The things that happened and were said by Trump during his presidency was so unfathomably bad that I don't think the US will recover its status abroad for a long time. It doesn't matter who gets to be president next. The fact that a grifting Russia-owned mobster with an equally grifting family got elected to the highest office in (arguably) the world, is still hard to believe to this day.
> FBI jumps in to say “it’s Russian disinformation”
This did not happen. As the article details, before the election the FBI gave a general warning and Facebook came to their own conclusion that the laptop looked like Russian disinformation.
The FBI told Facebook "Be on the lookout for an uptick in disinformation campaigns." A few weeks later, the Hunter Biden laptop story broke. It had all the hallmarks of what the FBI was warning about, plus if you remember correctly, there was a lot of propaganda from the Dems and former CIA officials saying it was Russian misinformation.
> After the election story turns out to be 100% true
Not entirely. The laptop was real, yes, but at the time Trumpists were claiming it had everything from evidence of Biden's conspiracy to steal the election to his child porn stash. This wasn't a story about Presidential Candidate Joe Biden, it was a story about his son that the Trumpists hoped would destroy his candidacy somehow.
Given how much deliberate disinformation and BS the Trump camp was putting out at the time (Sharpiegate? Dominion voting machines? Boxes full of fake ballots?) the reaction to the briefcase shouldn't surprise anyone. Of course, most of what was claimed about the briefcase was still false, because it was mostly an attempt at repeating the character assassination by proxy of the DNC email scandal. If you want to blame anyone, blame the messengers for crying wolf so often.
Weren't only some emails authenticated? The details on how the Washington Post authenticated them weren't enough to make me trust that they knew what they're doing. Email is famously unencrypted in a lot of its transit; could it have been sniffed? Could Biden have been the victim of spyware that captured the emails? It may very well be real, but the story about how it got to the press is bizarre, and the evidence is messy.
> According to the New York Post story, a person—who Mac Isaac could not identify because he is legally blind—left the computer at the repair shop to repair water damage, but once this was completed, the shop had no contact information for its owner, and nobody ever paid for it or came to pick it up.
The easiest thing to get traction would just to release it anonymously but it never happened. There was that tiny 4chan leak but it basically was nothingburger.
> In their examinations, Green and Williams found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.
> Maxey had alerted The Washington Post to this issue in advance, saying that others had accessed the data to examine its contents and make copies of files. But the lack of what experts call a “clean chain of custody” undermined Green’s and Williams’s ability to determine the authenticity of most of the drive’s contents.
That might all be true but it distracts from the original point - the FBI helped suppress information about a candidate prior to a Presidential election under the claim it was “disinformation” but had no evidence it was. They just said "it looks like Russian disinformation".
That should worry anyone no matter who you voted for.
Sure, the Trump side may be guilty of twisting it into something it's not, but I'm pretty sure "let's have the FBI suppress true stories to stop them from being twisted for political gain" is a terrible way to address it.
As I read the article, it doesn't suggest the FBI knew the story about Hunter Biden's laptop was true at the time, so the claim that they were "suppressing true stories," while technically correct, is a disingenuous framing of events.
It seems the FBI didn't order Facebook to suppress that story specifically, rather they warned Facebook generally about misinformation and propaganda, and Facebook (along with everyone else) decided of their own volition to suppress the story about the laptop. A story which, we both admit, was surrounded by a cloud of misinformation regardless of the kernel of truth in the middle. So they weren't even entirely wrong to do so on that account.
You could say that Facebook and the media were caught up in something of a moral panic about disinformation at the time, and overreacted, and I might agree.
And again - this wasn't information about a candidate. As far as I know, the only link to Joe Biden is that Hunter Biden introduced a Russian businessman to him when he was Vice President. That's hardly Watergate.
The content of the laptop is not the point in question. The ability of the FBI and the media to bury a factual story right before an election is the problem.
If the sides had been flipped and the FBI said potentially negative news about Trump was "disinformation" (without proof) I'd be just as concerned.
And take a look at the NYTimes article from Oct 2020. It details the fact the FBI had seen the laptop a year earlier (including a receipt from the Baltimore FBI office and confirmation from the FBI). It knew it wasn't Russian disinformation before the story ever broke.
And a nothing burger. Amazing how a Coke addict who failed upwards to get a cushy c suite job like many, is supposed to sway the election but the Trump family running a fraudulent university and a fraudulent charity, paying millions in fines, isn’t literally a disqualification.
To me the simplest explanation is Hunter Biden was selling the perception of proximity to Joe Biden. Which is skeevy but IMO doesn’t reflect on Joe Biden as anything except a shitty father.
It is a big story on the conservative side of the ever more inflamed culture war. Few recognize it as a civil war because it’s 2022, and so is being fought with information rather than gunpowder. Mostly. So far.
- Right before a presidential election a major story breaks about a Presidential candidate
- FBI jumps in to say “it’s Russian disinformation”
- Story suppressed across the media including online as “disinformation”
- After the election story turns out to be 100% true