Exactly. This looks much more like Greenwald trying to capitalize on hype. The entire spectrum of details around the Biden emails has been roundly debunked and there is tons of evidence to suggest it’s illegitimately sourced by agents directly directed by Trump, from sources with active incentives to try to damage Biden.
It is responsible to decline to run this story. It only serves to feed conspiracy theories and drive disinformation opportunities right at the time of an election.
> The entire spectrum of details around the Biden emails has been roundly debunked
Although I've been following this story, I am not familiar with this round debunking. I realize that the email headers are not available, but have the emails decisively been shown to be illegitimate? Or just difficult to verify?
Thanks for backing your opinion with a good summary like this. It provides a good framework for discussion. People should read it. That said, although it outlines the issues well, I disagree with many of their conclusions. I think in parallel, people should watch the 17 minute version of Carlson's interview with Bobulinksi and determine for themselves how well the details match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zLfBRgeFFo. Or if video averse, read the transcript here: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/10/27/tucker_ca....
Just to pick one example, here's Politifact on the question of who "the chairman" referred to: "Bobulinski has also claimed that Joe Biden was the person described in another message days later as "the Chairman." Whereas the interview goes much further than just a "claim". Instead, it directly shows a text message sent to Bobulinski by Rob Walker (the "Biden family representative") clarifying that "the Chairman" does in fact refer to Joe Biden: https://youtu.be/2zLfBRgeFFo?t=906 (or search the transcript for "the chairman").
Now certainly, the text message might be faked, or Rob Walker might not actually know what was meant. Hopefully, if allowed to happen, future research will be able to determine this. But this is something that can and (probably) should be verified. To reduce this to "Bobulinksi has also claimed" doesn't give adequate weight to fact that Bobulinski did a surprisingly good job of providing verifiable evidence for his interpretation. So yes, read the Politifact article, but also listen to the interview before deciding to trust its conclusions!
There’s also no evidence yet that Donald Trump wore a full body costume and pretended to be Hunter Biden while typing these emails.
Guess that can’t be called debunked either.
“No evidence yet disproving...” is not a standard of evidence for an extreme assertion. It’s ridiculous to act like it is.
The number of logical fallacies in your reply is alarming - and most regular citizens are susceptible to these same fallacies, especially when spammed out in high production infotainment.
I don't think your analogy fits. If someone who was known to be in Trump's presence produced a journal entry from a third party, also known to be in Trump's presence, saying, "Dear Diary, Trump wore a full body costume today...", and you then said that the sourcing of the journal had been "debunked", I'd expect something more than just the naked assertion that the journal was not legitimately sourced, with no serious investigation of the claims of the party producing it.
At least two recipients of emails from the laptop have confirmed their authenticity. Now, maybe there's still some forgery happening here, I don't know. But the idea that it's made up from whole cloth is no longer plausible.
Can you point me to a specific sentence in the Greenwald piece that you think is "debunked"?
Your extended analogy likewise doesn’t fit either. It would be more like if John Bolton sent an email that said, “we should get the big guy to wear a Hunter Biden costume ha ha” and then everyone starts demanding, based on nothing but extrapolating from this email, that Trump in fact has to deny it all and some investigation should be launched.
I think you’re wrong in your last sentence because there is nothing for Biden to deny or refute. The emails are real, probably sourced in a scammy way by Giuliani, but still real. They just do not contain any content that suggests or corroborates any wrongdoing or questionable behavior in any sense other than Hunter Biden has a big mouth and is a bit immature, that’s it.
What aspect of it would you expect needs to be denied or investigated? No part proves or suggests Joe Biden had anything to do with it or had any meetings or any business dealings related to it. No part suggests or proves Hunter Biden leveraged any political promises or power of his father for any profit.
I cannot see what aspect of it you believe is open to investigation. One person ran their mouth about their political figure father and .... nothing. That's all.
We cannot pretend like that requires journalists to devote attention to it - in any other situation they utterly would not. That’s a nothing story 8 days a week. It’s only being inflamed this time because it is politicized to subvert an election.
> The emails are real, probably sourced in a scammy way by Giuliani, but still real.
Agreed - and to be clear, I count Giuliani as the scum of the damn earth (and I say this as a New Yorker).
But do you think that you can say, on one hand, that the emails are real, but that "The entire spectrum of details around the Biden emails has been roundly debunked"?
> They just do not contain any content that suggests or corroborates any wrongdoing or questionable behavior in any sense other than Hunter Biden has a big mouth and is a bit immature, that’s it.
It shows that convincingly, yes. But, we also know that he received a $600k salary as a result. Isn't it worth investigating why? What did he do to be worth this salary?
> “Isn't it worth investigating why? What did he do to be worth this salary?”
No, it really, really isn’t. The FBI already did and found nothing worth prosecuting. There is no reason to even loosely speculate it has a connection to Joe Biden.
