The Presidency of the Joes, part II: lol documents

Politics & News
5561

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.

1 Like
5562

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.

5563

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.

5564

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?

5565

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.

5566

doesn’t seem like a great idea

5567

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.

5568

Or people to burn it.

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5569

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.

5570

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

5571

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.

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5572

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.

5573

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1513298827695906816?s=20&t=UX775mGsfDxYbUhIDfV-iQ

1 Like
5574

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?

5575

I guess I’m bad at communicating

5576

Free sounds good.

4 Likes
5578

The laptop is not really a big deal other than that it confirms that Hunter knew that this guy he was dealing with was linked to Chinese intelligence. The chatter about using his influence with Joe is pretty weak stuff. Like to be clear, I think the press take at the time of “the laptop is a non-story” was correct, it’s just that the reasoning of “because it’s probably non-genuine” was bullshit. That’s what makes it a difficult problem.

The Chinese stuff is sort of separate-but-related. Hunter was under federal investigation for this during the election campaign. There’s a WaPo article on that here.

5579

Swing and a miss, Trumpkin tactics in real-time during the 2020 election were classic disinfo:

https://mobile.twitter.com/awprokop/status/1513989254904434701

Mix some true documents with more scandalous fake stuff. Refusing to show source documents = only way to deal with these people is by treating everything they say as bullshit until proven otherwise.

5580

Well yeah, there were all kinds of rumours about what was on it at the time, including images of Hunter abusing children, that were completely made up. That’s why stuff like this and the Hillary emails work so well as an October surprise, their contents are limited only by your imagination. But the emails shopping influence to Burisma were authenticated by security experts hired by WaPo. The recording where Hunter calls Ho “China’s spy chief” is a recording of Hunter’s voice, so its authenticity is not in doubt. And the main thrust of the story, i.e. “we have a laptop of Hunter’s with shady stuff on it”, was true.

5581

Yes, after the election they provided docs to WaPo to prove some of the less scandalous stuff true.

In the fog of war, it was still correct for the first, second and third line of every Hunter Biden story to point out that the purveyors of this info are some of the biggest liars on the planet and we have no idea which, if any, of their claims are true.