Mr Biden possibly subject to Russian blackmail

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Oh, I'm sure they'd find some other "modern art" to overpay for and donate for the tax benefits, and what else does Hunter need the money for if he's well supplied with women and drugs?

Joking aside, I was actually shocked at the art dealing thing, the optics alone are so bad and it's not like the Bidens are poor.

This is definitely a video of Hunter Biden with his face blurred out, and not somebody else.
Tabloids never hire lookalikes so they can make up fake stories.
They'd sell too many papers if they did that.

That laptop in Delaware also definitely belonged to Hunter Biden, no doubt about it.
He definitely flew all the way from California to drop it off, personally, and sloppily forged his own signature.
He prefers shops who snoop through your unencrypted headerless emails.

That is a much more complicated and unlikely story than a drug addict with a habit of losing laptops forgetting to pick up one from a repair shop in his home state. Again, have the Bidens actually denied the authenticity of the material that came from that laptop? Recall also that some of the emails have been authenticated by the people who were on the other end of the; guess that tabloid making the deepfakes was pretty thorough, huh?

It's always safest to assume that any computer (or related device) which has storage (such as hard-drives, memory cards, etc.) that is taken to a computer store will have the contents viewed (particularly if "abandoned", as this laptop was).

Uuuuuhhh... no.
Unlike Trump, who was in debt for billions to the Russians, had apparently laundered money for said Russians, and may have been the star of a pee tape, Biden has nothing that could personally leave him open to blackmail.

Uuuuuhhh... no.
Unlike Trump, who was in debt for billions to the Russians, had apparently laundered money for said Russians, and may have been the star of a pee tape, Biden has nothing that could personally leave him open to blackmail.

You watch a lot of Rachel Maddow, don't you?

Rachel is a helluva lot more reliable than anyone on Faux.
We know Trump went to Deutsche Bank for a loan when nobody else would lend him money anymore (on account that he always refused to pay up). Deutsche Bank had arranged payments with Russian oligarchs connected to the Kremlin.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/21/ho ... -business/

There are plenty of other sources out there to quote from. The New York AG will doubtlessly bring this to light, as well.
Just where do you think Trump got such a loan from, other than shady characters as mobbed up Russian intelligence?

With Trump has come Russia: two years of conspiracy-mongering about whether the president, a failed real estate mogul and reality TV star consumed with dubious deal-making, conspired with the Russian government to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. Robert Mueller’s determination that no evidence exists to prove Trump and Russian colluded to fix the election has exposed, once again, the venality of A-list political punditry. At the top of the heap is none other than MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

Maddow, of course, was not alone. The New Yorker once ran a cover in Russian, a stunt that will age as terribly as all cold war-era red-baiting has to our 21st-century eyes. Last year, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait baselessly posited (in another cover story) that Trump may have been a Russian “asset” since 1987. CNN was a daily carousel of Russiagate pundits.

“We wrote a lot about Russia, and I have no regrets,” said the New York Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, in an interview after the Mueller report came in. “It’s not our job to determine whether or not there was illegality,” he added. Other news executives have also defended their coverage. CNN’s president, Jeff Zucker, said: “We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did.”

Still, it’s abundantly clear now that many liberal outlets overdid it in their fervor. And Maddow, MSNBC’s ratings juggernaut of the Trump era, is the embodiment of this overzealousness. The Mueller investigation was covered more on MSBNC than any other television network, and was mentioned virtually every day in 2018. No twist was too minuscule or outlandish for Maddow; every night, seemingly, brought another nail in the coffin of the soon-to-be-dead Trump presidency.

There was the time Maddow theorized that Trump was “curiously well-versed” in “specific Russian talking points”, strongly implying press briefings were dictated from the Kremlin. An American missile attack on Syria, Maddow concurred, could have been orchestrated by Putin himself. During a cold snap, the Russian government could shut down our power supply. Putin could blackmail Trump into pulling troops from Russia’s border.

Maddow was not only certain that Russians had rigged the election. On air, she would talk about the “continuing operation” – the idea that the Kremlin was controlling the Trump presidency itself. In more sober times, this brand of analysis would barely cut it on a far-right podcast. In the Trump era, it was ratings gold.

Maddow is much smarter than this. But the siren song of ratings is too difficult for a TV personality ignore, especially when a television network is transformed from an also-ran into a top contender.

