There's a Seth Abramson thread around here somewhere, started by a poster who is totally not you. If you want to discuss him, I'd suggest doing so in there.

Eh, not sure what's so unreasonable about a drug addict rich kid leaving his laptop at a repair shop in his home state where his alleged crooked father he shares his money with lives.

Speaking of Qanon, that crazy Chinese video that was posted last month says the hard drive has pedo stuff with Biden on it lol. I'm really surprised no one if flipping out about this considering we have the picture of Rudy, crazy Chinese guy, crazy Chinese virus girl, and Bannon in the room all at the same time.

The other thing is that crazy Chinese guy says the hard drives are from China. At least the ones he's talking about. So that would go against RUdy's story about the hard drives. Unless this is a whole other set of drives lol.

It's entertaining to say the least.

Thanks for the offer LOL, I'll pass on that nonsense.

This is exactly it - you don't want to give it oxygen. Denials are never as impactful as scandal, regardless of whether or not the scandal is obviously fake, and by engaging with it all you're doing is providing the media the opportunity to run stories on your engagement.

Its the Streisand Effect, only moreso because FOX, OANN, Breitbart, etc. weren't specifically out to get Streisand, and that story wasn't deliberately seeded in order to be propagated in this manner.

My point is that no evidence has been presented that it's Russian disinfo, and no name is attached to anyone with authority that it's Russian disinfo. This is Steel Dossier 101 stuff all over again.

I didn't say that I'd engage with you on the subject there. I just said that that's the place for the discussion that you tried to initiate and now are calling "nonsense".

At least we can agree on that latter point.

It's Steele Dossier 101 level nonsense. No one of authority has come out and said this is Russian disinformation. All there is is "people familiar with the matter" and the media burned that bridge a long time ago.

You mean completely accurate in every verifiable respect but still rejected by the GOP because they don't like the conclusions?

Sadly, no. A whole bunch of idiots are trying to push the story out there, spreading it among themselves via social media. And the news media seems to think they are obligated to use weasel words to describe it instead of coming out and calling it what it is, ludicrous.

Four years of Trump spinning lie after lie and people are still convinced by the next one. The news media has begun saying some things aren't true like the claim mail-in voting is open to massive fraud. At least they've gone that far. But Barr is repeating the story.

Has this been posted yet?

Above the Law: Career Prosecutor Torches Bill Barr In Epic Resignation Editorial He said he would have left sooner but wanted to finish the prosecution of: Sounds just like a prosecution Barr and Trump would have derailed.

Like I said, it depends what is being refuted. If I'm saying that the emails on the laptop aren't mine, then that is easily dealt with since I have access to my own email. If I am claiming they were altered, then again I have access to my emails so I can prove it. If I am claiming that the emails on the laptop are mine, but some additional emails have been slipped in, then I would expect the logs of Apple, or the other service providers who handled the email, to be able to show that the emails weren't sent. Given that the FBI are involved and presumably the owners of the mailboxes would be cooperative, this doesn't seem beyond the bounds of possibility.

The other thing is that what I can easily prove and what Biden's campaign can easily prove are very different things. I could not afford to get any lawyers, or computer forensics people involved, ISPs are unlikely to go out of their way to help me and the FBI are unlikely to care.

One weird thing in all of this is the number of rich important people using what look like free/generic email services for their business. Biden is using iCloud, somebody else is using Nazent. Is this the email equivalent of a burner phone?

One of the companies that supposedly sent him a dodgy email was j2cr. They are an international legal consultancy based in DC. I would hope that they have a legally compliant and auditable email system capable of demonstrating that they did or didn't send an email.

If these emails aren't genuine, it shouldn't be hard for them to prove. It may well not be the strategic moment to do that yet.

No. The Streisand Effect is where you try to keep something out of the public consciousness and your efforts to keep it out of the public consciousness get everybody interested in what you are trying to hide. Stating that something is false may have negative consequences, but it isn't the Streisand Effect.

There's stronger evidence for it being Russian disinfo than there is for it being legitimate.

Exhibit A is the fact that it comes from Giuliani who hasn't exactly made a secret of the fact that he's spent much of the last year or so palling around with known and sanctioned active Russian intelligence agent Andrii Derkach, and that he was doing so in order to find dirt on Biden. And that's just one of Giuliani's ties to Russia.

