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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

The AG could be replaced by a new administration and the case could get tabled.

If anything, an anti-trust prosecution is more likely to go ahead in the unlikely event Biden takes office. The Democratic party has a much greater willingness to engage in regulatory actions against large businesses than does the GOP.

The GOP pushing a rushed (and therefore, weak) case now smells of a designed-to-fail effort that will only strengthen Google's position by poisoning the well against effective anti-trust efforts in the future.

It may also be partisan. Facebook has received considerably less attention from Washington as it has become more cooperative with Republican demands that conservative-oriented fabricated news remain on the platform[0]. Google has made no such commitments and might be in the GOP's sights as a result. While the DOJ is playing to lose, defending the case will cost Google money and this could be a lever to encourage them to follow Facebook's lead and give preferential treatment to conservative fake news.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/business/media/facebook-d...

There is no evidence that Biden would go after big tech at all. It's not part of his platform. They are benefitting bigly from donations and favorable coverage from FAANG. Biden himself is prone to sell out to foreign companies as evidenced by his son's dealings in China, Ukraine, and Russia. You can't expect someone that corrupt to go after monopoly corruption.

You’re making two common mistakes, hopefully unwittingly: don’t confuse the modest leanings of FAANG workers with their bosses’ - the major tech companies PACs and executives heavily donate to whoever they think will be able to lighten regulation or give them favorable tax breaks. Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey are not freak unicorns but represent a sizable fraction of people and money.

Secondly, try to find evidence supporting the wild claims going around about either Biden. You’ll note that these claims tend to be very long on supposition but short on evidence and the people promoting them hace significant conflicts of interest. Just as when most of the same people said Clinton was more corrupt than Trump, they’re banking on you reading the headline but not critically examining the story.

In a world that is increasing polarized it is important to remember:

Just because evidence that contradicts your world view doesn't exist within you filter bubble of preferred information sources doesn't necessarily mean that evidence doesn't exist period.

Yes, I'm quite aware of that — note that I was suggesting that OP look for the actual evidence rather than relying on other people's claims. Their echoing of attacks which have been unsupported by evidence but common in conservative circles suggested that they were inside such a filter bubble

Honest question not trying to attack you. Do you really think think you are any different than OP?

I think it’s very different because the original person made a very bold claim, and the other said “I don’t know if I’ll believe that without evidence”. The burden of proof lies on the one who makes the original claim, not the one who doesn’t believe it without evidence.

Without making a judgement on the veracity of the claims.

There is at least circumstantial evidence in this case. I have noticed that the tactic used to defend biden has become to place insurmountable burden of proof on anyone who claims wrong doing while giving the bidens every benefit of the doubt. Which is gaslighting.

That is akin to saying "there is no evidence OJ killed his wife. The bloody glove found at his home has all the hallmarks of being planted by russian intelligence".

I can't speak for OP but while this is a common cognitive pitfall it's also one which you can intentionally correct for by attempting to anchor your beliefs on original sources and making an effort to find things outside of your immediate community. People are going to be successful at this to varying degrees but as we can see currently there are large segments of the population who never try.

Sure, here's Politico's Quint Forgey quoting the Director of National Intelligence that the laptop (source of the emails) is in the FBI's possession and that it is authentically Hunter's: https://twitter.com/QuintForgey/status/1318166732419235841

Here's Fox saying the same thing, quoting a Federal Law Enforcement Official: https://twitter.com/SeanLangille?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcam...

Here's a signed MacBook Repair quote from 4/2019, signed by Hunter Biden: https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/hunter%20bi...

And here's the NYPost article itself, excerpts included:

`Biden wrote that Ye had sweetened the terms of an earlier, three-year consulting contract with CEFC that was to pay him $10 million annually “for introductions alone.”`

`"Consulting fees is one piece of our income stream but the reason this proposal by the chairman was so much more interesting to me and my family is that we would also be partners inn [sic] the equity and profits of the JV’s [joint venture’s] investments."`

`The documents obtained by The Post also include an “Attorney Engagement Letter” executed in September 2017 in which one of Ye’s top lieutenants, former Hong Kong government official Chi Ping Patrick Ho, agreed to pay Biden a $1 million retainer for “Counsel to matters related to US law and advice pertaining to the hiring and legal analysis of any US Law Firm or Lawyer.`

https://nypost.com/2020/10/15/emails-reveal-how-hunter-biden...

This family is so corrupt it's not even funny. That's not even including the Burisma scandal, which was disgusting in its own right.

This is the problem with getting your information from Twitter. You're taking a public statement from a political appointee whose boss very badly needs an attack angle and generalizing it without cause. We know that the non-partisan staff have been telling Congress and the public that there are Russian attempts to influence the election[1,2] involving some of the people in this story[3].

This matters because you're taking a single very specific claim as proof an entire story. The DNI made a very specific denial that Hunter Biden's laptop is not part of a Russian disinformation campaign — we don't know what level of certainty the analysts have that this was actually Biden's laptop, that the data on it wasn't modified after it left Biden's control, that he wasn't fine parsing this being a disinformation campaign run by anyone other than the Russian government, or that the emails presented in the NY Post story are authentic and complete.

