respondents who voted for Biden had no idea the Trump administration had helped broker historic agreements between Israel and Arab nations, and 39.4% of the same voters weren't aware the five consecutive pre-election jobs reports — from June 5 to October 2 — showed a record 11.1 million jobs were created in the summer and fall. Incredibly, and perhaps most tellingly since the president was given widespread false blame for the spread of the COVID-19 virus in the U.S., 36.1% of Biden voters said they did not know about the administration's critical role in promoting coronavirus vaccine research and the development of a vaccine through Operation Warp Speed. National media bias against Republicans and conservatives is nothing new. Sadly, it goes with the territory. As the Media Research Center pointed out in just one example, in 2004 Newsweek's Evan Thomas boasted the media would go all in for Democrats John Kerry and John Edwards, and crowed it's "going to be worth maybe 15 points.""
Report: Kamala Harris Listed as 'Key Contact' for Biden Family Business Venture in China
Hunter Biden has 'no recollection' of meeting stripper - "The stripper, Lunden Alexis Roberts, was working in a DC strip club when she met Hunter, who had been going through “more than four years of active addiction.”... Biden also said he didn’t believe he made a “mistake” by taking a seat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company while his father was the then-vice president tasked with overseeing US policy in the country."
Ex-FBI chief gave $100K to Biden grandkid trust as he sought 'future work': Hunter emails - "Former FBI Director Louis Freeh gave $100,000 to a trust for two of President Biden’s grandchildren as he sought to pursue “some very good and profitable matters” with him"
Feds also probing Joe Biden's brother James, report says - "Federal investigators probing Hunter Biden’s taxes have also been asking questions about Joe Biden’s brother and his involvement in a bankrupt hospital business, amid calls that a special counsel be named to probe both... According to a CNN report, investigators in the US Attorney’s Office in Delaware are also probing a laptop that reportedly belonged to Biden’s scandal-scarred son, which was first reported by The Post."
Federal probe into Hunter Biden's taxes intensifies, sources say
The Bidens and Beijing - WSJ - "Exactly one year ago, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and six Democrats chairing House committees unveiled their plan to charge President Donald Trump with impeachment articles which did not claim he had committed any crimes. Mr. Trump’s alleged offense was suggesting that a foreign government look into Hunter Biden dealings which any reasonable person would say deserved examination. A source now tells the Journal that the feds began investigating Biden taxes in 2018. One year ago today, did any of the congressional Democrats know that as they were accusing Mr. Trump of non-crimes, the subject of his scrutiny was already under U.S. criminal investigation? And no, the investigation wasn’t manufactured by Mr. Trump... Now why won’t Joe Biden’s office say when he learned about the investigation? Perhaps there’s a difference of opinion within the family about whether Tuesday is a plausible moment for the subject of a two-year-old investigation to learn about it. “What is curious is that Hunter Biden says that he just learned of the investigation on Tuesday,” observes George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley on Twitter. “Yet, many of us have discussed the 2019 subpoena in the case for his laptop as an obvious indicator of a criminal investigation.”... It surely is a concern, especially when the manifestly unqualified son of a leading American politician scores financial coups in China—in ventures that no one seems able to fully explain... Looking at the roster of Biden associates, this column’s most celebrated alumnus might mischievously ask: Why do bad things keep happening to them? But where and with whom the Biden family chooses to do business has nothing to do with coincidence. When your humble correspondent and Maria Bartiromo were interviewing the president last summer for a book, Mr. Trump mentioned that he used to wonder why his Beltway adversaries always use Russia when advancing conspiracy theories about him. He chuckled as he recounted the moment he understood why and said, “They never use China. You know why? ’Cause they’re all getting rich on China.”"
