The laptop is real, Hunter is up to his eyeballs in shady shit and the laptop is probably full of him blabbing about it, for example he was paid millions of dollars for unclear purposes by a guy whose job was to do bribery for Chinese intelligence, and if you’re wondering if Hunter knew this:
In a May 11, 2018, audio recording of a conversation with an unidentified woman found on the laptop, a copy of which has been obtained by Yahoo News, Hunter Biden complained about getting a phone call from a New York Times reporter asking about his representation of Ho. He is “literally the f***ing spy chief of China,” Biden says to the woman, clearly overstating Ho’s role.
There is no “setup” here, it’s low rent corruption, probably par for the course in DC, but Hunter is too much of a fuckup to do what Kushner did and structure his bribe-taking for plausible deniability, not run his mouth in internet conversations, etc etc.
There’s no suggestion of involvement by Joe, but Joe’s brother James Biden is in the thick of this too.
It’s especially hard when student loans are a big reason for the rise in the cost. Free money for whatever you charge means you can bump prices without much consequence.
I still can’t get over how I paid about 120k for two years of med school where I used approximately 1000 dollars of third party resources instead of the lectures/resources my school provided. I’m guessing that’d be similar for a lot of undergrad classes nowadays too. It wasn’t that bad when I was in undergrad, but I had a big break in-between undergrad and med school.
Education costs should be dropping hard. It’s never been easier to get education materials to people.
I had a convo with one of my more righty acquaintances about Hunter Biden. It went something like this. I’m condensing and paraphrasing it quite a bit.
Friend*: Hunter Biden laptop was real. Everyone said it was Russian propaganda. See just like conservatives, liberals will cover for their own. If all of these stories had run before the election, we could have had a different outcome.
Melk: So what do you think was on this laptop that showed that Joe Biden did anything wrong?
Friend: Well it doesn’t matter if there was or wasn’t. Some voters might have interpreted the contents as negative to Joe Biden and it could have changed their votes.
Melk: That’s possible, but is there anything you have heard of on the laptop that shows Joe Biden was corrupt.
Friend: Nothing yet. But who knows what they suppressed?
Melk: So, if they find nothing else, would you still feel bad that the initial reporting on Hunter’s laptop was not as detailed and widespread as it became later.
Friend: Yes, because some people still could have changed their votes based on that info.
Melk: FFS…
*Probably not quite a friend, or at least not a close one, but I had to call him something in the script.
is there actual evidence on that laptop he peddled influence? or is it just some dumb vague business plans drawn up as investments? i am not super surprised that chinese intelligence would have a budget for bribes, but i also don’t find them approaching the vp’s son as a smoking gun?
It is a genuinely difficult problem imo. On the one hand, the contents of the emails were on their face newsworthy. But then… I posted about this in October 2020, when this furore was originally going on:
But then, are we saying news organisations should bury information in the name of the public good? I’m not in love with that idea either and I would honestly be furious if the media whitewashed evidence of the corruption of Don Jr. the way they did with this Hunter story.
I think a large part of the answer is for US journalists to drop the raised-by-wolves “objectivity” thing they do and frame things more plainly. Like report the Hunter story, but in the news report, like not in an op-ed or editorial, say like “the accuracy of the information is unclear and this appears to be an attempt by Republican operatives to muddy the waters ahead of the upcoming Presidential election, in which President Trump trails to rival Biden in polling”. Like tell your readers what is going on, rather than rely on them to work it out.
He did do influence-peddling, like he offered to set up meetings with Joe, but it’s unclear if Joe knew about this or whether any such meetings ever took place.
The more eyebrow-raising stuff is like:
Moreover, in September 2017, just two months before the Chinese businessman’s arrest, Hunter Biden (who is a lawyer) signed a retainer agreement to represent Ho, according to emails found on his laptop and since authenticated by the Washington Post. Grassley separately obtained bank records showing $1 million was paid to Biden in March 2018 for the representation, although it is not clear what work, if any, he did for Ho. Court records of Ho’s criminal case show no indication that Biden or his law firm at the time, Boies Schiller Flexner, participated in Ho’s legal defense. (Among the questions that Yahoo News submitted to Mesires, the Bidens’ lawyer, were what work Hunter Biden did for the $1 million retainer and what work James Biden did for the $1.4 million paid to his consulting firm. He did not respond.)