Continuing the trend, there's a conservative media figure citing unnamed officials with uncorroborated claims. We don't know how well informed they are, what conflicts of interest they have, etc. but we do know that their chain of command has a number of people who have significant personal investment in a particular election result. This is why anything involving politically sensitive claims really needs to be done as openly as possible since history is full of examples of various ways officials have mislead the public.

Similarly, you are presenting as proof a JPEG on a conservative blog showing two signatures which aren't close matches and have none of the provenance you'd need to demonstrate that similarities aren't due to one of them being a forgery based on the public record. Even if the receipt was authentic, that tells you he dropped a Mac off, which could be part of but is not on its own sufficient to say that the data came from that Mac.

I mention all of this because it's how the process works: you're convinced that Biden is corrupt because the sources you read presented some nice juicy headlines and just enough plausible details to underpin all of those conclusions. If you remember Guccifer 2.0, one of the best ways to make a forgery seem more realistic is to put it in with legitimate but innocuous documents. The decision to sit on this story until close before an election but not release the data or an independent forensic report is exactly what you'd do in this case.

My suggestion that you look for the evidence is to put an upper bound on how confidently you should present that narrative as fact — for example, doesn't it seem interesting that this conversation about laptops is still missing any evidence that a meeting or conversation happened or that it involved anything more than a businessman wangling a handshake with a prominent global figure? It's certainly possible that Hunter Biden did something dodgy but I personally would wait to call his father corrupt without strong or, really, any evidence of that. Similarly, the NY Post story repeated the long-debunked claim about VP Biden having tried to get a prosecutor fired for investigating Burisma — that certainly doesn't mean that the rest of the story is completely wrong but it does call into question how much a wise reader should trust the story without further corroboration.

1. https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/item/2...

2. https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/07/politics/us-intelligence-russ...

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/us/politics/giuliani-russ...

Your #1 and #2 links simply indicate a general assessment of several foreign entities including China, Russia, Iran and their general attitudes towards the candidates (it also indicates China, our number one threat strategically, militarily, technologically, democratically, medically, prefers Biden). No doubt they are all trying to influence the U.S. election. None of that has anything to do with the damning evidence of Hunter Biden selling access to his father for millions of dollars.

I linked to professional staffers on Twitter from Politico and Fox. They're not random contributors, they're journalists and they're quoting specific government officials.

At any rate, I know, neither journalists nor government officials have a very good reputation these days, but you asked for evidence, and I provided that, along with photo evidence of Hunter's signature on the laptop repair ticket, which matches the Paternity suit signature filed by Hunter's baby mama in Arkansas last year. It's the same RHB (Robert Hunter Biden) signature. I don't know what to tell you. Look again.

The laptop had incriminating photos of Hunter smoking crack. Those photos were published. Where else would they have come from? Also, the dates on the emails match up with Secret Service travel logs from 2014: https://www.theepochtimes.com/secret-service-travel-logs-mat...

I'm convinced Biden is corrupt, because power corrupts. That's an almost universal law of human nature. And Biden had power for 47 years. You cannot be a part of that scene for that long without corruption rubbing off on you. After a while, you start to think you're invincible. Especially if the media covers for you. Conservatives don't have that benefit. They're always under far more scrutiny than liberals, because over 90% of journalists are liberal and they don't cover Democrats the same way. They spent 3 years on a fake Russian scandal against Trump. Spent $50 million+ and wasted the nation's time based on some DNC paid for propaganda hit piece by a washed up ex-MI6 agent. And the media spent 3 years breathlessly covering every "bombshell" report only to come up with nothing.

Again, there is signatures, emails, photos, and witnesses on the Biden story and you had a made up tabloid story that dominated news coverage on Trump for THREE YEARS.

> Conservatives don't have that benefit. They're always under far more scrutiny than liberals, because over 90% of journalists are liberal and they don't cover Democrats the same way. They spent 3 years on a fake Russian scandal against Trump. Spent $50 million+ and wasted the nation's time based on some DNC paid for propaganda hit piece by a washed up ex-MI6 agent.

This is a great example of what happens when you uncritically seek out information which satisfies your political biases without thinking about it critically. I’m sure you do believe what you wrote above because people you trust have told you to do so, but wishing doesn’t mean that it’s true.

For example, do you really expect anyone to believe there’s a global “the media” with uniform beliefs spanning everyone from the BBC and NPR to Fox News and The Guardian? Want to try using evidence to show that, say, journalists were covering for Hillary Clinton during the previous election? (Or for the amusing belief that they’re covering for Biden now by totally not covering this other than all of the hundreds of stories running about it?)