Hunter Biden's book 'Beautiful Things' sells less than 11k copies in first week, despite PR rush
Republicans call for new probe into Hunter Biden laptop - "A growing number of Republicans around the country are demanding a new investigation into Hunter Biden after the New York Times confirmed the authenticity of a laptop whose contents were published by The Post 17 months ago. Though The Post exclusively revealed in September 2020 the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the potentially compromising material contained there, the story was censored by social media companies at the behest of the Democratic Party. Mainstream media outlets — including The Times — attacked or ignored The Post revelations, while the Biden administration falsely suggested it was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. More than 50 intelligence agency officials publicly attempted to discredit the coverage saying it had “the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” — and none offered any apology when contacted by The Post this week... The laptop — which Hunter left at the Delaware computer-repair shop of John Paul Mac Isaac and contained evidence that he was colluding with deep-pocketed corporations in China and Ukraine and giving a cut to his father — eventually made its way to Trump attorney and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He brought it to The Post in September 2020. The Post authenticated the computer and its contents in interviews with Mac Isaac and Biden cronies whose emails were found on the hard drive. The coverup helped swing the election to Biden. Outlets and social media only admitted they were wrong after the election, which Biden won with 51% of the popular vote. Almost 50 percent of Biden voters knew nothing of the laptop scandal at the time of the election and almost 10 percent said they would not have voted for Biden had they known, according to a survey from The Media Research Center. Hunter Biden is already facing a sprawling federal probe into his tax filings and business dealings around the world, the New York Times finally reported this week... Legal experts said a new Hunter Biden probe could potentially implicate his father President Biden. “There is very damning evidence that Hunter Biden sold his father’s access when his father was the vice president of the United States and that’s on his laptop and there is even evidence that then Vice President Joe Biden may have been in on this,” said Mike Davis, a former chief counsel for nominations for the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The president needs to clearly state right now that he will not interfere in any federal probe into his son Hunter, and he will not use his presidential powers — including the pardon power — to rescue his son if there are charges brought against Hunter.”"
"Disinformation" is whatever hurts liberal causes
Hunter Biden To Be Indicted? - "The lawyer representing Lunden Alexis Roberts, the former stripper with whom Hunter Biden has a three-year-old daughter, says that Hunter will likely be indicted for tax fraud.“I expect him to be indicted,” attorney Clint Lancaster told CNBC on Thursday. “Just based on what I saw in his financial records, I would be surprised if he’s not indicted.”... Joe Biden infamously threatened the Ukrainian leaders with withholding a billion-dollar loan from the Obama administration unless they fired Ukrainian Prosecutor General Shokin, who was investigating Burisma for corruption at the time, while Joe Biden was vice president. As the New York Times reported earlier this week, Hunter Biden has been under federal investigation for potential criminal tax violations, money laundering, and illegal foreign lobbying since 2018."
Hunter Biden's close relationship with Chinese-American secretary revealed - "After launching his multi-million-dollar joint venture with CEFC, Hunter was assigned a 29-year-old Chinese-American assistant, JiaQi Bao, who quickly struck up a close and intriguing relationship with her Biden boss. At first, emails show the New York-based Bao diligently scheduled flights, hotels and even doctor's appointments for the president's son. But mysteriously, the young assistant also sent him opposition research to help Joe Biden's 2020 election bid, urged him to take cash from the joint venture's accounts as the business collapsed and wrote flirty and personal messages and even ended up with Hunter's military dog tags in her New York apartment – the same tags he can be seen wearing in home-made porn videos he recorded on his laptop... A Senate probe highlighted links between Hunter's Chinese backers and the country's spy machine, and reported that his dealings with the Chinese 'raise criminal financial, counterintelligence and extortion concerns'... Hunter himself seems to have believed his business partner's ties to Chinese intelligence agencies – telling a friend in an audio recording on his laptop that Ho was the 'spy chief of China'... Bao listed negative stories about Trump for Hunter to use, including allegations of selling citizenship to corrupt Chinese officials, his alleged links to a Chinese-owned Florida 'prostitution parlor', and letting human rights violations slide in negotiations with China. Bao also attacked Trump's trade war with China, slamming it as 'a complete failure thus far, resulting in tremendous loss to Americans'. Under the heading 'Uncle Joe 2020', the former assistant encouraged Hunter to tell his father to 'lead by example', 'bring back sensibility', and emphasize his experience and age as a strength. Bao's suggestions appear to fit with China's foreign policy at the time. Joe Biden was expected to have a less confrontational policy towards China, and appeared to be preferred by the Chinese government over Trump."
