How admirably neutral of them. I'm sure, just like everybody else they have minimal interest in who wins the election. It's a pity that the Democrats don't have more influence in DC.

Amazingly, GOP aren't jumping in to "prove" diddly either.

Seems everyone rational is staying away from this **** show.

Story not picking up with major news. By election time, Giuliani scheme may be all exposed.
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/ncna...mpression=true

If they provided information clearing Biden, the company would be refuting evidence that the company had been involved in corruption. If the company provided evidence implicating Biden, the company would be providing evidence that the company had been involved in corruption. The situations are not symmetrical.

Both sides are presumably thinking strategically here, so just because today they haven't provided proof one way or the other doesn't mean that they won't tomorrow.

You are no longer claiming that it's easy to disprove these screenshots then? Now your claim is that a law firm denying something will be considered proof? I would ask you to consider whether law firms routinely deny things in court that are subsequently found to have happened.

Again, why should any company address such complete ********? You're asking them to play your fools game.

This fool is out of it. Keep trying to find others.

You're still not disproving that I sent you the e-mail.

One other interesting thing here. These emails don't look to come from a single hacked email account. There is no single email account on all the emails so far released. Either somebody has hacked multiple email systems, or it looks like we are talking about something like somebody getting access to Hunter's laptop.

No, again... I am not Joe Biden. What is easy for him, is not necessarily easy for me.

"People in personal trouble, as Hunter Biden was in 2014, often ignore good advice, and that seems to be the case here. The consultant, elaborating on a fragmentary account I reported in March, told me that he was approached in the spring of 2014 by one of Biden’s friends, who was worried about his plans to join Burisma.

The consultant said he met Biden and the friend for drinks at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Georgetown. Biden described the discussions between Burisma and his company, Rosemont Seneca Partners, which he had founded five years before with Christopher Heinz and Archer, both friends from Yale.

Biden asked the consultant about some of the Ukrainians involved with Burisma, whom Archer had encountered in Kyiv. Burisma was pursuing new gas leases in Ukraine that it claimed might attract international investment, the consultant remembers, and wanted prominent people on its board.

The consultant made some inquiries about several senior Burisma executives and then met with Biden a week later. The consultant told Biden the planned Burisma gas licenses involved small assets that weren’t likely to attract foreign investors, and cautioned the vice president’s son against working for the company.

“They’re using you for your name. They will exploit your name to your detriment and your father’s,” the consultant remembers warning Biden."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...f08_story.html

Now we are getting back to the strategic thing. Maybe it is better to not answer accusations of criminality that could easily be refuted than to refute them. It is possible that they take that view. If the emails are fake, and Biden wanted to prove it, I have a hard time believing that these companies wouldn't cooperate.

If you can't imagine a way it can be done, claiming it is easy to do seems like a BS way to lend unearned legitimacy to an illegitimate claim.

As shutIt says I'm on ignore, I'll just keep shouting into the void. If these screenshots are easily refuted in your opinion, you should be able to explain how they could be refuted. So far we have "deny it", "have a law firm deny it", and "so what if I can't, it should be easy for Biden." None of those hold water.

I already explained how it could be done. You have a lot of companies involved here any one of whom could say whether the emails were genuine. Now Fox seems to be claiming to have sources that confirm the Chinese emails.

The next couple of weeks will be interesting watching this play out.

It has already played out. True believers are just behind the curve.

OK, well lacking your Nostradamus like powers of precognisance, I'm going to have to wait to see it play out.

From your article.

Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop: An explainer

Keep us posted. Also let us know if that flat earth thing ever panned out.

Your explanation was that Biden should deny it, or that some law firm should deny it. You continue to ignore that neither of those things disproves anything. Here, this should help explain why: Let's imagine that Biden did come out and say that the screen shotted email that was supposedly sent to Hunter Biden wasn't sent. Would you then accept that this was false?


I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you wouldn't. You haven't yet accepted anything that exonerates Biden, even if it was in the sources you claimed to get your information from. This says you likely wouldn't accept Biden, or any law firm, or Apple, or any of the relevant intelligence agencies telling you that this is Russian disinformation. So why should Biden give this nonsense the light of day?

Of course I'd accept evidence from the email service provider. If we don't accept things like that then we are effectively choosing what to believe on the basis of which side it benefits. That wouldn't make it utterly beyond challenge, but it would be a high bar for Giuliani to get over and my assumption would certainly be that the emails were false. These emails could turn out to be genuine, or not.

So, the "reporter" who wrote the story involving Bannon and Guiliani? Hannity's old producer.

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/17/92450...ducer-giuliani

This is reaching Mad Magazine levels of journalistic integrity.