Judging by what Giuliani himself is saying, there isn't much meat on the alleged Hunter Biden's hard drive. And absolutely nothing criminal attributed to Joe Biden.

It's CT territory, even Soros appears in Giuliani's utterings.

Leaving aside the fact that you're side-stepping your own dishonesty there, you can say that "the media" aren't credible when they refer to sources (which I'll accept as true just for the sake of argument), but that doesn't imply that Giuliani is even half as credible as that. Giuliani is a total clown shoe.

I can say where that comes from in a general sense.

Whatever the motivation, people apply scientific burden of proof to events/topics in the socio-political domain. And whatever the motivation, it's mighty unimpressive.

Dude, you're evading so much you should start thinking about evasion therapy.

Again, you're badly missing the mark. To you, the investigation never moves past the abstract. "Just prove the e-mails aren't there." Okay, but how is that done? You still haven't explained that part.

We'll try it like this: I want you to prove that the heroin e-mail I claimed to have sent you (for the sake of argument) never actually arrived in your inbox. Do not speculate on what could be done. Actually do it.

What about a coked up Don Jr. at the RNC convention. Isn't THAT a security threat?

Or Trump and Kushner owing hundred of millions of $ to foreign banks?

But yeah, Hunter Biden!

I've gained exclusive access to one of the incriminating photos from Hunter Biden's laptop. It shows incontrovertible evidence of Hunter meeting with a dangerous enemy of America.


https://i.imgur.com/Lc0x6N8.jpg

You misunderstand. I meant it would not be unreasonable for Hunter to go to Delaware, not that he did go to Delaware. After all, that is where his father lives and where he grew up. TahiniBS was attempting to twist my meaning. I agree that the whole Hunter B computer story is, as you put it, fishier than a tin of sardines. Rudy G. is has become nothing but a useful idiot of the Russians.

Why Biden hasn't declared the emails illegitimate:

1) You're assuming that the photo is a photo of an actual email message. AFAIK, that hasn't been proven.
2) I can list all the email on my computer, but that doesn't prove that I never had a particular message and subsequently deleted it. Therefore, there is no way for me to prove that I never received a particular message.

The whole Hunter emails nonsense is actually being investigated by the FBI but not as Biden corruption, rather they are investigating Russian influence behind the materials. Trump is going to be sorry what he wished for if he asks Barr or Wray to release what they have found about the emails.

AP via Yahoo: Biden email episode illustrates risk to Trump from Giuliani

Exactly.

Biden is in a no win situation anyway. No matter whether Biden denied the emails or not, it wouldn't matter; the Fox pundits and Trumpers would attack him anyway just as they did Obama on the birth certificate.

The FBI is investigating this and the Bidens are wisely letting them handle it. They have the experts and the means to determine if this is a Russian manipulation.

With Giuliani, of all deranged and corrupt people, in the background, you could almost exchange "if" with "that"...

That has been explaine already. Please pay attention:

If you want to make sure that every single trace of an incriminating email on a mac disappears, you take it across the country, drop it off at a repair shop that is not an authorized Apple service center and is run by a man with poor eyesight, and leave it there under the assumption that the repairman will take ownership of it, scrub the hard drive without reading your email (since he has bad eyesight), and re-sell it.

Oh puhleese!

You take the hard drive out and destroy it.

Sorry if I missed your sarcasm.

Ah....but not if he took it to the shop for repair as I said in my post. If he want to destroy the info on it, you remove and destroy the hard drive as Skeptic Ginger said.

The FBI took something, or nothing. We have only a receipt for a computer in the NYPost article. A third page is added to the document there, but has no connection to the other two pages.

So we know that the FBI received a MacBook Pro from someone and then Giuliani presents this as evidence that it is Hunter Biden's MacBook. It could have been any MacBook anywhere with that number.

The third page is a printed receipt for a computer. Anyone can print that. I can print that with Word.

That's why it's brilliant, don't you see? It's like when you need to hide a body, it's best to take it straight into the police station. It's the last place they'll ever look!

No, you get some unsuspecting repairman on the other side of the country to scrub the disk. You would make a lousy criminal.

I'd have to change parties to make a good criminal. :D

But what happens if want to save that favorite photo of yourself with a crack pipe?

Again, you are misstating this. It's more like you are claiming that Walgreens sent me an email saying they sold me Heroin.

