Hacker News Reader

Comment by richbell | Hacker News Reader

> Donald J. Trump was not directly involved in the breaking of the laptop story.

Do you really believe that Rudy Guiliani, a man acting as Trump's lackey for numerous things, received bombshell information and publicized it without Trump having any knowledge or involvement?

Michael Cohen testified under oauth that Trump knew about leaked DNC emails in advance of the 2016 election. Fast-forward to ~2019 and Trump had already personally tried to pressure Ukraine into providing damaging information about Joe Biden. There is very little plausible deniability here.

> "Republicans" is a group containing tens of millions of people (though I am not aware of the repair shop owner's party affiliation, if any?)

I am obviously not referring to a collective conspiracy of between hundreds of millions of American citizens. I meant the Republican Party.

View on HN

My mistake, I had forgotten about Rudy Giuliani's involvement.

> I meant the Republican Party.

Which contains many thousands of people, many of whom do not get along. It's a minor miracle that it is still holding together at all!

> My mistake, I had forgotten about Rudy Giuliani's involvement.

That's okay, I had to go back and re-check the details of the story multiple times.

Based on your other comments, I think we're probably share a similar view about it. All I'm saying is that, while the validity of the content itself unimpeachable, the story about how it was uncovered is highly suspicious.

> Which contains many thousands of people, many of whom do not get along. It's a minor miracle that it is still holding together at all!

Of course, but they demonstrably put up a rather unified front against the Democrats; Catholics and Protestants hated each other, yet put aside their differences to vote for common interests.

Aren't the GOP currently spearheading an investigation into Hunter Biden's laptop?

https://twitter.com/housegop/status/1593253229747265545

https://i.redd.it/4yfum3kpzy0a1.jpg (I'm too lazy to find the actual tweet)

I don't think it's suspicious. If the Russians (or whoever) had stolen the personal labtop of a close Biden family member, it doesn't seem plausible to me that the Bidens would not make that fact public. Joe Biden would not cover up a foreign adversary's crimes when both political and financial incentives run the other way.

> it doesn't seem plausible to me that the Bidens would not make that fact public

It makes sense to me, considering how damaging and embarrassing the content was. If they confirm it, they lose plausible deniability in being able to claim it's fake.

For a large period of time there was a coordinated effort to purge everything from the Internet and paint anyone bringing it up as a conspiracy theorist. It's harder to get away with that if you call attention to the leak and confirm it's authenticity.

Perhaps the laptop truly belonged to Hunter Biden. Without a confirmation or proper chain of custody, it's hard to say either way. It's not implausible that an advanced threat actor, especially one backed by a nation-state, could create an elaborate laptop forgery to 'layer'[0] hacked material into a legitimate news story and avoid the hack itself taking centre-stage like in 2016 — of course, this is speculation on my part.

[0] https://www.moneylaundering.ca/public/law/3_stages_ML.php#:~...

I don't understand why the chain of custody matters if DKIM and DMARC are legitimate ways to verify the communications contained in the laptop. The focus on crack smoking hookers getting clapped by Biden isn't as interesting when it comes to political malfeasance.

> I don't understand why the chain of custody matters if DKIM and DMARC are legitimate ways to verify the communications contained in the laptop.

Whether the information is real is orthogonal to how it was obtained. Conspiring with a hostile adversary to release damaging information about a political opponent is also political malfeasance.

The circumstances of how the information was obtained is incredibly suspect and that deserves scrutiny, even if the information is legitimate and actionable.

> The focus on crack smoking hookers getting clapped by Biden isn't as interesting when it comes to political malfeasance.

That's kind of my point: why was that stuff leaked and spread when there was actually damning evidence? To me, it seems like the point was to release as much damaging and embarrassing content as possible to harm Joe Biden.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com