How will the email service provider confirm or deny anything? Do we have the hard drive to examine? The email metadata? Anything other than a screenshot?

And I'll repeat, you didn't accept Wikipedia, any of the various linked articles, or any of the various experts quoted within who told you that Biden, along with almost the rest of the world, pressed for Shokin to be fired because Shokin was not investigating Burisma. Rather, you repeatedly claimed the opposite. What should make me believe you would accept a different source correcting a different false claim about Biden?

It's their email system that the email would have passed through. They know who the email was from, who the email was to, what the subject was and when it was sent. What more information would they need?

Wikipedia doesn't and can't know why Biden pushed for Shokin to be fired. That would be an opinion claim rather than a fact claim.

I don't think I am disagreeing with any of the facts in the Wikipedia articles. If Apple said that their logs showed that the email had never arrived on their infrastructure, then that would be a fact claim and, as with the wikipedia article, my default position would be to accept it.

Oh, the actual emails have been released? So far as I knew the NY Post/Giuliani had only released one screenshot and several claims but zero actual emails. You know, the info we'd need to verify, the metadata that people keep telling you hasn't been released?


Wikipedia directly says the international community pushed for Shokin to be fired for refusing to investigate companies including Burisma. You claim he was fired while/for investigating Burisma. You disagree with the plainly stated facts, as laid out on Wikipedia and sourced in their sources.

See above, you have repeatedly made the claim that Shokin was investigating Burisma, which is in disagreement with what Wikipedia, as well as the international community on record at the time claimed.

Further, what actual emails including the metadata have been released for Apple to investigate?

So far, without Giuliani or the NY Post releasing more than a screenshot and some unverifiable claims, there is nothing to investigate.

Why the **** should he? God could come down from on high and pronounce the emails fake and it wouldn't change one ******* thing. This has nothing to do with the actual facts and everything to do with simply spreading lies because some people, like yourself apparently, suck those lies right up.

This is also why I'm not sure why anyone is engaging in this argument with you.

If you think it's only one email that has been provided, then you haven't been following the story. When I've been involved in data retrieval from email systems for court cases as so forth you typically get the email addresses of the people of interest, keywords or a subject and a date range.

Yes, and I have neither looked into, nor disputed this. I'm perfectly prepared to believe that people in the EU and US government made statements about thinking this prosecutor was corrupt.

No. Wikipedia doesn't and can't know what Biden's motivations or the motivations of the Ukrainian government were.

Wikipedia says the investigation was stalled. I have no opinion about that. Supposedly he was fired for not pushing forward with investigating/prosecuting Burisma and hence Biden got him fired. He was then replaced by a prosecutor who cleared Burisma of wrongdoing.... only for some time later evidence to come to light that caused the oligarch behind Burisma to flee the country. Those facts don't seem to be in dispute, so I'm not sure what we are arguing about.

I don't think you need metadata to investigate this on the server side. It would be nice, but I don't understand why it would be needed. None of the email retrievals I've been involved with relating to legal cases have required metadata beyond what we have here to locate the emails of interest.

The claims aren't unverifiable. Supposedly Fox has sources confirming one of the emails. Any of the companies involved, and certainly the law firm and the investment fund could locate the emails, if they exist, based on the information provided. Of course, if they do exist and they match the emails Giuliani has shown, then that would implicate them in corruption.

I didn't say he should. I'm saying it should be easy for him to do if he wants to. As I've said repeatedly, presumably his campaign don't feel it is in his strategic interest to do so. Perhaps as has been suggested on the thread it is because they believe that saying nothing is the best way to kill the story.

I disagree with this. Letting Trump gather as much focus on the story as possible only for it to be proved fraudulent would be a terrific way to deflate him going into the election. Having everybody ignore the story feeds into the narrative that the media and the Democrats coordinate with one another, though maybe that is a preferable narrative to feed than the alternatives.

Isn't it obvious? Someone is wrong on the internet!

If people stop attacking me by misstating my position, then all we are talking about is whether based on a list of senders and recipients, subject and a timestamp it is easy or impossible to search for traces of an email on an email server. That that is easy seems like a fairly non-contentious point, so perhaps there is indeed nothing to discuss?

:D

Did you miss this part of my post?

This is also why I'm not sure why anyone is engaging in this argument with you.

Please provide a link to the actual emails that have been released, then. Not sources claiming what is in the emails, but the emails themselves.


Just kidding. We both know you can't because they haven't been released.


Is this obtuseness intentional?


We are agreed that Shokin was not investigating Burisma then? Good, I'm glad you finally accepted that. Unfortunately, if you accept that then you're left with nothing nefarious.

