This morning I was pinged by someone after seeing a Tweet that went by on my feed from Maggie Haberman (NYT) linking a lurid New York Post story claiming the smoking gun has been found on Hunter Biden.
This story is riddled with holes and innuendo but, may have some kernels of truth. But all a good disinformation warrior needs to carry out a disinformation campaign, is that Russian formula of 80/20 disinformation to real information, so this story certainly fits that model. The story line thus far, is that some unnamed computer repair store owner received a mac laptop for repair in April of 2019.
The customer who brought in the water-damaged MacBook Pro for repair never paid for the service or retrieved it or a hard drive on which its contents were stored, according to the shop owner, who said he tried repeatedly to contact the client.
The shop owner couldn’t positively identify the customer as Hunter Biden, but said the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunter’s late brother and former Delaware attorney general.
NY Post 10/14/2020
So, yeah, a laptop of uncertain provenance, in the hands of an anonymous computer repair guy, say’s he found incriminating data on the hard drive, and it was subsequently taken by the FBI. Of course the laptop, who brought it in, and who it belonged to are all quite unknown as the anonymous computer guy fails to give any details such as he should have, ya know, like a reciept or a write up of who it belonged to and at least the number he tried to call right?
Say, while we are at this point, would you like to buy a bridge I have for sale? Perhaps a nice piece of swamp land in Florida maybe? Going cheap!
But, I digress… Anywho, yeah, this guy only thinks that this could be Hunter Biden because there is a Beau Biden sticker for the charitable orginization that was set up after his death. Pay no never mind to the fact that this alleged computer repair guy had the WHOLE HARD DRIVE to access and he couldn’t maybe tell who it belonged to just by looking say at the documents folder?
COME ON!
So, yeah, this anonymous guy somehow see’s some nefarious emails (OH LOOK, HE’S IN THE EMAILS ON THE HARD DRIVE AND STILL DOESN’T KNOW WHO THE LAPTOP BELONGS TO?) from Vadim Pozharskyi and BOOM we have the coverup of the century! But wait, it gets better. So this guy calls the FBI and then makes a copy of the hard drive and passes that ILLEGALLY to Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer?
But before turning over the gear, the shop owner says, he made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello.
Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Trump, told The Post about the existence of the hard drive in late September and Giuliani provided The Post with a copy of it on Sunday.
New York Post 10.14.2020
Wow! That’s some epic shit right there! So, are your spidey senses tingling too? Cuz mine are just screaming here. What’s more is that all this began only on the NY Post, in an “exclusive” which means the Post is all in for Trump it seems. That aside, I also had to ask myself why Maggie Haberman was flogging this on Twitter (pssst hey NYT, what the fuck?) without as much as a howdy do on doing any leg work to rebut these allegations. Anyway, if you look further into the article though, you see some screen shots of things like the alleged email from Burisma and photo’s alleged to be of Hunter Biden (from the hard drive? It is not clear) along with a nice picture of the alleged subpoena that was served to the computer store guy that has been “redacted” according to the naming of the file.
Of course this alleged picture has a few issues. First of all, no court case number is conveniently there to look up. Of course no name of the person to be deposed, and then there is the EXIF data that they conveniently left in the photo for people like me to find…
This photo was shot on an iPhone and it has the geolocation still in it. Once you extrapolate that, you get a tavern in Delaware where the photo was snapped.
So, someone with an iPhone took a picture of an allegedly redacted grand jury subpoena in Jessop’s Tavern on January 11th 2020. And this is just popping up now, in October 2020, conveniently a couple weeks from the election of a century… Right… Oh, and there are a couple of Mac specialists with in easy drive of this tavern, so, it may be possible to guess who it may be.
So far, this story has only been getting traction on Fox and Bloomberg other than being on fire, then quickly put out by removal by Facebook. A removal mind you, that has many people in the Trump camp gnashing their teeth about, boo hoo. I would expect this story to get more traction though as I have already seen on Fox one Senator demanding more information from the now defunct Barr/Durham investigation that managed to charge no one with a crime.
Convenient eh?
Lastly, let me just say this, all of this story screams no chain of custody, and a large probability of tampering, hacking, disinformation creation and propagation by forces yet to be seen. The rest of the photos in the story on the post all lack any EXIF/Metadata, which is kinda suspicious, so there is that too. I would not put it past Russian assets and the Trump camp from being central to the creation, curating, and release of this disinfo campaign against Biden now for fullest effect.
I don’t buy it, and neither should you.
K.
