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Comment by pvarangot | Hacker News Reader

Did you read his story? It's good, it's serious and it calls out the democrats about some real bullshit like inventing a fake Russian intelligence operation to not respond to allegations that come from the emails.

I don't care if a journalist has a paranoid delusion as long as they are doing good writing and due diligence, and Glenn's story has both. He's not the most stable individual and he has made mistakes in the past, but he's a journalist he writes and we read and make our minds. I'm not going to doubt him because he's a "freak".

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I read it, or at least as much of it as I could get through. Good writing and due diligence are the last words I would use to describe that piece. It was more of a rant than an article.

Glenn has been pushing the boundaries more and more every year, and it's not surprising that this is the article that finally made his editors draw a line in the sand. I even think he has several good points buried in there, but it reads like a screed from an unhinged man.

If the best you can do is call him names, just don't weigh in.

The article may be a form of a rant, but it is meant as a opinion, and an articulate and specific opinion at that. Everything he says is either very believable, obvious, or verifiable. You may not like what he is preaching, but give examples of what is incorrect, and why, or just go home.

Generally, labeling ("screed from an unhinged man"), hyperbole ("as much as I could get through"), unjustified claims ("pushing the boundaries more and more") and projections ("it's not surprising") are all great in debate class, and do wonders in a courtroom (unfortunately), but they are not content, they are tools of persuasion.

>The article may be a form of a rant, but it is meant as a opinion

That's the whole problem. Greenwald doesn't call himself a columnist, he calls himself a journalist. The Intercept doesn't publish his articles as opinion pieces, they publish them as news. You can't publish that article as a news piece with any sort of credibility.

Just posting a link to the story since I didnt see it elsewhere in this thread: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...

I read it, but did not see any new reporting. It makes a bold claim in the lede - "a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories" and offers no specific evidence for it.

It seems like Greenwald's gist is that circumstantial evidence is enough proof - that this story is so obviously important that not covering it prominently is <i>prima facie</i> evidence of bias. That's a reasonable opinion, but that's all it is, and if you didn't already believe it, I don't think there's anything here to change your mind.

Personally, I don't see the bombshell part. All I see here is that most journalists want Biden to win, and sometimes politicians' kids get sinecures they don't deserve. I knew both of those things last year. The whole debacle like an obvious attempt to smear Biden Sr with salacious stuff that his kid did, and the only reason it's getting this much attention is that, unlike Trump, Biden doesn't have any other scandals to talk about.

Yeah I see where you are going and I think Biden is a "clean" candidate corruptionwise, at least as much if not cleaner than Hillary was. That being said I have no doubt he is an accomplice for the US backing corrupt politicians in the Ukraine or other countries.

Also I think accusing Russia of running a disinformation campaign to try to cast doubt on the emails form Hunter is cheap and dangerous, it makes his base more angry for no reason.

> Did you read his story? It's good, it's serious

I have read it, and it's not good. It is an example of the worst aspects of pearl-clutching, can-you-imagine-what-this-means, ignore-the-actual-facts tendencies of the media today. He starts from a ludicrous premise and then doubles down on the ramifications, all without actually addressing the question of whether or not it is true.

You certainly don't question the suspect if you already know their answer, and you have no proof to the contrary. At least not unless you are ready to cede to that suspect the moral high ground.

Firstly, Glenn focuses on the fact this "de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community" is not asking the Bidens questions about the nature of these allegations. The simple answer is that "union" is focusing on questions of merit, unrelated to this fictional reality Greenwald is portraying.

If one were to accept the premise that these are questions of merit, then one must believe the predicates - that Hunter Biden would send a personal computer to be fixed, thousands of kilometers from his home, by a coincidently pro-Republican repairman, who is coincidently blind but is coincidently also able to confirm that it was Hunter Biden who dropped this computer off, and that coincidently this repairman has a speed dial to Rudolph Giuliani, and that the proof of all of this was coincidently stolen by the USPS. By now the product of all these low-probability events is vanishingly small.

> I don't care if a journalist has a paranoid delusion as long as they are doing good writing and due diligence, and Glenn's story has both.

Due diligence would require Mr Greenwald to start with a neutral or cynical mindset. Who is to gain from this story, what is required for this to be true.

It is telling that Mr Greenwald thinks there is the cabal against him, that the famously apolitical intelligence services are taking a stand contrary to his. And the thing it might tell him is this: start from the facts, and follow from there.

