It would have been much better if they responded to the factual claims Greenwald laid out in the article they refused to publish. I read that article, and his argument for why the Biden emails pass at least the plausibility bar sound reasonable.
BTW, the DKIM signature on at least one of the emails has been verified:
EDIT: OK, rather than downvoting, which isn't going to change my mind, why don't you help address his points? If you change my mind, I'll go try to change other people's minds.
"The Hunter Biden documents have at least as much verification as those other archives [the Panama Papers, Wikileaks war logs, Podesta / DNC emails from 2016] that were widely reported. There are sources in the email chains who have verified that the published emails are accurate. The archive contains private photos and videos of Hunter whose authenticity is not in doubt. A former business partner of Hunter has stated, unequivocally and on the record, that not only are the emails authentic but they describe events accurately, including proposed participation by the former Vice President in at least one deal Hunter and Jim Biden were pursuing in China. And, most importantly of all, neither Hunter Biden nor the Biden campaign has even suggested, let alone claimed, that a single email or text is fake."
Add to that that at least one email has had its DKIM signature verified (see the link above).
I hate Trump and think a second term would be an unmitigated disaster for our democracy. Even if the worst of the allegations or insinuations were true I think Biden would be better for our country than Trump. If I were an editor of a newspaper, I'd certainly think twice before publishing something like this, even if I thought they were accurate.
But I would never throw shade on a fellow journalist for writing something like this. And as a voter, if I'm going to choose the lesser of two evils, I want to know just how evil the lesser one is.
Greenwald published the e-mail correspondence with his editors on his Substack. I would argue that the feedback doesn't question the authenticity of the e-mail, but instead, the narrative being pushed that isn't fully supported by the e-mails.
The closest they came to suggesting that the e-mails were not authentic were these two points, addressing Greenwald:
"You spend quite a bit of the piece explaining why authentication efforts have been more than sufficient to satisfy any reasonable requirement of verification, but a key reason news organizations have cited for their lack of full confidence in the documents is their inability to access the hard drive; your draft does not mention that. It is hard to report on and authenticate an archive you do not possess."
"And I do think you should treat the origin story of the hard drive β that it came from the Delaware repair store β with a bit more skepticism. Itβs true that nothing has emerged yet to significantly undermine it, but it remains a very strange story surrounded by many unanswered questions."
Reading the editor feedback as a whole, I think they were totally fine with Greenwald claiming that the released e-mails are authentic.
BTW, the DKIM signature on at least one of the emails has been verified:
https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim
EDIT: OK, rather than downvoting, which isn't going to change my mind, why don't you help address his points? If you change my mind, I'll go try to change other people's minds.
"The Hunter Biden documents have at least as much verification as those other archives [the Panama Papers, Wikileaks war logs, Podesta / DNC emails from 2016] that were widely reported. There are sources in the email chains who have verified that the published emails are accurate. The archive contains private photos and videos of Hunter whose authenticity is not in doubt. A former business partner of Hunter has stated, unequivocally and on the record, that not only are the emails authentic but they describe events accurately, including proposed participation by the former Vice President in at least one deal Hunter and Jim Biden were pursuing in China. And, most importantly of all, neither Hunter Biden nor the Biden campaign has even suggested, let alone claimed, that a single email or text is fake."
Add to that that at least one email has had its DKIM signature verified (see the link above).
I hate Trump and think a second term would be an unmitigated disaster for our democracy. Even if the worst of the allegations or insinuations were true I think Biden would be better for our country than Trump. If I were an editor of a newspaper, I'd certainly think twice before publishing something like this, even if I thought they were accurate.
But I would never throw shade on a fellow journalist for writing something like this. And as a voter, if I'm going to choose the lesser of two evils, I want to know just how evil the lesser one is.