Yeah. Aren't we all? :D

"But admit this one small detail in a casual comment you made in passing is wrong while I ignore absolutely everything else!"

I doubt it has anything to compete with Hunter complaining to Joe that his sister in law/ex-lover has complained to his therapist that he has been sexually inappropriate with his 14 year old niece. It's like Jerry Springer. If you can make one of Trump's businesses opening a bank account in China when he was doing business in China as interesting the Biden story, good luck to you.

This is a non sequitur. I haven't claimed that the investigation is or isn't at any stage. Either it is the case that they have checked up on the origins of the laptop, in which case the FBI know whether Hunter Biden dropped it off or they haven't, which if the claims about them thinking it was part of a Russian disinformation effort, would be a bit shocking.

OK. So the idea here is that the FBI find out that there is a plot to use this laptop to interfere with the election. The laptop is then used to interfere with the election. The FBI then pass no comment for fear of interfering with the election. They are running this like Jean-Luc Picard on an away mission afraid of violating the Prime Directive. I have a hard time believing they would behave in this way if the emails/photographs had been faked by the Russians. If it's all genuine, maybe.

What fraudulent Steele report would that be? The only one I know of by Steele was the one largely corroborated by the Mueller probe (even though Mueller whitewashed that fact as hard as he could, it still came out dirty).

Well, yeah. The NYT isn't really into sordid gossip-mongering.

Hunter Biden: "And I would have gotten away with it to, if it wasn't for those meddling kids, I mean Trump cultist!"

Oh my word, you so didn't look. :sdl:

Is this propaganda or a turn in events? Seems I recall a FBI statement that the agency had no present information that would contradict Ratcliffe"s assessment that the hard drive story was not a Russian construction. That's not the same thing as stating the FBI has confirmed Ratcliffe's assessment

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...paign=msn_feed

It's a smear job. And like conspiracy theories and pseudo-science and religion and... well pretty much every other form of "wrong" it's operating on "Well I haven't been proven wrong" logic.

A bed made out of ironwood - with extra lead weighting in the base?

Are you sure it wasn't Borat's daughter?

Which is exactly why the Russians would create a misinformation scandal story exactly like this. They ain't stoopid. They know what appeals to the voter who reads grocery store tabloids, watches Fox, and attends Trump rallies.

This is Trump's last ditch desperate Hail Mary. The GOP Senate investigation found no wrongdoing on Biden's part. The Durham report isn't coming out before the election to 'save' him. So who's he gonna call? Giuliani! :jaw-dropp

Yeah there's a reason every other made up conspiracy theory smear jobs aimed at Democrats involved "Sex" and/or "Those new fangled computer things."

You might want to tell Steele LOL https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...lusion-in-2016

"British ex-spy Christopher Steele testified he met with Democratic lawyers during the 2016 presidential election, and one provided him with now-debunked claims about alleged Trump-Russia collusion as he compiled his dossier."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulrod.../#5937e9b36867

No. Nothing of interest from the Steele report could be corroborated.

Correction, Shokin was not investigating Burisma, despite their being an open criminal file (and plenty of evidence) on both the company and its owner Mykola Zlochevsky. Largely at the prompting of the UK authorities, the EU, US and IMF started pressuring him to investigate and when that didn't work pressured the Ukrainian government to fire him which eventually did work.

Hunter Biden walked into the situation like an idiot, but despite the fact that any serious investigation of Burisma would look bad for Hunter, and possibly land him in hot water, his father Joe as VP was the strongest backer in the US of the efforts to get the investigation going properly.

Sacking Shokin made it more likely, not less, that Hunter Biden would land in legal trouble, thus tarnishing his father's political reputation. If Joe Biden were corrupt he'd have pushed hard against any attempts to sack Shokin.

Would they? Conceivably.

Did they? There's no evidence of that.

SHHHHHHH! You're not supposed to comment on ongoing investigations, Special Agent Ziggurat!

How does that make the report fraudulent?

The NYT published stories about Trump and Pissgate and the claims of a prostitute that the President's penis was shaped like a mushroom from Mario Kart. I'm not sure the NYT is in a position to act like sordid gossip is beneath them.

Not quite the same. It’s surely sordid, but it wasn’t quite gossipy. There was an actual thing called the Steele Dossier that detailed sordid activities. Stormy Daniels wrote a book that they may have covered. Those were newsworthy items.

