It'll be interesting to see if the people who've been lauding musk for his supposedly pro free speech attitudes will reckon with what's been happening in actuality, or if they'll just accept this as "freedom for me but not for thee".
Calling it "Hunter Biden's laptop" ignores the fact that it was hacked information provided by a foreign adversary to sow division and influence an election. That is not comparable to sharing publicly available information about aircraft movements.
That being said, I also think the extent to which they went to bury and remove the real photos and videos of Hunter Biden smoking crack was a huge overreach. They tried to paint it as a conspiracy theory that had no factual basis — that's biased censorship.
Every single one of these claims is false. Hunter Biden gave his laptop to a repair shop, the repair shop shared its contents with the New York Post and the FBI. At no point was any foreign agent involved, at no point was anything "hacked"
You're right, Rudy Giuliani is clearly a credible figure and his account of how he happened to come across Hunter Biden's laptop is sensible and not-suspicous in the least.
Hey, quick question completely unrelated to this, was Trump pro or anti Putin? Did Julian Assange leak information in good faith or did he co-ordinate with Republicans to release only information that made Democrats look bad, in the 2016 election? Who provided Assange that information?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-assange-idUSKBN20...
I am aware. My point is that there is a precedent for this behaviour and neither Trump nor Republicans are credible.
> As for the provenance of the laptop: Hunter Biden never denied giving the laptop to the repair shop. And the repair shop gave the laptop and all its contents to the FBI, who would presumably have found any foreign involvment, if it existed, in their investigation of the matter.
Let me be clear: I have no doubt in the veracity of any of the information or materials leaked. I distinctly recall seeing posts on /pol/ containing videos of Hunter smoking crack and banging hookers (that have since been scrubbed from the Internet), and people allegedly attempting to hack his iCloud account.
However, the I do not find the story and chain-of-custody of his laptop credible. I have been looking further since your prior comment and I cannot find anything that unambiguously confirms its provenance.
On the flip side, I also do not find a lack of official condemnation or attribution to Russia to be sufficient in disproving it. Joe Biden and the Democrats were clearly trying to kill the story and scrub any mention of it, so acknowledging it only gives it legitimacy.
Happy to ammend my comment if you can point me to something that proves otherwise, though. Jeffrey Epstein was discovered in part because a woman stumbled across his black book on the sidewalk — sometimes unlikely coincidences happen.
~~Donald J. Trump was not directly involved in the breaking of the laptop story.~~ (edit: my bad) "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?)
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.