What??? - Hunter Biden: Ukraine

[Kathianne]

Hmmmm:

https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morri...er-biden-docs/

Spox: Senate Homeland Security Committee Investigating New Hunter Biden Docs; Update: Biden Called Lid At 9:41
ED MORRISSEYPosted at 12:01 pm on October 14, 2020

We’re getting a little more information about the earlier New York Post bombshell on Hunter Biden, but enough to still leave some nagging questions. According to its spokesperson, the Senate Homeland Security Committee has opened its own investigation into the claims by the Delaware technician, calling him a “whistleblower.” They only heard from him in the last few weeks, according to the Post’s report from about an hour ago:


A Senate committee is investigating a bombshell cache of documents about Hunter Biden’s foreign dealings acquired by a Delaware computer repairman and exposed Wednesday by The Post.


The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee confirmed it is working with the repairman, whose identity was confirmed by The Post, to verify the documents. …


The repairman contacted the committee in late September — one day after it released a report on Joe Biden’s apparent conflicts of interest in his son’s international business dealings — including a claim he received $3.5 million from the wife of Moscow’s former mayor.


The repairman provided correspondence to The Post documenting his outreach to the committee.


Hmmmm. The earlier report was a little more vague on this point. In fact, it didn’t mention anything about the repairman connecting with the Senate Homeland Security Committee, or any congressional committee. Did the Post forget to put that into its first report, or did they get an update from the repairman after its publication? If it’s the latter, that might go toward credibility of their source.


There are other points that remain to be clarified. The repairman turned over the laptop and hard drive to the FBI in December in accordance with a subpoena, and we have a picture of the subpoena in the first report. Did the SHSC ask the FBI about whether it could authenticate the documents, and indeed the laptop itself? They have had it for eleven months, it would appear, and should have some insight into the provenance of all the above. The FBI can’t comment publicly on investigations, but they should respond to inquiries from Congress about them, especially to determine whether this is a whistleblower or a crank — or worse.


This new timing answers one of the questions posed by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, but still leaves the others murky:




This makes it sound as though the repairman got tired of getting no response on the issue, and started looking for other options last month. If that’s the case, then it makes Rudy Giuliani and Stephen Bannon look a bit better than in the original telling. That, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s on the level either. Both of these men have been publicly asking for this kind of dirt for years, and would be susceptible to a disinformation campaign — especially just weeks ahead of an election.


The timing on this is odd in another way. The laptop emerged in December, just as the House was impeaching Donald Trump over Ukraine-gate. The FBI took it and it went nowhere. Now it’s suddenly emerging again just as the election comes up. Those might be coincidences, but they’re awfully convenient coincidences. Don’t dismiss this out of hand, but don’t buy into it either unless the FBI weighs in on this soon, or the SHSC provides a basis for confidence in this report.


Update: Here’s an amusing, if not entirely dispositive, development:




Biden’s been calling mid-morning lids for weeks, so this may have nothing to do with the Post stories. On the other hand, it’s an indication that they’re not prepared to get on top of this story, either.

[jimnyc]

Here is the earlier article I noticed it linked to:

--

NY Post: We Have A “Smoking Gun” Proving The Bidens Lied About Burisma

Given to them by Rudy Giuliani, no less. According to the New York Post, an e-mail found on a laptop in a Delaware repair center shows that Hunter Biden introduced Burisma executives to Joe Biden a year before Biden intervened in Ukraine to demand the firing of their top prosecutor. That contradicts an number of denials from Joe Biden, who has insisted that he had never gotten involved in his son’s business dealings, in Ukraine, Romania, China, or anywhere else while he was vice president.

But is this on the level?

The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the e-mail reads.

An earlier e-mail from May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma’s No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.

The blockbuster correspondence — which flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claim that he’s “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” — is contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.

There are all sorts of questions this raises, but not just for the Bidens. For them, the questions are simple: if this is on the level, how do they explain lying all this time about their actions with Burisma and Ukraine? For House Democrats who impeached Donald Trump over his phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymir Zelensky by claiming it was corrupt, this raises a huge problem right before they have to go home to voters who will want to know what they will do about Biden. The same is true for Senate Democrats who tried to remove Trump over it.

That’s if this is on the level. How do we know this laptop had Hunter Biden’s information on it? According to the Post, it held a number of business and personal data connected to Hunter, including a twelve-minute video allegedly showing Hunter smoking crack and having sex. The Post uses a couple of other personal pics found on the drive, including one of Hunter and his family with Joe himself, and another of Hunter apparently smoking a cigarette in bed.

So the data at least appears to have come from Hunter Biden, but what about the laptop? Was it really Hunter’s, and how exactly did this computer data get to Giuliani? Well, that’s a fairly convoluted tale, at least as the Post tells it. Someone dropped off the laptop (with a Beau Biden Foundation sticker on it) to repair water damage but never came back to pick it up, despite a number of calls to the owner. In December, the shop owner looked at the hard drive and alerted the FBI about the contents, who then subpoenaed the shop owner to seize both the laptop and the hard drive. The Post has a photo of the grand-jury subpoena in the story.

But that was in December. How did Giuliani get the data, and why is it only coming out now?

Photos of a Delaware federal court subpoena given to The Post show that both the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December, after the shop’s owner says he alerted the feds to their existence.

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.