This is exactly right. Greenwald has distanced himself from the Democratic establishment for years and basically given Trump a free pass to instead lead bizarre crusades against perceived Democrat hypocrisy.

This stuff from him today is just playing on hype. Having read the draft article he put on Substack, there is simply nothing in it. There is no evidence anywhere suggesting the Biden emails merit this reaction, let alone merit any sort of investigation.

At this point the emails/texts have been authenticated by many people who were actually on the email chains, and people who were direct recipients of the text messages.

We are about a week past the point where people were falsely claiming this was disinformation, and several days past the point of any credible claim that the emails are not authentic.

We are actually, as of tonight, at the point where anonymous Justice Department sources are alleging that the Biden’s have been and continue to be under investigation for money laundering since 2019.

> At this point the emails/texts have been authenticated by many people who were actually on the email chains, and people who were direct recipients of the text messages.

This is like saying that one spy has caught another spy red-handed because the first spy has a letter that says "I done it."

There is nothing that links the computer to Biden, beyond the fact that it contains some emails (which were known to have been stolen), and other emails which appear to have been doctored. The doctored emails are the ones alleging malfeasance. To accept that Biden owns the computer is to accept that he flew all the way across the country to hand deliver his laptop to a blind technician who miraculously recognized him.

> We are actually, as of tonight, at the point where anonymous Justice Department sources are alleging that the Biden’s have been and continues to be under investigation for money laundering since 2019.

Yes, anonymous sources. The funny thing about these anonymous sources is that, you see, they're anonymous. Which means they could be anyone and, let's face it, they probably are anyone, even an anyone unrelated to the Justice Department.

> We are about a week past the point where people were falsely claiming this was disinformation, and several days past the point of any credible claim that the emails are not authentic.

No one outside of the alt-right media is claiming any authenticity for this "scandal". Even Fox News is like "Nah-uh. Nope. This is fishy as hell, and I once ate a whole fish stinking and raw!"

10s of thousands of emails, text messages, photos, and videos. Tens of thousands. To claim “there is nothing that links the computer to Biden” is disinformation.

DKIM validated by the way:

https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim

In fact there is a massive amount of data which substantiates that it is Hunter Biden’s laptop, including extremely personal pictures and videos. We could say that it is either Hunter Biden’s actual laptop, or perhaps it is merely a clone of his laptop, down to the stickers on it (a “conspiracy theory”).

People on the email chain confirming that they did in fact receive those emails is evidence that the emails are genuine.

There is no evidence that I know of indicating any of the emails being doctored. If you want to make that claim, please cite a source.

John Paul Mac Isaac is a 44-year old Wilmington owner of “The Mac Shop”, located near a Biden family home. He was an Apple Genius from 2004-2010. There is no one disputing he works at the shop he owns, and while I have read some people claiming he is “legally blind” — what he actually said in the interview was that he has an eye condition, not that he was legally blind, and in any case that doesn’t mean he can’t see with corrective lenses. And he said he could not conclusively recognize Hunter Biden but that the sticker on the laptop and then ultimately it’s contents (e.g. thousands of sync’d iMessages) identified Biden as it’s owner.

As to the FBI investigation, for years the anonymous claims of Justice Department officials have graced the front pages of every national newspaper with stories damaging to Trump. So I agree it’s important to qualify the statement with “anonymous” and “allegedly” while also certainly being newsworthy, and would otherwise obviously make the front page if it concerned Trump or Trump’s family.

I think your last paragraph gives up your position. The bigger story even than all the alleged corruption in the Biden family is how the media has circled the wagons on this and lied about it being somehow linked to Russia, a claim made entirely without a shred of evidence. This latest attack against Greenwald is just more of the same. The story has nothing to do with alt-right anything, it is widely reported on Fox News, has a surprising large amount of documentary evidence for this type of exposé and now has on the record sources directly substantiating the key findings with their own testimony as well as their own emails, text messages, and even recordings.

It’s time to pack up the disinformation campaign against this story and go home.

I don't care were the emails came from. If a Russian agent with a secret invisibility cloak powered off the freedom of the countries they invade sneaked into Hunter's room at night, killed his dog, and stole his laptop, I don't care.

Maybe the repairman story is parallel construction maybe it's not, but I think the emails are real and Biden's Campaign response is a pathetic attempt at pointing to a scarecrow. It's as bad as Chinavirus in my hierarchy of sins, it's fuel for America's systemic racism and exceptionalism which are the energy that fuels the reactor that will make this country blow up.

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