If you’d told me back in 2005, when I first met Rachel Maddow, that the lightning-quick, ultra-smooth broadcaster would someday supplant Bill O’Reilly as the #1 name in cable news, I wouldn’t have been surprised, at all. But I’d have been shocked if you told me she got to the top by being Bill O’Reilly.

With Maddow in the lead role, MSNBC has become Fox, but somehow more craven, jingoistic, and shameless. If you don’t believe it, compare their narratives side by side, and see if you can spot a real difference between Bush-era Fox and Maddow’s MNSBC broadcasts from this past week.

On February 16, 2001, six months before 9/11, O’Reilly said on Fox, “You know, I don’t take Saddam Hussein all that seriously anymore, as far as a world threat.” He added, “Maybe I’m wrong and naive here. Should we be very frightened of this guy?”

Within two years, O’Reilly reversed course. He launched himself into an incredible 16-year run as the #1-rated star on cable by playing Madame DeFarge for the Bush/Cheney War on Terror. His show became a nighty fireside chat in which citizens tuned in to fulminate over stories of Saddam’s boundless evil, denounce traitorous unbelievers, and engage in McCarthyite interrogations of the insufficiently patriotic.

He moved the factual record by himself. On December 6, 2002, he told his audience: “I can’t, in good conscience, tell the American people that I know for sure that [Saddam] has smallpox or anthrax or he’s got nuclear or chemical and that he is ready to use that.”

But two months later, on February 17, 2003, he was saying, “According to the U.N., he’s got anthrax, VX gas, ricin, and on and on.” Two weeks after that, as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting noted, O’Reilly was saying things like, “This guy we know has anthrax and VX and all this stuff.”

He furthermore announced that “Once the war against Saddam Hussein begins, we expect every American to support our military, and if you can’t do that, just shut up,” adding that “Americans, and indeed our allies, who actively work against our military once the war is underway will be considered enemies of the state by me.”

By the runup to the invasion, O’Reilly was berating anyone who even tried to suggest the WMD case was not airtight, or had the temerity to suggest that Saddam Hussein was not the equal of Hitler. “Whoa, whoa. It’s not Hitler?” he snapped in one broadcast. “What’s the difference?”

Want to know how seven in ten Americans during the war came to believe that Saddam Hussein was somehow behind 9/11? In part, because people like O’Reilly regularly said things like, “Saddam Hussein… I believe is involved with this World Trade Center and Pentagon bombing,” and “I believe that you’re going to find out that money from Iraq flowed in and helped [9/11] happen.”

O’Reilly eventually got around to putting his “spotlight” on anyone who didn’t publicly back the invasion effort. He even took on Pope John Paul II, saying, “And then the pope sits in Rome and says, gee, this is terrible, but does not throw his moral authority behind removing this dictator.” He went after Sean Penn, the French, congressman Jim McDermott, etc., etc.

Then a funny thing happened. We invaded Iraq, the WMD case went splat, and O’Reilly, grudgingly of course, admitted he was wrong. “Well, my analysis was wrong and I'm sorry,” he said, on Good Morning America. “What do you want me to do? Go over and kiss the camera?”

Who knew that would end up looking like a proud moment in TV history?

On March 26, 2014, Maddow saluted Barack Obama for rolling his eyes when asked if Mitt Romney had been right to identify Russia as America’s biggest geopolitical threat. “America has got a whole lot of challenges,” Obama said, but “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness.”

“Serious presidential shade!” Maddow gushed, adding that this was, “President Obama… explaining that Russia is basically a gnat on the butt of an elephant. Calling Russia, in his words, merely a regional power that does not rise to the level of a major challenge for the United States.”

Within two years, just as O’Reilly had done, Maddow effected a complete turnaround on the major story of an era, devoting one broadcast after another following Donald Trump’s election in 2016 to the awesome Russian threat. As Erik Wemple of the Washington Post documented, Maddow tried to push the edge of the factual envelope. This was done in much the same way that O’Reilly did it, regularly inviting audiences to imagine one step beyond the facts. When the infamous Steele dossier leaked out, she had California congressman Adam Schiff on and asked, “When you cited … that dossier, should we stop describing that as an uncorroborated dossier?”