It is a 100% non-story, period. Unless some vast new source of information was obtained, there is nothing in it.
“This info contains no wrongdoing and no indication of Joe Biden being involved” is not at all valid pretext for “but shouldn’t it be investigated?”
If that were true, all possible facts that are ever gathered showing no wrongdoing would be justification for constant investigation. Every time someone with noteworthy parents spouted off some immature nonsense, it would be the pretext for never ending persecution by investigation.
This situation truly, truly is not noteworthy. Hunter Biden did some business deals and ran his mouth. In doing so, there is no evidence of anything questionable or illegal. Why would go around opening up big investigations into pieces of information that don’t prove, corroborate or even suggest wrongdoing?
I simply do not trust the FBI. I do not think that the FBI, throughout its history, has earned our trust, and it has done many awful things to betray it. I see no evidence that this entity is materially different than it was when it attempted to gaslight Dr. King into suicide.
I think that this does warrant an investigation. We have the son of a powerful career politician offering to sell access to his Dad's office. We have a foreign corporation cutting a generous check on that basis. We have emails outlining these details in an archive that has been verified in part by one of the people in the "To" field, who was indeed a business partner in an earlier venture. We have an official decision being made during this time, by Joe, which is favorable to the corporation in question.
None of these facts are in dispute.
It seems the only dispute is whether they warrant an investigation by someone with more integrity than the FBI (ideally, a lot more).
While I don’t agree with you, and I believe wide distrust of established justice offices like the FBI is conspiracy theory behavior inflamed by Trump, I at least grant you that if this is your position, I guess it makes sense to also believe all the disinformation around the Hunter Biden emails.
I just feel so sad for the US that it is such a deep epistemological divide.
Almost half the country appears to believe true knowledge no longer derives from fact or observation, but instead derives from speculative conspiracy theories that use lack of evidence to reinforce themselves to the point of being essentially unfalsifiable religious beliefs, like QAnon, Pizzagate, disbelief in basic institutions of justice, refusal to acknowledge or accept whole classes of humans, like trans people, through denial of rights and continued discrimination.
Anyone seeing this and not realizing it is a full on existential threat against basic human rights and decency just isn’t paying attention.
I certainly do not fit the picture you paint. I'm not a Trump supporter, nor do I adhere to any of the silly theories you suggest. I believe wholeheartedly in robust rights, recognition, and respect for marginalized groups. I believe no person is illegal. I have been out in the streets of Portland joining BIPOC leadership in calling for abolition of police and prisons many dozens of the past 150 nights.
Distrust of the FBI doesn't stem from Trump-support and is not related to "refusal to accept whole classes of humans"; it chiefly stems from the fact that it's a historically racist and xenophobic institution that threw itself headlong into trying to violently disrupt civil rights activism, and has never done any serious internal healing since.
The deep, lasting, institutional corruption of the two major political parties is based on fact and observation, including the fact pattern I have laid out in the comment to which you responded, which again, to my knowledge, is not in dispute. Whether or not it amounts to another in a long line of actual instances of self-enrichment at the public's expense is something that I do not trust (and I don't think any reasonable observer can trust) the FBI to investigate and conclude on its own.
If I produce a random TXT file saying jMyles is doing BIG BAD THING X, is it on you to show it is illegitimate? No, it is on whomever is producing this to show it is in fact a real email, from a real source, and not just something they made up on MS Word to win an election, especially if they make up things a mile a minute.
If you are in a position to know such a thing, and you assert its veracity, then I don't think I can properly say that I have "debunked" it without actually investigating your role and showing that your assertion is false.
There is a difference between a claim being unproven - and properly erring on the side of caution and skepticism - and claiming that the story has been investigated and debunked (when, to my knowledge, it has not).
> If I produce a random TXT file saying jMyles is doing BIG BAD THING X, is it on you to show it is illegitimate?
It's on him to deny it, yes. He doesn't have to prove that it's illegitimate, but if he doesn't even say so, then that's reason enough to assume it's true.
Seems like there would be a bit of a risk for a personal DDOS attack by that logic?
This attitude doesn't seem reasonable. Anyone can make up random nonsense about someone else (no federal libel laws in the US...). Acknowledging the nonsense will only legitimize it. Why should the subject of the nonsense have to invest time and energy in debunking/denying it?
I don't think it's too much to ask people to deny any claim made about them by, say, the four largest papers in the US, if that claim is in fact wrong.
I'm simply looking for a more thorough explanation of the claim that "the entire spectrum of claims regarding Hunter Biden has been roundly debunked".
Bubolinski, a recipient on the emails recovered from the laptop, has confirmed that those sent to him are genuine. Has that claim been debunked?
