Shit! we forgot an election thread for the midterms. Here it is now.
- Thread starter Godzillarich(aka tf2godz)
- Start date
I didn't say anything about Biden, you're not defending Biden, you're defending the people who signed that letter.
"This info may or may not be real" is not explicitly distancing yourself from "this info isn't real". That's just making the claim with plausible deniability. That's no different at all from a Trumpy "I'm not saying it's true, people are saying it's true, and if it is it's a big deal". It's making the claim while tossing in some extra words for plausible deniability. You would never defend that sort of technicality for someone you didn't view as on your side.
Trump's done lots of wrong things, including on January 6th. A lot of you just won't accept there's options between "complete innocence" and "organized an attempted armed coup".
You're still talking about the laptop. You're still talking about me. Pretending you've left this conversation and then making this post is not a good look.
You absolutely did bring Biden into this-- you pointed to his misrepresentative statement in the debate. I condemned it, and then asked you to condemn the same behaviour from Trump. You refused to do so.
Absolute bollocks. "This info may or may not be real, we don't know" is absolutely, 100% not the same as implying it's real.
Trump does not merely do that. He goes far, far beyond, and you know it. Firstly, he whips people up to act on the assumption that it is real. Which the authors never did. Secondly, for every Trump "just asking questions!" shtick, he will tend to also make factually false statements. Which the authors never did.
Thirdly, the provenance of the information actually is tremendously suspect. Less than 20% has been verified, and other data shows signs of extensive tampering long after Hunter had it. Its entirely worthwhile to remind people of how shaky/unknown it is-- particularly when the President is hammering on about it and making unsubstantiated accusations about it.
EDIT: Wait a minute, weren't you yourself also one of those who said we can't blame Trump for what people take away when he does his "just asking questions" shtick!? Meaning that if you want us to believe they're the same situation, then it also means you're not following your own damn advice!
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You accused me of saying "but Biden" again in response to a post that didn't mention Biden.
No, I did not directly say "I condemn Trump misrepresenting the laptop", but if that's what you need to move on, I condemn Trump for misrepresenting the laptop. One would hope you could infer from comparing Trump's behavior to what I'm condemning would be clear enough, but there, it's explicit.
The result is exactly the same. What is the purpose of that letter? To tell you to treat the laptop as invalid information. It's "this is Russia trying to meddle, so it might be fake, and so you shouldn't listen to it anyway". The outcome is the same.
They whipped people up on the assumption that it's fake, and then the media extra whipped people up.
It was literally some of the same people that argued for the presence of wmd's in Iraq. If that doesn't balance out against Trump lies, nothing does.
By tampering, you mean the data was cloned to other devices and organized into folders in places. Against your 20% that has been verified, literally nothing from the original drive has been demonstrated to be false.
You may see some people claiming there are timestamps of things showing changes made after Hunter Biden would have had the laptop. But the dates are after the info was presented to both the FBI and NY Post, which logically says nothing at all about the original data. You can't claim the originals were suspect because someone messed with them after the news broke. Russia, to my knowledge, does not have time travel figured out.
That was an exceptionally different context.
If Trump asks any random person "Do you think Hillary should be in jail, just asking?", you are well justified in calling that out as Trump saying she should be in jail.
If Trump looks over to the virologist and epidemiologist leading his pandemic response and asks them if they were researching disinfectants for lungs, it's not in any way fair to characterize that as Trump recommending people use disinfectants on their own lungs. That's actually a question.
Also, I like that as soon as you thought you could call me a hypocrite, you suddenly understood that I was condemning his "just asking" schtick.
This is true: you deflected to Biden in the post next to it.
Happy to see it.
And no, nothing you've done or said before is equivalent to this: You've repeatedly paid lipservice condemnation while simultaneously offering shoddy short-team excuses.
They didn't advise you to treat it as invalid information. Why are you doing so?
They didn't insinuate it was untrue. Donald Trump did.
Do you know how the burden of proof functions?
Nothing thats actually consequential has been verified.
Yes. Tell me, how exactly does it incriminate Biden, when data on the laptop shows indications of tampering... from a year after he ever held the laptop?
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The tampering was timestamped after the incriminating parts were already public knowledge. You're implying people went in and edited things to make it incriminating, but the only suspicious elements happened after the New York Post published their story, when the original computer was already in the hands of the FBI, so none of those changes should be on the original drive.
No, I'm not implying the discovered timestamped edits themselves became the source of the story. I'm saying that the fact such edits were found-- and in the hundreds-- indicates that unknown parties have/had accessed it, and could have done so before.
I find it rather unlikely it was so drastically compromised only after the FBI already had it.
You find that unlikely because you're not listening to what I'm telling you. We know about those edits, because they were found by analysts looking for evidence of tampering. We know those edits happened after the drive was passed off by the repair shop owner, because they were timestamped after that time. None of those edits were timestamped earlier than the story breaking, which is to say, they do not draw into question the original data, or the people finding the new edits would likely spot them using the same methods.
The timeline, in theory, is this:
Laptop is dropped at store broken.
Attempts are made to restore function (the data supports this event happening)
About a year later, the repairman cloned the hard drive, and then allegedly turned the original over to the FBI.