Of course they're unverifiable. The Post/Giuliani haven't released them. There is nothing to verify without the actual emails. And even if one or more emails are eventually released and verified, that says nothing about the veracity of any claims about any other unreleased emails. Perhaps you have other posters on ignore, but the whole 'mix up real emails with doctored emails and outright false emails' disinformation campaign has been explained already. For Pete's sake, Trump's own people have been telling him that Giuliani is compromised and likely passing on Russian disinformation.

An interesting article about how unconvinced even the accusers are and that even Giuliani gives it a 50/50 chance of it being a Russian disinformation campaign:

https://www.businessinsider.com/spie...igence-2020-10

Yeah, just to talk about this Russian fabricated bogus trash is a kind of a half-victory. Anyway, the major thing is that mainstream media is so far staying away or openly sceptical. Couldn't they have found some else than that corrupt madman Guliani to peddle this excrement?

As you can see from how QAnon, Obama's birth certificate, all of Trump's constant lies, and this 'excrement' as you aptly call it: we Trump and his cult are in a post-truth world. They can put the most ridiculous crap out there and milk it. Twitter just announced they will no longer block this email fabrication. They claim it was because the NYPost article "could no longer be considered private." But the NYT's take is they are caving to political pressure.

NYT: In Reversal, Twitter Is No Longer Blocking New York Post Article What a mess.

Why would Zuckerberg not be allowed to censor FB? Foxnews censors comments to their stories.

Speaking of Fox, they are happy to spin as much from this as possible. It will soon turn to Russia as the only topic you can keep spinning as news:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ada...-email-kremlin

Worth pointing out that Trump shared the satirical article apparently believing it to be real.

I think it has to do with Rule 203, as to whether you qualify as a 3rd party or a producer of content.

I believe that the FB Terms&Conditions allow Zuckerberg to do whatever the hell he wants.

It's a business decision by Zuckerberg. If he is a content provider, he is responsible for what is posted. If he is just a platform, he is not.

If he's a simple sharing platform, he has every right to show anyone the door biased on any criteria he decides.

if he's a content provider, he has a duty to the truth to not share false information.

There is no place anywhere on the "Content Provider / Platform" hairsplit where it matters.

Dangit guys, we were almost at a point where the type of person Giuliani depended on to be a gullible fool who amplified his transparently stupid BS was going to explain to us why this time the guy known for promoting Russian disinformation campaigns was worth listening to! But Noooo! Now he's going to pretend he never saw this thread and I'm going to go back on ignore and two years from now Daily Mail is going to write a sneeringly comic article about what sort of blithering maroon ever gave this nonsense a moment's credence.

Sigh

Well even with "ignore" your posts seemed completely visible for the purposes of argument. "Gullible" IMO is a charitable way of describing what was going on. Remember birtherism? How hard could it be to prove Barack Obama wasn't born in Kenya? Even with a birth certificate, the evidence was never quite proof-y enough for many Trump supporters. They, and perhaps Trump himself, are still convinced they were right. Trump even tried to shut down his own message, and it fell flat.

Joe Biden is a big boy. He's capable of coming up with his own strategy for dealing with a perpetual-motion innuendo machine, though I don't know what that would look like. Convince voters he didn't receive a given email 4 years ago? Repeat that 36,000 times, or whatever number it's supposed to be? Whack-a-mole indeed. Hillary Clinton couldn't quite manage it, true. But Biden may be somewhat more teachable than she was.

Oh, I agree, but we're told to apply the principle of charity here.

Agreed again. But years later, the more sophisticated innuendo promoters are laughing at those who fell for the birther propaganda. That's why I predict that the Daily Mail or NY Post of tomorrow will be laughing at the rubes they conned this time. Currently, the shutIt's of the world may be necessary to spread the message, but the more transparently bonkers the message the more quickly the Giuliani/NY Posts of the world will throw their "useful idiots" under the bus.

I can't fault Hillary Clinton for falling victim to a decades long smear campaign, no matter how much I appreciate a similar but shorter campaign failing this time. There will always be people willing to believe and amplify even the most glaringly BS claim about their political opponent. I would hope that the American public is becoming more aware of the abysmally retarded propaganda and how to ignore it this time around, but I fear this is a fleeting victory.

The NY Times claims that the NY Post reporter who was the primary author of the article refused to allow his byline to be used because he didn't think that the information had been adequately verified.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/18/b...jl3eESYTWqMRuU

And many other NY Post news staff questioned the legitimacy and adequacy of the evidence behind the origins of the hard drive and the data in it.

Calling someone who once wrote an article in the NYP a NYP reporter is stretching it

This will be dismissed out of hand because the sources are unnamed.

DNI Ratcliffe addresses Adam Schiff's claims of Russian disinfo