So the shop owner “later” gave the copy to Giuliani’s lawyer. When was “later”? Presumably after the impeachment and Senate trial; if Giuliani had this information and could authenticate it, he would have leaked it then to embarrass Democrats into ending that effort. Maybe he waited until September to pass it along, but that seems rather odd, given the political context of Joe Biden’s win in the primaries and the narrative-busting nature of this information. The timing of this seems pretty suspicious — it looks like a deliberate October surprise.

Meanwhile, where is the FBI in all of this? They had the laptop in December. If they authenticated it, why haven’t they acted on it, especially with the grand-jury subpoena? The FBI refused to confirm or deny that an investigation exists, as is their practice, but the long delay on any action could mean that they haven’t yet authenticated anything. It’s possible that this could be more game-playing by outside sources, especially since this just seems waaay too good to be true. Hunter Biden might be an idiot, but would even he leave a laptop at a repair center with the Burisma smoking gun on its hard drive? And not go back to get it when the repair center called? Or did someone manage to hack into Hunter’s files, retrieve some personal data, create the “smoking gun,” and then leave it all on a laptop with a Beau Biden Foundation sticker at a repair center while leaving the owner with an unpaid bill?

This might be entirely on the level, of course. There’s enough smoke around Joe Biden and the way his family members manage to get wealthy in areas where Biden takes policy interests to suspect multiple points of corruption fire. But until this gets some authentication, stay skeptical, or at least remember that things too good to be true usually aren’t.

https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morri...-lied-burisma/


Is it legit? This doesn't mean so, but apparently the FBI seized it:



It's in the original article from the NY Post. There were also 11 private photos on the laptop. Could have been gained in another way though. - https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-...iz-man-to-dad/

What a shocker, Facebook immediately whip out the censors. - https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/facebo...2020-campaign/

More info from Biden's travels - https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/biden-...cial-schedule/

Hunter Biden emails show leveraging connections with his father to boost Burisma pay - https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/hunter...t-burisma-pay/

Sen. Josh Hawley threatens Facebook over handling of Post exposé on Bidens - https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/josh-h...ose-on-bidens/

Sen. Josh Hawley demanded answers from Facebook Wednesday about why it “censored” The Post’s reporting on emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The Missouri Republican fired off a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg questioning the Silicon Valley titan’s Wednesday move to limit the distribution of The Post’s exclusive exposé detailing emails that indicate Hunter Biden introduced his father, Joe Biden, to a Ukrainian energy executive.

“The seemingly selective nature of this public intervention suggests partiality on the part of Facebook,” Hawley wrote. “And your efforts to suppress the distribution of content revealing potentially unethical activity by a candidate for president raises a number of additional questions, to which I expect responses immediately.”

Facebook said The Post’s story could be reviewed by third-party fact-checkers, a step it generally takes for news articles that raise red flags for misinformation. That led Hawley to ask whether it was normal for the company to limit the spread of news reports from established publications before they are fact-checked by outside sources.

[jimnyc]

Apparently Twitter is censoring it as well. Figures.

[jimnyc]

Add this in too:

Senate Homeland Security Committee Investigating Hunter Biden Emails

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will investigate newly released emails that revealed Hunter Biden introduced his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, to an executive at Ukrainian gas firm Burisma.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), the chairman of the committee, told Fox News that the committee had contacted the source who provided the emails. The New York Post revealed that Hunter Biden introduced a Burisma executive to Joe Biden less than a year before he lobbied Ukrainian government officials to fire Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the company.

Johnson said:

We regularly speak with individuals who email the committee’s whistleblower account to determine whether we can validate their claims. Although we consider those communications to be confidential, because the individual in this instance spoke with the media about his contact with the committee, we can confirm receipt of his email complaint, have been in contact with the whistleblower, and are in the process of validating the information he provided.

One May 2014 email showed Burisma executive Vadym Pzharskyi wrote to Hunter Biden in May 2014 asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” to benefit Burisma, of which Hunter Biden was a member of the board.

Joe Biden also said that he was successful in pressuring Ukraine to fire Shokin, who was investigating the founder of Burisma at the time.

The former vice president said at a 2018 Council on Foreign Relations meetings, “I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.”

“Well, son of a bitch. He got fired,” he said.

Despite the Post’s report about Hunter Biden introducing the former vice president to a Ukrainian executive, Biden has claimed that he “never” discussed Hunter Biden’s “overseas business dealings” with his son.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2...-biden-emails/

[jimnyc]

This all could be crap made up by a college kid and submitted. The source has to be triple verified & how this data got on this laptop & what is the relation to the Biden's? It's possible it'll be investigated and slowly disappear as something that couldn't be verified or similar.

But if this turns out to be true, and they can verify all various ends and it's proven, then it can be quite damaging.

For now, covered in only republican/conservative/right leaning/pundit/opinion pages. I couldn't care less who covers it right now and care more so about them finding out if it's legit or not first. Not gonna run with this one other than post the above stories. Not gonna say it's true as I just don't see it solidly.

What they could do best more than anything would be to get Pzharskyi's device it was sent on or even better the server it went through if they would cooperate. This would almost solidify whether they match or not and the existence for sure or not.

[jimnyc]

Makes it more believable though when you see Facebook and Twitter censoring it.

And not on the MSM liars - not CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC. Every other rumor on earth is acceptable, but one with emails/images & seized by the FBI and has an investigation by the DHS, doesn't rate enough.