Opinion | The Media’s Hunter Biden Conundrum - The New York Times - "the decision by Twitter to attempt to shut down the circulation of the New York Post story, which looked bad when it was made, looks even worse now that we have more of the back story and more evidence in view. At this point we can posit with some certainty that The Post’s story was not some sort of sweeping Russian disinformation plot but a more normal example of late-dropping opposition research, filtered through a partisan lens and a tabloid sensibility, weaving genuine facts into contestable conclusions. It was, in other words, analogous to all kinds of contested anti-Trump stories that various media outlets have run with across the last four crazy years — from the publicity around the Steele dossier’s wilder rumors to the tales of Michael Cohen’s supposed Prague rendezvous to the claims that Russians hacked Vermont’s power grid or even C-SPAN. In none of these cases did social-media minders step in to protect the public from possible fake news. As Matt Taibbi and other gadfly press critics have pointed out, it’s hard to come up with any reasonable social-media rule that would justify the suppression of The Post’s story that couldn’t just as easily be applied to all the pieces of conspiratorial Trump-Russia reportage that didn’t pan out, or the Julie Swetnick allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, or various scoops based on technically illegal leaks. That capriciousness is a bad sign for the project of harnessing social media giants to filter out disinformation; it suggests that any filter would inevitably feel partisan, partial and obviously reverse-engineered... The power of media gatekeepers (like this newspaper) to shape political coverage is still significant, and just b
ecause some charge or scoop circulates in the right-wing ecosystem doesn’t mean that it has any impact beyond the realm of people who are already voting for Donald Trump... It is not a coincidence, as some of my Times colleagues note in their story, that “the countries that Hunter Biden, James Biden and their associates planned to target for deals overlapped with nations where Joe Biden had previously been involved as vice president.” Nor is it a coincidence that the areas of Hunter Biden’s particular interest, China’s and Russia’s near abroad, were particularly important foreign policy zones under recent Democratic presidents. And given that pre-Trump American foreign policy in these regions was a conspicuous failure — with China tilting totalitarian and Vladimir Putin outmaneuvering the West — the fact that Biden’s nearest relative was trying to influence-peddle in both places is a useful reminder of why the establishment that’s likely to reclaim the White House next week lost power in the first place. More specifically, Bobulinski’s story and the email evidence both suggest that Joe Biden took at least enough interest in his son’s dealings to have a meeting during the Trump presidency with his business partners. This isn’t proof that he partnered with Hunter or profited in any way, but it seems like evidence that he wasn’t particularly worried about keeping his son’s sketchy salesmanship at arm’s length"
October 2020
This is an admission that media lies matter
Hunter Biden’s Laptop Is Finally News Fit to Print - WSJ - "Talk about burying the lead—for 17 months. The New York Times has finally acknowledged that Hunter Biden’s business dealings are legitimate news. Implicit apology accepted. The Times waddled in this week with a story on the “tax affairs” of the President’s son, including this gem in the 24th paragraph: “Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.” You don’t say. This admission comes six months after a Politico writer published a book that also confirmed that the laptop emails were authentic. But the original scoop belonged to the New York Post, which broke its laptop story in October 2020—only to meet a media wall of denial and distortion. Rather than attempt to confirm the emails, nearly all of the media at the time ignored the story or “fact-checked” it as false. This in-kind contribution to candidate Joe Biden was all the more egregious given other evidence supporting the Post’s scoop. Neither Hunter Biden nor the Biden campaign denied that the laptop was Hunter’s. And Hunter’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, went public with documents backing up some of the laptop’s contents. The herd of media conformists also echoed the speculation of obviously partisan “intelligence officials.” Some 50 of these officials—headlined by former Obama spooks James Clapper and John Brennan —circulated a statement peddling the Russian “disinformation” line—even as they admitted they had no evidence. This result was a blackout of the Hunter news, except in a few places, including these pages. Twitter blocked the Post’s account for nearly two weeks, and Facebook used algorithms to quash the story. This deprived voters of information they might have wanted to know before Election Day. There’s more for our reborn media sleuths to investigate. Mr. Bobulinski provided these pages with documents showing Hunter was looking to use the Biden name to profit from a business deal with a Shanghai-based company with ties to the Chinese government... The Times won a Pulitzer prize for pushing the Russia collusion narrative, which proved to be much ado about nothing. The New York Post deserves a Pulitzer, but it will probably have to settle for well-earned vindication."
I was reading lots of confident dismissals from 2020 and 2021 of it as fake news, and almost no one saying it was genuine, on Quora. So much for that
Mark Hemingway on Twitter - "The media, en masse, waited a year and a half to verify Hunter's laptop so they could report on it, but ran with the false Trump phone call gap story immediately without needing to verify it. This kind of thing keeps happening. Hopelessly politicized and corrupt."