I mean I guess there could be innocent explanations why a Chinese intelligence agent and subsequently convicted criminal paid a crack addict and career fuckup $1 million to do legal work for him and nobody can explain what that legal work consisted of, but none immediately come to mind.
dude that amounts to less influence and bribes than the sum of just the true parts of steele dossier and many russian salvos into the trmp campaign. which you took down pretty thoroughly as nothing there, if you look too close at each thing individually. but all of a sudden you are extrapolating a lot from just crack addict and career fuckup descriptions.
sure, i hope all such instances are investigated by doj just to prevent most officials’ family from ever thinking of taking money, and hopefully we don’t see biden try to pressure the investigation as a testament to him having some lines not to be crossed, but everyone is fallible so who knows how the event eventually shake out.
but it seems you are coming at hunter’s laptop with some bias.
I don’t know that we disagree on any of the facts here. Like if we had a laptop full of similarly unfiltered emails from like Trump or Kushner or whoever, we would see shady dealings on a larger scale. But we’re not going to get that because Trump doesn’t use email and Kushner has spent his life learning how to do bribery politely and with decorum, rather than smoking crack and banging hookers. This doesn’t change the fact that the millions of dollars transferred from Ho to Hunter reek of criminal activity. There’s a real story here, it’s not just dressed-up innuendo like the Hillary emails.
it’s not the same story though, like hunter never held office like trmp or worked in the whitehouse like jared and never had access to information he could profit from, or profited via a magic saudi bailout and windfall in two different occurrences that we know about.
btw i don’t have the facts of hunter’s laptop at all, nor do i know any of the other details of what’s on it that you are telling. how deep into the /redpill would i have to dive to learn all that?
the laptop just seems like, if all of the conservative fever dreams about Hunter suddenly are proven true, it’s still nothing. failsons making money off daddy’s name is the american dream. like the above poster said, he never held a position in government and it doesn’t appear to be related to Joe at all.
It’s also kind of inevitable as the world sleepwalks toward climate disaster. People aren’t going to give up their carbon fueled lifestyles until there literally isn’t any more gas to burn.
Our own Federal government is talking about curtailing the use of carbon fuels and also simultaneously approving brand new oil extraction projects that won’t even start producing oil until that late 2020s. Canada is definitely not going to stop producing and exporting fossil fuels, we’re just going to talk about it.
It’s just funny because you’d think the President’s child receiving bribes would be enough of an impropriety regardless of lack of evidence of quid pro quo
I’m sure it would be for thousands of government positions. This is the President we’re talking about. We only have to get one person out of hundreds of millions to fill this role. And it’s not like he’s a grocery store worker where losing this job would be a hardship for him
But that’s where we’re at with corruption. No public-facing evidence of direct connection to the father? Nothingburger
This kind of behavior only attracts criticism if you try to hide it or do it in secret. When you are a Trump family member and you do the misconduct in the open or, like, hold a press conference to brag about it, people instinctively assume it’s not bad. This is a core tactic for getting away with bad behavior - just normalize it and people will go along to get along. But try doing anything in secret, even good deeds, and people instinctively will mistrust you and assume you’re doing something bad.
It’s a tough problem in cases like the Bidens because Joe has no control over what his adult son or brother does. Joe could publicly say he hates what they are doing and that might slow down business for them but that is about it.
This is a result of the US being a super individualistic society, nobody expects you to keep your family members in line and doesn’t reflect on you if they do something fucked up.
I mean virtually nobody here is a big Biden fan, he’d lose an Unstuck Primary by an absurd margin - his o/u would be like 5% of the vote. But I’m supposed to get fired up over this and play into the GOP’s hands on this scandal after the four years of non-stop scandals and open and blatant corruption that we all just witnessed, which the GOP handwaved away like it was Star Spangled Awesome?