Your mischaracterization of the Russia investigation similarly shows that you’re only reading sources friendly to the subjects. There were multiple sources, none of them the Steele dossier, and it certainly found a lot more than nothing – all facts you’ve had easily available to learn for years but have either chosen not to or are at least hoping your readers have not:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossfire_Hurricane_(FBI_inves...

https://www.justice.gov/storage/report_volume1.pdf

https://www.justice.gov/storage/report_volume2.pdf

I’m not going to waste time further responding to someone acting in bad faith but don’t think I wasn’t amused by you going from claiming that a major multi-government intelligence investigation was a “made up tabloid story” while at the same time complaining that people are calling for verification of a tabloid story.

Thanks for the links, but if you click on them you'll see they don't support your claims at all.

In contemporary American politics, "filter bubbles" that suppress facts--as opposed to providing a slanted interpretation of the meaning of facts--are exclusively a product of conservative politics.

If there was concrete evidence of malfeasance involving either Biden, actual media outlets (NYT, WaPo, CNN, ABC, CBS, etc) would report on it. They might downplay it, but they would report it.

In contrast, conservative media gleefully provides politically motivated "alternative facts[0]" -- more properly known as 'lies'[1] -- and fails to report on stories that are politically harmful to conservatives. Conservative media is not intended to inform; it is intended to keep people ignorant of actual, objective, facts.[2]

Has your filter bubble told you that Trump was impeached specifically for attempting to blackmail the Ukrainian government into framing Biden?

Has your filter bubble told you that this kind of conduct is not normal in a democracy?

Just because conservative media lies to people to further a political objective does not mean that the entire media ecosystem is equally bad.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts

[1] https://www.politifact.com/article/2015/jan/29/punditfact-ch...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2011/11/21/fox-news-v...

You'd kind of hope that it's apolitical and solid enough that that wouldn't happen? Launching it right now makes it more political.

The issue I see there is the Democratic establishment is pro-corporate before anything else. So yeah, if Biden is elected, this will never have seen the light of day.

The Democratic establishment is more pro-corporate than the Republican establishment? In what reality is this. Like I don't get where this idea comes from that you have to be pro-business or anti-business. I can be both pro-worker and pro-business, it's not black and white, it's shades of gray.

> The Democratic establishment is more pro-corporate than the Republican establishment?

It depends on the company in question.

And, yes, Republicans right now are much more likely to be skeptical of Silicon Valley giants than are Democrats, who have been very cozy with Democrats since 2008.

> And, yes, Republicans right now are much more likely to be skeptical of Silicon Valley giants than are Democrats

That wasn't the claim raised or addressed.

The biggest and most powerful corporations in the world right now are tech companies, of which Republicans are increasingly skeptical and with which Democrats are increasingly cozy. So of course it's relevant to a question about how Democrats could be seen as pro-corporate.

> The biggest and most powerful corporations in the world right now are tech companies,

Not even close to true. JP Morgan, ExxonMobil, Citi, Chevron, ATT, Comcast,, Walmart, GE, GM, Berkshire Hatahway, Pfizer, Johnson & Jhonson... I could go on. Yes, Apple, MS, FB, Google are huge tech companies, but they are not the most common and not by any means "the most powerful".

The most clear and objective way to compare corporations is market capitalization, and the seven corporations with the biggest market cap in the world are all tech companies.[1]

How powerful a company is a bit harder to judge, but if anything tech companies punch above their weight when it comes to political power. Johnson & Johnson has ten times the market cap of twitter, but much less political power.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...

The difference is none of the companies you listed have the same amount of control over the internet. SV giants are the new gatekeepers of information.

Exactly. Those companies are more of a "you buy things from them" than the "your knowledge and view of the world is filtered through it" of Google. Google yields tremendous power over people just by what results it shows them when they search for things.

But a better alternative to measure power could be lobbying efforts and spending, which the tech companies are lagging in.

... do you actually believe that?

AT&T is more powerful than Google?

Johnson & Johnson is more powerful than Apple?

> I can be both pro-worker and pro-business

That's exactly what a establishment Democrat would say.

You're a libertarian, aren't you? Frankly, business's interests and worker interests are fundamentally at odds solely because labor is so expensive and having to accommodate workers' needs is expensive.

In what reality are you living in that Obama didn't give corporate America billions of dollars in hand-outs in the aftermath of 2008? Republicans aren't any better, but Democrats like to pretend they care about workers, when all they really care about is enriching the wealthy.

In my, and many realities, the Democratic and Republican establishments are the same establishment.

Not wanting to destroy your countries industries and creating a balance between workers and businesses is not the same as believing that today's large businesses are over regulated and workers have too much power.

If you are anti-capitalist, fine, but your complaint isn't the Dems are pro-business, the argument is that they are still capitalists.

Honestly, America is pro-corporate before anything else - neither party is actually a good advocate for labour or consumer protection, you only see these things on the fringes of the parties.

Adminstrations changing priorities is legitimate. Just ask Bill Bar when he's trying to do favors for the president.

Sure, especially when the corporations being scrutinized donate to their election campaign.

I doubt it. The democrats want this too. However, Biden would have much more likely listened to his advisors rather than this case where no doubt Trump is throwing stuff at the wall hoping it sticks and helps him with the election. Most people are probably in favor of holding Google's feet to the fire.

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