First of all I could safely deny it based on having searched my email and also not being involved in anything relating to Heroin. Then, were there money on the line I could get independent verification that there was no such email evident in my inbox. Since I am nobody of any significance, that is all I could do. Were I Biden though, I could get Walgreen to confirm that they hadn't sent the email. They would almost certainly have their email logged in an auditable way so we could get proof one way or the other. Were I Biden I would also be able to get Apple to confirm if the email had been received.

Maybe they will produce proof like this.

Pretending that what is easy for a campaign spending hundreds of millions of dollars and with institutional support should necessarily be easy for me is feeble.

Plus, as hard as Fox is trying, nobody is picking this garbage up. There’s no reason to address it, nobody cares what Giuliani says.

I'm not sure I'm assuming that at all.

These emails involved multiple cloud email providers, as well as a DC based international law firm and I don't know who else. There are going to be logs there, and in the case of the law firm probably non-alterable copies of the email, if anybody wants to look at them.

Have I mentioned before that retaining e-mails indefinitely is not a standard practice? Have I also mentioned that some people delete e-mails immediately? I'm pretty sure I mentioned that Apple would not have copies of e-mails or records of sending/receiving just because someone is using a Mac to deal with their e-mail.

Your continued insistence that it would be easy to disprove the authenticity of a faked e-mail is at odds with reality.

Given that nothing about the story makes sense in reality, as noted more than once, there is no benefit to the Bidens or the Biden campaign to substantively address this non-scandal.

Good point. Why would Hunter download his actual emails onto his hard drive when he can access them from any computer? How did Giuliani get access to them? Does he have Hunter's password?

E-mails would typically be downloaded to the hard drive as they are read. Depending on the provider's settings (and perhaps user settings), they can even be automatically deleted from the server upon download. This is less common now that e-mails are accessed from multiple devices since it would be inconvenient to open an e-mail on a PC and then not have it for reference if needed on a smartphone.

Still, a smart computer user shouldn't keep every e-mail message after dealing with it and should only retain those that have important information, and deleting an e-mail locally should always delete the e-mail on the remote server.

Have you checked the email address he was using? One of them is rhbdc@icloud.com.

No it isn't. I'm imagining the law firm who sent at least one of the emails. Are you telling me that they have no idea what emails they have sent in the past and no way of proving it? If one of their lawyers makes a mistake, or does something foolish, the lawyer can just delete the email and the law firm has no way of finding the data? I find that hard to believe.

That's a strategic question, and all I can say to it is "we will see".

People who do a lot of travelling often want to do their email without access to the internet. One way to achieve that would be to install a client on the laptop and sync the mail to it.

That shouldn't apply to the law firm, or the investment fund's email systems though.

I'm starting to feel that shutIt has me on ignore, but for the record denying something is not disproving something. You've repeatedly claimed it should be easy to disprove emails (of which nothing but screenshots have been released) but so far you seem unable to explain what would disprove them. How can you claim it should be easy to do something if you can't come up with anything other than 'say uh-huh that wasn't me?'

Just to keep hammering away, how would you prove someone else didn't send an email? How would you prove you didn't send an email? We don't have the emails. We don't have metadata. We have a screenshot of a purported email. How do you disprove that? You are claiming it is easy to prove a negative, but so far your "proof" consists of "deny it." That's not proof.

The email in the original NY Post article had the message as having been sent to Hunter Biden's work email account. I don't know how things work with Apple computers, but with my Windows 10 computer my work email is not stored on my computer even though with mandatory telework I exclusively use my computer to read my work email (my personal email is also not stored on my laptop - that would only happen if I used Outlook for my email).

I'll tell you what: Produce one of these supposed e-mails intact and it might be worth further discussing data retention policies with you. Unfortunately for this story, this has yet to be proven to have happened at all.

You are on my ignore list, but none the less.... these emails have been sent from a law firm and an investment fund. If you don't think they have the capacity to confirm/deny to a legally defensible standard that these emails were sent by them, then I don't know what to tell you. These are companies who Biden worked for/with and who are being accused of wrong doing here. That is ignoring what ever logs Apple and Google will have.

If they want to refute that they sent these emails, they easily can.

We know who it was sent from and to, the subject and the time it was sent. It isn't 5 minutes work to check the archive if their email archive is any good, and a few hours to a couple of days if it isn't.

The companies involved have no skin in the game at the moment. They open their mouths and they open themselves to attack from one or both sides.

Not worth it.