Yeah, I have definitely decided that I'm not voting for Hunter Biden.

Nobody can make me. :D

I wonder if Giuliani caved and paid the $5 mil they were asking for for this info last year, or if the Ruskies caved and just gave it to him to try to stick a monkey wrench in the spokes this year. Either way, Giuliani looks like a fool for running with this, and the useful idiots who've been trying to carry the water for him on this board and other places look...not useful anyway.

Oh I see we've reached the "Beffudled old man who can't keep up with the discussion and is going to try and make the discussion stop and 'reset' over and over" part of the trolling argumentative rulebook.

Yep. He and Hillary Clinton are definitely off my shortlist. I guess Trump is running unopposed.

What's amazing to me is that this was supposed to be their big, deadly October Surprise that was supposed to totally detonate the Biden campaign.

And it fell apart instantly. None of the mainstream media outlets fell for it, and I've seen in several places that if you didn't pay close attention to polly ticks and knew about it already, what Trump said in the Thursday night debate would have been incomprehensible.

The whole thing is just so incredibly stupid. Shockingly stupid. I keep waiting for the REAL October Surprise, but it appears this was it. 'Course, I still suspect he's going to try to have Biden arrested sometime in the next 9 days ... but maybe Barr has told him that's too over-the-top corrupt, even for Barr.

But I've said all along, Trump's only saving grace is that he's too stupid, lazy, and incompetent, or he would have caused a lot more damage to this great land of ours than he has managed to do. Granted, he's done a ton of damage. He's done everything he could think of to hurt this great nation, as long as it didn't involve a lot of work. It's going to take years to recover from this kakocracy.

But I'm very thankful that he's so dumb and so incapable. It could have been a lot worse!

That's unfair. There's insufficient evidence to conclude sex or age.

I imagine he paid significantly more for it, having turned it down at first and came crawling back once all the other scandals failed to manifest.

And notice neither Biden nor his son have denied this happened!

Seems that the spiders have added a few more documents to pics one added just now that says it was added 4 days ago. They seem to be from millennium mirror which seems to be a Facebook page. Let me look at them. Looks like a invoice for 3 MacBook's for 85 bucks which is the price to retrieve data from one MacBook. The story does not add up. Why does he have 3 MacBook's anyway. Possibly they were stolen by agents of Trump and then sent to Moscow for analysis because he considers them to be more reliable then Americans because Americans are stupid. They were then delivered to Russian asset and then to Trump. Could all be true. Let me pursue this rabbit hole a bit further. I did hit a dead end but, To be fair to Rudy, People are really that that stupid to send in their stuff with child porn and etc. in. Usually nothing happens to them these days which is disgusting. Of course nothing happens to them because it is not reported. If this guy had really Turned in a laptop with child porn on it and it was linked to Hunter. Hunter would probably be already in jail. Signature looks fake I just looked at emails that are using Hunter's iCloud account I don't know, I have never used my iCloud account for anything and it seems unlikely that a business concern would use iCloud to conduct business. More likely that is the Hunter's email that is going could have been hacked. I wouldn't be surprised if it was found on certain banned gaming accounts as well because that is what hackers do. Pretty sure iCloud emails can not be used as evidence in my mind at any rate.

If there was anything here beyond nothingburger special sauce it woulda been dumped a while back. Before early voting got underway. This is just a last-minute hail Mary to sow enough doubt to dull enthusiasm among voting-day Biden supporters. The hope was to not have the smear completely debunked too soon, hence the comparative delay. Looks like the fools jumped the gun nonetheless. Amateurish incompetence and impatience add no luster to scumbaggery.

Even if all this was all true, times ten, Biden would still be far less awful for the country than Dumpy.

In my opinion, it is not Russian disinfo op. Why? Because it bears hallmark of usual Trump omniincompetence. He and his cronies screw up their October surprise as readily as anything else they touch.
And I think Putin's Russia is more competent than that.

Only possibility for actual Russian op like that would be deliberately making this op such nonsensical, full of plotholes disaster, but I can't see reason for doing that.

No, this is just a smoke screen. The real October surprise is coming this week. It will come out of left field and be so shocking it will take your breath away. Sleepy Joe will definitely be arrested for the Crime of the Century, and you libs won't have time to react.

Since it's a secret I can't tell you what it is, but here's a hint...

A notoriously secretive government agency just paid a record $114 million to an anonymous whistleblower

I think that Russia's plan was probably more competent, taking real untouched emails and mixing them with real emails with some fake info mixed in and some completely fake emails like they like to do. But they didn't plan for Giuliani and the right wing news bubble's sheer bumbling idiocy.

Further, sowing doubt and discord still furthers Russian goals. Even a loss in influencing the election still counts as a win if the Bogatives and TBDS's of America still harbor a grudge and are still receptive to Russian manipulation.

