> what they considered to be Russian disinformation and propaganda
was it?
was it?
Trump's own government warned Trump that Giuliani was being targeted. [1] Guliani met with Derkach in Ukraine explicitly to get dirt on Biden - incredibly in the middle of impeachment surrounding Ukraine.. Derkach is a known Russian agent (recently placed on sanctions list - the timing must be noted as well). [2]
It's been reported that the Biden emails were already being pitched around the time Guliani was in Ukraine - which throws into question the timeline of this computer repair story. [3]
Burisma emails were also hacked, and it was widely reported that Russia was going to use them for an 'October surprise.' Hacking emails/iCloud etc is a proven method employed by Russia/GRU many many times for similar political interference over the last 4 years. [4]
Russia is also known to have mixed false materials into legitimate hacked materials in FR-17 - which is a reported reason why FB/TW/the legitimate press has refused to spread this [5]
It should also be noted that the Trump campaign shopped the story around and not even the Journal (and evidently Fox News too) wouldn't report on it. [6]
It's been widely reported that the FBI is currently investigating. [7]
Though personally I call F U on Trump's DNI going on Fox News while the FBI sends a 'won't break longstanding precedent to comment' letter to Congress. [7]
While not the same as a reciprocal 'Comey disclosure' at least someone is leaking enough to the press that we know the above. Ironically let's hope for more in the the way of Comey -> Richman -> NyTimes
an addition. while not fact, Putin going to the press to 'reject' this story feels very very much in line with trolling and his underlying effort to just make one question what is real and mess with us [8]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/giuliani-bi... [2] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm1118 [3] https://time.com/5902557/hunter-biden-rudy-giuliani-ukraine/ [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/us/politics/hunter-biden-... [5] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/T... [6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/fbi-hunter-... [7] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid...
[8] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-putin/putin-...
Twitter’s initial justification for removing the “hacked” material is completely at odds with their past decisions to leave up hacked/illegally obtained materials like the Snowden docs, Trump tax returns, Panama papers, etc. Of course they have since changed their stance.
There’s the possibility of civil damages if it amounts to defamation, but that’s quite a standard to reach. Such damages would fall on the publisher of the story, the NY Post, but not a platform like Twitter (per section 230 safe harbor immunity). There is no legal gray area here.
This is the same reason why those who publicized the now widely rebuked Steele Dossier are not facing legal consequences for it (including Twitter), nor should they.
Of course your original comment said nothing about the accuracy of the reporting and instead only made the claim that there was a legal gray area around publishing hacked materials like these, which is simply not true.
It's clear only to you. You cannot normally legally publish hacked or stolen photos of celebrities. The personal, intimate, or family photos of Hunter Biden almost certainly do not meet the bar for public interest.
Twitter is not liable here. But as a private company they're allowed to have a policy against linking to hacked or stolen material on their platform. It's the NY Post that's in a grey area.
> Of course your original comment said nothing about the accuracy of the reporting and instead only made the claim that there was a legal gray area around publishing hacked materials like these, which is simply not true.
My original comment was in response to someone saying Twitter blocked it because it was Russian propaganda, which is simply not true.
Really? Who would be the judge of that? The suppression itself is hard evidence to the contrary.
Maybe you don't believe Twitter. Maybe Twitter suppressed the story for political reasons and you feel that proves the hacked content is of public interest. But if Twitter was honest then their policy is just to not allow direct links to any hacked or stolen photos. It doesn't mean they're important.
How are personal photos of Hunter Biden with his family important to public interest?
We are here on Hacker News, are you certain that a legally blind person in Delaware. would be the guy to fly to all the way from California to repair water damaged laptop? If you don't know how such repair looks like, I recommend you to search Luis Rosmann on YouTube (actually cool to watch anyway).
I initially thought that the repair maybe involved reinstalling windows or removing viruses (which you could get assistance from text to speech tooling), but it was a water damage.
As far as I know the Biden residence was sold few years ago, and Hunter lives in LA, but could be wrong, it's not possible to find definitive answer. But he has a house and his son was born in LA so high chance that's where he lives.
I also have hard time to believe that someone who makes $80k a month would care about laptop repair, and even if he did, wouldn't have someone on payroll (perhaps IT person from his company) who would go to his house to get it fixed.
Also, I still can't see how a legally blind person (I know legally blind doesn't mean completely blind) can do a water damage repair.
There are so many other holes in that story, but even if ALL of that was true, I don't see how actions of a 50 year old man implicate his father. There isn't any "smoking gun" in relation to Joe Biden. So what was the purpose of this story again?