A specialty was advancing the story by inference. She suggested in January of 2017 that the Steele dossier was true because, “Had the FBI looked into what was in that dossier and found that it was all patently false, they could tell us that now, right?” she said. “I mean, the dossier has now been publicly released. If the FBI looked into it and they found it was all trash, there’s no reason they can’t tell us that now. They’re not telling us that now.”

In May of 2017, she posited that the existence of a FISA application on Carter Page was more proof: “Parts of this dossier passed muster,” she said, “even in federal court when the dossier was used in part to justify a secret FISA court warrant for U.S. surveillance on a Trump campaign adviser.” She went on to spend two years hyping the document, claiming among other things that Steele had the story “dead to rights,” and that “Christopher Steele had this story before the rest of America did. And he got it from Russian sources.”

Then, when the report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz exploded the credibility of the dossier, revealing those “Russian sources” to be a clown show of beery rumors, she moved on as if she hadn’t spent two years hyping the document. She moved straight to stressing a different part of Horowitz’s report, i.e. his conclusion that the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation was not opened for political reasons. She would do this over and over, ignoring developments that undermined her previous coverage.

Throughout the Trump years and beyond, Rachel exactly filled O’Reilly’s role as America’s chief accuser, pointing a finger at those in league with our hated Asiatic enemy. Once again, Hitler was regularly evoked, except that this version was Donald Trump. The bottomless evil of a foreign dictator became an overriding focus, again, as The Rachel Maddow Show rode all the way to #1 in the ratings as the home for suggestions that Trump was under the literal control of Vladimir Putin, seizing on any detail to suggest this or that betrayed his secret Russianness.

There was the time, for instance, when she said Trump was “curiously well-versed” in “specific Russian talking points.” She hammered the theme of treason, nodding in earnest as former Russia ambassador Michael McFaul watched the Helsinki summit, when Trump sat next to Putin, and declared “there’s your explanation” for the Trump administration’s “appeasement” of Russia. She hyped the erroneous story by McClatchy declaring that Michael Cohen had been in Prague, a detail that was supposedly explosive because it “confirmed” the Steele dossier narrative of the Trump team secretly meeting with Russian spies and hackers.

But, as Wemple pointed out, each time one of these stories fizzled, Maddow would pretend the fizzling didn’t happen. She was “there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings,” a “pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry.” In one of the all-time ironic podcasts, Michael Isikoff of Yahoo! — who was himself among the first reporters to cite Steele’s work and co-wrote a book that drew heavily on the Steele reports — pressed Maddow on her Steele broadcasts, saying she’d “given a lot of credence” to them.

She denied it. “You’re trying to litigate the Steele dossier through me as if I am the embodiment of the Steele dossier, which I think is creepy,” she snapped, adding: “I think it’s unwarranted. And it’s not like I’ve been making the case for the accuracy of the Steele dossier.”

Russia has become a propaganda Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card. Want to affect the congressional vote on the AUMF, justifying our presence in Afghanistan? Leak word Russians killed our troops there. Want to smear Tulsi Gabbard or Bernie Sanders, or prevent a damaging expose about your son’s laptop from reaching audiences in an election? Point at Russia. It’s become a joke, straight from the “reality-based community” playbook O’Reilly humped in the Bush years.

Despite the fact that the asinine collusion theory has been debunked now by a two-year Special Counsel investigation and a massive Justice Department Inspector General’s report, and one Russia story after another has fallen violently by the wayside, Maddow continues to lead the pack in the “bombholing” technique, i.e. covering up an old error with a new bombshell.

Even The Guardian a left wing rag, calls her a conspiracy theorist:

Even The Guardian a left wing rag, calls her a conspiracy theorist:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... hel-maddow



I can go much deeper on this, Maddow sold her soul during the Trump years, and lit any credibility she may have had on fire for ratings.

By protecting speakers whose statements cannot reasonably be interpreted as
allegations of fact, courts “provide[ ] assurance that public debate will not suffer for
lack of ‘imaginative expression’ or the ‘rhetorical hyperbole’ which has traditionally
added much to the discourse of our Nation.” Milkovich, 497 U.S. at 20 (quoting
Hustler Mag., Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46, 53–55 (1988)). That is the case here.

So, we've gone from discussing Trump's much too cozy relationship with Putin (specifically in regard to being indebted to the Russian strongman/spymaster), to demonizing Rachel Maddow.