I think that Trump proved to be dumber then even Putin thought.

The SEC paying someone $114M should be a scandal all on its own

I have no clue about the specifics here but in general, whistleblowers get paid a percentage of the money they save the government with their information.

Under some government laws, whistleblowers can be entitled to a percentage of money recovered/saved/paid in penalties. On Wall Street, I'd imagine those numbers can get huge.

In other words, probably not a scandal.

Um, that's the heart of this silly conspiracy theory...:boggled:

FYI, there's an Apple Store less than 6 miles from Joe Biden's home. A real live Apple store that does certified Macbook repairs. Took me all of 10 seconds on Google to find it. There are two more within 10 miles in another direction. And yet, amazingly, "Hunter Biden" ignored all of those and sought out some second-rate dinky little place up a holler with a "blind" owner to leave these incriminating units at...according to Rudi. Then forgot to go back and get them...according to Rudi.

This all sounds absolutely legit. :rolleyes:

I suspect this is aimed not at Hunter or Joe but at Trump. Rudi has been the stupid messenger only.

And the message to Trump is: Here's a sample of the sort of kompromat we can make public about Hunter Biden, through your moronic sidekick Giuliani. You KNOW we have lots of kompromat on you too. Tons of it, all of it far more compromising than this. Maybe a dozen Macbooks full of it. So remember who your special friend is and what he has asked you to do. Or he will make Rudi an offer he can't refuse... OK? Just so we understand each other...*pats Donny's cheek*

The New York Times reveals that there was a plan and Rudy wasn't supposed to be part of it.
Bottom line: Rudy jumped the gun and The Wall Street Journal didn't think there was enough evidence to prove that Joe Biden was involved in anything illegal.

It says in the article that the reward money comes from the fines paid and never from taxpayers. No scandal at all.

Well I don’t think the government should be paying an individual $114M. That’s it.

Why not if it brings in much more in fines for turning in a huge illegal scheme like what Berne Madoff had going?

It’s too much.

That's a personal opinion. If it brings in $228 million in fines and stops an illegal scheme going on, it's not too much IMO.

ETA: And it's not coming out of taxpayers' pockets to begin with so why not if it encourages whistleblowers to come forward?

Yea it’s my personal opinion. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.

He didn't clam up; he evaded specific questions. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that but it's a far cry from the NYP claim that he tried "repeatedly" to contact the computer owner. There was something else going on. He might have been covering his ass regarding specific industry standards related to blabbing about a customer's data. Again, I don't really blame him. I suspect he's in over his head and just wants to protect his livelihood.

I find all that reassuring, in a way. It makes the whole plot sound slightly less amateurish. Rudy-as-loose-cannon explains a lot.

I can't access the article, but is the NYT's position that there is some compromising information there but Giuliani just shanked its release, or is it that the information itself is likely garbage ?

The WSJ team that investigated the material found little in it except that Hunter Biden may have used his family name to get business opportunities. Nothing incriminating about Joe Biden.

From the NYT article:

Lack of coordination amongst itself is a consistent hallmark of the Trump admin.

In that same NYT article, an interesting description of how the mainstream media, despite everything, still have learned something from their disastrous treatment of Clinton emails and Wikileaks in 2015-2016.
And why this "Hunter Biden Scandal" is going nowhere outside the right wing bubble.

The article doesn't take a position on the details. The main point of the story is to report that, despite having a conservative bent, the WSJ didn't just regurgitate whatever Trump and company wanted them to, instead choosing to vet the information thoroughly, as good journalists should. It is clear from the article that the staff at the WSJ haven't found enough credible information to even imply Joe Biden is guilty of anything but having a son who's made money internationally from his name, which is barely newsworthy and doesn't mean his dad is guilty of anything.

Fox News: There ain't no there there. "No role" for Joe Biden in Hunter's business activities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K02u0iRTj_M

That is bizarre. They start by disparaging other media outlets for not reporting on the laptop/emails story then provide an explanation of why the story should be ignored.

Hay, just because it's a fake story doesn't mean you shouldn't use it to try to smear Joe Biden.

Trump made that clear last Thursday, I reckon. The thing is, they don't have anything else to use to smear Joe Biden. So they're kind of stuck.

10 to 30%

It is a lot of money. Risk/reward I suppose. It seems generous, seeing as whoever crafted the policy/legislation could never have imagined that a POTUS would one day threaten the life of a whistleblower.

Can you... like expand on that instead of just a vague "It's too much?"

It's almost funny. It literally reads like FoxNews is mad at other news outlets for treating their smear job as if it where actual news. As if FoxNews is trying to play the "journalistic integrity" card... on people reporting their own bad reporting.