If you are simply saying that the evidence isn't strong enough to say one way or another, fine. But "roundly debunked" means, at least to me, that there has been an investigation and that the factual claims have in some way been shown to be false. That, to my knowledge, hasn't actually happened.
And sure, "anyone can make up random nonsense", but these claims aren't being made by "anyone", but by people with closeness to the situation that not just anyone can claim. And they aren't random nonsense; they are part of a pattern of explaining how a family has become fabulously rich on a 176k salary.
> Exactly. This looks much more like Greenwald trying to capitalize on hype. The entire spectrum of details around the Biden emails has been roundly debunked
Oh please. Let's try to keep the "post-truth" ethos on the Right, rather than adopting it ourselves, mmkay?
Absolutely not. Your comment is absolutely not describing the world.
This story has been completely debunked. I welcome real facts suggesting otherwise, but there truly aren’t any. This story is not being cut because of Evil Democrat Socialites. It’s cut because it truly, really, actually is debunked by well-regarded professional journalists at many other trusted outlets.
Greenwald has spent the last four years on a bizarre war path against the Democratic establishment. This is just more of the same.
The standing claim is that Hunter Biden’s emails do affirmatively show Joe Biden’s involvement in questionable or illegal activity.
The emails do not show that. This has been established by all major news outlets, even Fox News.
Therefore it is debunked.
Now, some totally separate other evidence may show something different. That is irrelevant. The claim is about what these emails affirmatively prove or corroborate. If someone were to say these emails suggest impropriety by Joe Biden, that claim is totally debunked.
The "story" (at least that I am referring to) is that Hunter Biden had these emails and they were released. Is your claim that the emails were forgeries? If not, the NYPost story had relevant, true, information of public interest.
If you're discussing the broader context of the Ukraine prosecutor firing, I agree that there is strong evidence that Biden was not pushing for his firing in response to circumstantial evidence of pressure from his son or anything. Not, to me, strong enough to consider the claim "completely debunked."
The pushed story is that those emails implicate Joe Biden or otherwise call into question his involvement with foreign interests.
It has been completely debunked - the emails do not contain any suggestion, evidence or information that in any way implicates Joe Biden in activity that even might have impropriety, let alone actual impropriety.
Nobody’s saying the emails don’t exist. They appear to have been up for sale in Ukraine for at least a year, suggesting that the Giuliani “found it in Delaware” story is possibly a lie, but the emails exist nonetheless.
Their content has no bearing or connection to Joe Biden. Drawing that line would be deliberate misinformation purely for election destabilization.
> Their content has no bearing or connection to Joe Biden. Drawing that line would be deliberate misinformation purely for election destabilization.
The emails mention his father, a meeting, etc. There's obviously some connection, but claiming that the emails are referencing a meeting with Joe is not "deliberate misinformation."
I'm sorry, but it's just pretty clear that your threshold for what constitutes a "debunking" is much lower than mine.
It's a stupid reason to not vote for Biden anyways, but I think it is better to be honest.
Emphatically no. A son possibly mentioning his dad and alluding to things you are wildly speculating about is not “some connection.”
Every credible journalist would laugh you out of the room if you try to frame that as if it’s legitimate in any way or counts as evidence of anything besides Hunter Biden having a big mouth.
Just as they are shutting down even Greenwald if he is going to try to pull that same disingenuous crap just to keep pushing his crusade against the Democratic party leaders.
My parents are both retired journalists in DC, one a former editor-in-chief of a publication with millions of paid subscriptions. Both voted for Biden.
They have also expressed their concern with the response to the Hunter Biden story, but I won't name them for obvious reasons.
I understand that you have a vested interest in presenting this as open-and-shut, but in no way are you speaking for "every credible journalist" unless you mean in a tautological no-true-scotsman way.
It’s very scary that disinformation conspiracy theories affected them like that.
And I mean this absolutely sincerely, from the POV of open journalism, high priority for inquiry into our democratic process, freedom of the press.
The way the Hunter Biden email story has morphed into basically a manipulative, disinformation campaign to overwhelm citizens and undercut basic trust in journalistic integrity and election procedures is staggering and frightening - as this anecdote about your parents being swindled by it highlights.
It could be a no true scotsman issue on my part, or it could be that really, actually the story is completely debunked and belief in it indicates departure from credible journalism to instead embrace partisan conspiracy theories.
The evidence really, actually suggests the latter in this case.
> It’s very scary that disinformation conspiracy theories affected them like that.
The existence of the emails is not disinformation, nor has it been discredited. You're attaching all of these claims to what "the story" is and using it to make extremely condescending remarks about reputable journalists (and my parents).
Good day, can't wait for after Nov. 3rd for people to return to normal.
It is responsible to decline to run this story. It only serves to feed conspiracy theories and drive disinformation opportunities right at the time of an election.
I am really disappointed with Greenwald here.