These underage sex rumors are just that. Nothing but pure gossip. No corroboration. No one credible willing to put their names on the line and say they actually saw this. That’s the definition of gossip.

I don't think there's even that. From what I've read, it's pictures of a topless 14 year old. That's not "sex".

Were those now-debunked claims in the Steele dossier?

The more I learn about this story, the less I think there's Russian disinformation behind it. It's just so damn dumb. They have to have better ideas than that.

I'm just picturing a young analyst in Moscow or wherever the hell these guys are, talking about a new scheme of "finding" an inappropriate email on a laptop but not bothering to actually fake one but actually it's child pornography but maybe it isn't and they're giving it to a computer guy whose security system doesn't work but he'll swear he saw Hunter Biden even though he's blind and his shop is nowhere near anywhere Hunter Biden would need a computer disposed of but only a couple of miles from Joe Biden's house and it must be an attempt to get rid of it because he was told to repair it and hold onto it but no one ever picked it up so instead he calls Steve Bannon who calls Guiliani who picks it up and calls Hannity's old producer to write a story that they need to get published without verification which even Fox News won't do despite everyone being on a first name basis with the hacks who work there so they'll go to the New York Post who'll run it but even their writers won't put their names on the byline and that will surely make it all airtight and convincing and then and then and then

And then his supervisor would come over.
He would pull up a chair, one of those old school, gray-painted ones with a thick metal frame and rolling wheels that squeal like nails on a chalkboard.

He would look the analyst in the eyes, and softly say Comrade. Comrade Badenov. You are an excellent analyst. You have been pushing yourself too hard. I think you need a few days off. Go home. Come back when you are rested and dry.

Or it was a beginner's first effort by the young work-experience tovarich that accidentally got loose in the wild.

Or maybe it's a meta disinformation scheme - designed to resemble disinformation schemes, only to raise doubts that it's a disinformation scheme, except it really is a disinformation scheme and being stupid enough to be real is part of the disinformation.

Diss-inception.

That doesn't make it not gossipy.

Well of course :rolleyes: . As we know it always seems harder for a Democrat to get out of a scandal than a Republican. Democrats on average need to work harder than Republicans for electoral success on top of PR.

Maybe Borat provided the laptop to Rudy?

I just remember how Trump told us how the truth was coming out any day now about Obama's birth certificate. He had sent a special investigator to Hawaii who had discovered explosive information! Then there's how they have all this HUGE evidence of the greatest political crime in US history like we've never seen of Obama spying on his campaign that.....went nowhere. Then there was all this evidence of Hillary's crimes through the years that ...well you get the idea. We're always going to all this evidence of some huge crime that just never seems to go anywhere. Same song, different tune.

I just want whoever is reading this post to know: You are having a significantly better day than Rudy Giuliani.

GAWP! That first image...


HEEEEERK! :gasp::sour::wide-eyed:hypnotize

This is a complete stab-in-the-dark guess:

The laptop really did belong to Hunter Biden, but he did not drop it off at any repair shop. Rather it was stolen from him, and, as others have suggested, now contains a mixture of his emails and files and forgeries from Russian intelligence. The whole repair shop story just doesn't pass a laugh test at all.

So Bill Barr's "October Surprise" did happen. Just that it wasn't a surprise on the Democrats. It was a major back-fire on Trump by nutbag Rudi.

Surprise!

:rolleyes:

Yeah no.

Why make up a convoluted story about a laptop that either doesn't exist or has absolutely no connection to Hunter Biden?

Meh. I think it is Hunter's Macbook. And he did drop it off at the repair shop in Delaware. However, he gave the Macbook HD contents to someone* back in Dec. 2019 according to this article from Heavy (last updated Oct. 15 2020).

https://heavy.com/news/john-paul-mac-isaac/

Therefore, it has already been checked out and nothing incriminating has been found. Giuliani is just trying to become a player again.

*insert Government agency here.

ETA: And Mac Isaac doesn't look blind in any of his pictures.

I think both things can be true - the laptop is connected to Hunter and there is something dodgy about the computer shop guy's story.

ETA: As far as I can tell, a grand jury subpoena does not necessarily mean that it was issued by a grand jury.

From law.com:

Where is a single shred of evidence there was ever a Hunter Biden laptop involved in this at all ?????????

Look how insidious this purely fabricated propaganda** injected into the social media stream becomes fact or partial fact.

**Because we have no evidence whatsoever that it is not fabricated.