Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

conix, You keep repeating "And the FBI sat on the Hunter Biden laptop before the election...and
after." as accepted fact when it is far from it. You have been given these more than once before.

Excerpt: ----------
House Republicans’ attempts to claim government officials played a role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story have often gone well beyond the established facts .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/09/holes-jim-jordans-convoluted-weaponization-theory/?itid=lk_inline_manual_2 . Now they’re turning to the Biden campaign’s role.

As before, though, the evidence isn’t as compelling as advertised.

In a new letter .. https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/2023-04-20-jdj-mt-to-blinken-re-public-statement-on-hunter-biden-emails_0.pdf , House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) reveal details of a recent interview with former acting CIA director Michael Morell. At issue is an Oct. 19, 2020, statement from 51 former intelligence officials .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/13/hunter-biden-laptop-claims-russian-disinfo/?itid=lk_inline_manual_5 .. that Morell spearheaded. The statement suggested that the laptop story, published in the New York Post, might be part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

Morell said in his testimony that he had spoken with Biden campaign senior adviser (and now secretary of state) Antony Blinken about the Hunter Biden laptop story two days earlier, on Oct. 17, and he agreed that conversation “triggered” his intent to write the statement. Morell also said Blinken that day shared with him a USA Today .. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/10/17/fbi-probes-possible-russia-link-hunter-biden-data-trump-ally-giuliani/3661895001/ .. story about the FBI investigating whether the story was tied to a Russian disinformation campaign.

Morell told an associate that the Biden campaign had suggested the statement be shared with a particular reporter for The Washington Post. (The Washington Post did not initially write about the statement, which Politico was the first to report on.) He also said part of his motivation was to “help Vice President Biden.”

The implication of the letter — which Jordan spelled out more explicitly Thursday night on Fox News — is that the Biden campaign was creating a pretext for suppressing the story, using the former intelligence officials.

“Then, quickly, it turns into this political operation — that letter that became the basis for suppressing the story and keeping it from the American people just days before the most important election we have: election for president of the United States,” Jordan said on Fox.

The Jordan-Turner letter connects this to social media companies blocking or limiting the sharing of the story, saying of the Oct. 19 statement, “Social media companies simultaneously restricted access to the [New York] Post story.”

But the letter appears to have omitted key context, including whether Blinken actually pushed for such a statement.

On Friday afternoon, House Democrats released an excerpt from Morell’s interview .. https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=5150 .. in which Morell actually addressed that. Asked whether Blinken had directed, suggested or insinuated that he should write such a statement, Morell said, “My memory is that he did not.”

“Mr. Morell testified that Mr. Blinken did not hint that the Biden campaign ‘could use some help on this’ or suggest that Mr. Morell should ‘cook up something’ that the campaign should use,” the House Judiciary Democrats said.

The Republicans’ claim of suppression also doesn’t really comport with the timeline, insofar as this is about social media suppression.

In fact, the Oct. 19 statement came five days after the initial New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Twitter and Facebook had begun restricting the story shortly after it was published, citing concerns about the provenance of the information and whether it was hacked. This had been an issue late in the 2016 campaign, when Russia interfered on Donald Trump’s behalf.

But Twitter actually apologized for its decision and said it had stopped blocking links to the story and documents by Oct. 16 .. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/technology/twitter-new-york-post.html . In testimony to Jordan’s committee in February, former Twitter chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde said, “Twitter changed its policy within 24 hours and admitted its initial action was wrong. This policy revision immediately allowed people to tweet the original articles with the embedded source materials.”

(Twitter would continue to block the New York Post’s Twitter account for two weeks. Former top officials have said both moves were mistakes.)

Facebook’s restrictions took the form of decreasing distribution of the story, rather than blocking it. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has said this lasted for “five or seven days .. https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/26/tech/mark-zuckerberg-joe-rogan-interview/index.html .. when it was basically being determined whether [the story] was false.” That would place the end point on Oct. 19 or a couple days later.

The other issue is the content of the statement. While the Jordan-Turner letter describes it as being “infamous,” the statement was more nuanced than it was initially described both in the media and by Joe Biden himself, as The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler recently wrote .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/13/hunter-biden-laptop-claims-russian-disinfo/?itid=lk_inline_manual_28 .

The statement said that the situation “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” while saying that it didn’t have direct evidence of that. It also allowed that the contents of the laptop could be genuine. But the Oct. 19 Politico headline stated more categorically, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” Joe Biden then said at an Oct. 22 debate that the intelligence officials had said this was “a Russian plan.”

As Kessler wrote, “In fact, the letter mainly argues that Russia may have had a role in obtaining and disseminating Hunter Biden’s emails — which could mean as little as Russian bots spreading awareness on social media.”

Perhaps the argument could be that the intelligence officials’ statement wasn’t the “basis” for the social media restrictions, but rather for later alleged suppression of the story in the broader media.

But the statement was merely one of numerous data points that existed at the time and led to caution about the story.
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Given to you again here, including again Desert Drifter's excellent little note to you:

conix, Since you have nothing but Jim Jordan disinformation false fact litter to rely on here is a lifeboat you could have read already. It's linked in

House GOP’s latest Hunter Biden laptop theory is less than meets the eye
[... including this excellent note to you from DD ...]
You CANNOT tell me that you, as a 'progressive" Democrat, are not a little bit concerned what is being discovered by the Committee investigating Hunter Biden.
Look, birdbrain, you were addressing me, so you got responded to. I can truly say that your statement is just you doing your masturbatory drivel. I care about as little as Hunter as I do for the son of the guy you voted for multiple times and are ready to vote for again. One difference between trump junior and hunter biden is that biden got help for his substance abuse problem and your guy still goes on air baked out of his gourd on coke. Two, shitgibbon junior is tied to daddy in all their business dealings, such as tax frauds, etc. What little I have seen about hunter that can be construed as fact does not rise to the level of fraud, but I don't follow it closely as I have better things to do than follow your conspiracy theories. So maybe you should be beating yourself up for supporting that family, as you did, have, and plan to if he is nominated again. But republicans tend to have no shame, you fit right in with that mentality. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171866202
[...]
Jim Jordan and company allege the Biden campaign got former intelligence officials to help suppress the story
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