'No yellow!' Hunter Biden referred to Asians with a slur in 2019 texts | Daily Mail Online - "Hunter Biden referred to Asians as 'yellow' in a 2019 text conversation with his cousin. Caroline Biden, President Joe Biden's niece, was texting Hunter discussing setting him up with her rich, model friends... The slur, uncovered from Hunter's abandoned laptop, is particularly distressing as it comes amid a surge in racist attacks against Asian-Americans. President Biden signed into law last month legislation to expedite review of Covid-19-related hate crimes, and vowed to 'stop the hatred and the bias' against Asians. This is the second revelation about Hunter's use of racial slurs in text conversations from his laptop... Hunter also used the n-word multiple times in conversation with his white lawyer. In the days since the n-word texts surfaced, the majority of US media outlets failed to cover Hunter's use of the racial slur... During the January 2019 conversation with his cousin, Hunter, then age 49, said he wanted to date 24-year-olds because they were 'easy to impress'. '24 is great. Seriously,' he wrote. 'Its incredibly easy to impress a 24 year old.' Caroline suggested logging Hunter into Raya, an exclusive dating app that is known for pairing celebrities and the super-rich with models and young groupies... Like Hunter, Caroline has reportedly struggled with addiction for years, and attended court-ordered rehab after one DUI. Friends told the New York Post the 33-year-old went to rehab for alcohol and Adderall addiction while studying at Georgetown University. In 2009 she was briefly detained by Amtrak police after a dispute over a train fare, and in 2013 she was accused of assaulting a New York Police Department officer who broke up a fight. She was sent to an anger management rehab the following year. In 2017 Caroline admitted spending $110,000 on a stolen credit card in New York, and in December last year she spent 20 days in rehab for a DUI after crashing her car into a tree in Pennsylvania... Hunter's father has attempted to make race a central issue in both his presidential campaign – which came amid nationwide protests over racism and police brutality in 2020 – and in his administration."russia
Joe Biden met with Hunter Biden business partner at the White House - "Hunter Biden’s closest business partner made at least 19 visits to the White House and other official locations between 2009 and 2015, including a sitdown with then-Vice President Joe Biden in the West Wing. Visitor logs from the White House of former President Barack Obama reviewed by The Post cast further doubt over Joe Biden’s claims that he knew nothing of his son’s dealings. Eric Schwerin met with Vice President Biden on November 17, 2010 in the West Wing, when he was the president of the since-dissolved investment fund Rosemont Seneca Partners. The logs also reveal that Schwerin met with various close aides of both Joe and Jill Biden at key moments in Hunter’s life when he was striking multi-million dollar deals in foreign countries, including China. Yet President Biden has long insisted he had no involvement in his son’s foreign affairs. “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” he said in 2019... Hunter Biden is already facing a federal investigation over his tax filing, which insiders say has widened to include potential money laundering and violations of lobbying laws. Former business partners have reportedly been cooperating with the feds. House leaders have vowed to subpoena the younger Biden before Congress to answer questions should they retake control of the chamber in 2022. Chief among the unanswered questions is the identity of the Big Guy — a figure mentioned in the hard drive as someone who would receive a slice of equity in a deal with a Chinese energy company. Tony Bobulinski, another Hunter Biden business partner who appeared frequently in hard-drive emails, has said there is “no question” President Biden was “the big guy.”"
NPR Public Editor on Twitter - "Why haven't you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post's Hunter Biden story? Read more in this week's newsletter➡️"
Newsletter - "“We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” NPR Managing Editor for News Terence Samuel told me. “And quite frankly, that's where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.”
NPR on Twitter - "President-elect Biden's dog, Major, will soon be the first shelter pup to make it to the White House. That shelter, the Delaware Humane Association, is planning a virtual "indoguration" ceremony for Major on Sunday."
Repair shop owner sues CNN, Daily Beast, Politico over 'Russian disinformation' claims regarding Hunter Biden's laptop - "The laptop repair store owner at the center of publicizing the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned hardware is now suing CNN, the Daily Beast, and POLITICO for defamatory damages that cost him his livelihood amid claims that the story was "Russian disinformation." Hunter Biden first dropped off his laptop in April 2019, but forgot about it. Mac Isaac shared the laptop’s data with the FBI in December of that year, before then Rudy Giuliani obtained it and the New York Post broke the story in October 2020... "This was collusion led by 51 former pillars in the intelligence community and backed by words and actions of a politically motivated DOJ and FBI. I want this lawsuit to reveal that collusion and more importantly, who gave the marching orders." Mac Isaac singled out Adam Schiff of the House Intelligence Community for pushing the baseless claims in a last-ditch effort to protect the Biden family’s reputation... It was later revealed that Hunter Biden likely lost possession of more than one single laptop"
Spectre of son’s scandal to haunt Joe Biden presidency | World | The Sunday Times - "According to Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner, Hunter regularly asked his father for sign-off on deals he was doing in China, which included travelling with Biden on an official vice-presidential trip, when he solicited investment from state banks. In 2017, Hunter accepted a 2.8-carat diamond — worth up to $80,000 — from Ye Jianming, a Chinese tycoon. It was a thank-you gift for helping Ye invest in America."