After that, the data was copied a second time to give to Rudy Giulianni and copied over a third time to give to the New York Post. The analysis suggests that in this time period, one of these parties started sorting files into folders. The analysis also suggests the drives were likely copied many times, enough to cause the drive to degrade noticeably.
Then the New York Post publishes an article about the laptop.
After that, there is evidence the drive was accessed remotely, and then at several times since there are recorded edits to the data.
But those changes were all to the data after it had been cloned from the original device. Someone hacking into the physical drive the New York Post was using doesn't change the contents of the laptop. Giuliani trying to put Hunter's files into folders doesn't sort those files on the original hardware. There has not been found a single piece of evidence suggesting the data had been compromised before the drive was cloned, all the suspicious changes were dated after that point.
I did listen to all of that before. My response directly addressed it.
Again: I am not saying those timestamped edits that were identified were themselves the source of the original information.
Do you believe that the analysts, who were able to verify <20% of the emails, found every single modification/trace of tampering? Do you find it completely unconcerning that the device was definitely accessed by parties unknown-- and we have no way of knowing if they'd done so beforehand?
Edits wouldn't even need to be "before the drive was cloned"; it was cloned long before the authorities ever got their hands on it.
A) It's not like they have magical tools that they're verifying it. The emails themselves could be faked. They're validating the emails by cross-referencing to external databases. Validating 20% of the emails means they have access to the sender or receiver of 20% of the emails. Not having that for the rest is not a reason to be suspicious of them.
B) That they can point to the evidence of access by parties unknown is the opposite of concerning. The analysts have shown themselves capable of detecting edits and external access, which makes the lack of evidence of changes prior to a certain point meaningful evidence that the data was unmeddled before then. It would be more suspicious if they found no evidence of changes to the data in the time since it was cloned off the original drive.
I'm well aware of that-- it was me who brought attention to the fact that the emails being "verified" as coming from the Burisma accounts didn't mean much, seeing as the Burisma security credentials themselves had very recently been compromised. And it was you who was acting as if the fact they were "verified" meant that the information itself was therefore trustworthy and definitely pointed to Hunter Biden.
It would be absurd to conclude that since some edits were detected, therefore no undetected edits exist.
It is very concerning to know outside parties were definitely interested and capable of editing it. You're ignoring so very, very many question marks here.
You're aware they aren't just validating Burisma related emails, correct?
No, it would be absurd to conclude from the existence of detectable edits there are also undetectable edits made at in a totally different time frame. You are being blatantly illogical.
Please do. Then lock up every member of the Trump admin who did the same kind of thing, and keep going to any other government higher-up who engaged in any government business that should be on record in case of FOIA or investigations using communications not controlled by the government. Holy fucking record keeping that should be a given, and it's a lesson they seem to have trouble learning without examples being made. If it would have been unacceptable for those messages/documents to have been mailed to/from your home address instead of sent through normal official channels, it is even more unacceptable for them to have been sent to/from your personal email.
...and he had such a thorough history of reasonable and responsible decision making prior to that.
Indeed. Just as I'm aware that Burisma stuff formed a particular central part of the Trump campaign's claims surrounding the laptop; and just as I'm aware that the email forming the basis of the original NYP story wasn't one that was verified.
Hardly a "totally different timeframe"; we have a very long, murky period after it was handed to the repair shop, and before the FBI ever saw it, during which edits were made and copies were taken.
And I don't see it as illogical to conclude that it's quite likely, when the edits run into the hundreds and the analysts specifically said they could be covered up, that some edits may not have been identified. You're essentially placing 100% faith in the idea they've found them all, and thus all the rest is definitely not compromised. Now that's illogical-- or at the very least shows a drastic failure to recognise how digital analytics actually works.
Well, I'm pretty sure there are worse things that she should actually be locked up for but, like most things, it's paper work that usually does rich people in. See also Al Capone and possibly Donny T
So, general agreement with a side of 'hope they do more'.
Incorrect. By grand jury filings, the FBI took possession of the original in December 2019, most of a year before the edits that were found on copies of the drive in 2020. The CBS analysis in particular claimed to have as close to the original as could be acquired, and they explicitly stated they found no files made after early 2019 when the laptop was dropped off.
I'm led to believe that the St Valentine Day's massacre got the public riled up, and that was the reason that Al Capone's paperwork was investigated, though, it took political reasons to get the ball rolling. Obvious modern parallels for that as well.
Though, get everyone who's broken those rules and you'd probably neutralise the US government. Which, ok, but without a replacement. Might want to start off slow, make a few examples until the rest get the message.
Yes-- the copies. Two of which were made long before the FBI had it, and used for god-knows-what.
So we have timestamps from a copy. Which the analysts themselves could be faked; and were also hampered by the logs having been repeatedly deleted before analysis could begin. Which itself provokes suspicions that logs have been deleted specifically to cover changes.
Are you seriously looking at this murky mess and concluding we must already know everything about the info? The analysts themselves were very up-front about the massive limitations of what they were actually able to conclude.
No. I'm telling you that every single piece of direct evidence has supported the conclusion that the data is both authentic and unrelated to Russia.