Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by baryphonic 749 days ago
> Internally they had dissent but dismissed it and went so far as to misspell things so FOIAs would not find things.

I hadn't heard this yet. Unbelievable. And yet all of the sites I found it on from a quick search have at some point in the past been branded "fake news." In fact, one source, the New York Post, was falsely branded "Russian disinformation" on the eve of the 2020 election and suspended from Meta and Twitter, only for its story to be verified subsequently when it had minimal consequence.
1 comments
astrange 749 days ago
The Hunter Biden's laptop thing continues to be an intelligence op and not "real". It has not been "verified".

Of course it does contain some real content, since it was constructed from a hack of his iCloud account, but that doesn't validate anything else on it and some of the earliest claims about it seemed to involve eg planted child porn. You only find it credible because those were successfully suppressed so hard you don't even remember them.

link
rufus_foreman 749 days ago
From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...:

"In November 2022, CBS News published the results of a forensic analysis they commissioned of a copy of the laptop data Mac Isaac initially handed to federal investigators in 2019. The analysis, conducted by Computer Forensics Services, found data, including over 120,000 emails, "consistent with normal, everyday use of a computer", found "no evidence that the user data had been modified, fabricated or tampered with", and found no new files created on the laptop after April 2019, when Mac Isaac received the laptop. The chief technology officer of Computer Forensics Services added: "I have no doubt in my mind that this data was created by Hunter Biden, and that it came from a computer under Mr. Biden's control". Also on November 21, CBS News published the first photograph of the damaged Macbook Pro, which had been provided to them by Hunter Biden's legal team.

According to reports on January 16, 2024, new filings by the U.S. Department of Justice's special counsel, headed by David C. Weiss, appear to be the first public confirmation of the laptop's authenticity by the DOJ. The filings refer to the laptop connected to Hunter Biden stating, “the defendant’s Apple MacBook Pro, which he had left at a computer store.”"

Is that fake news?

link
astrange 748 days ago
Yes; notably a special counsel saying something is not "confirmation by the DOJ". A special counsel is a political entity not controlled by the DOJ and not everything they say is an official position or even true.

For instance, they said in the same case that a picture of a table saw with sawdust on it was cocaine Hunter Biden was using.

The defense in the case has said some of the material is not authentic (eg https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.827...) but it's pretty irrelevant to the case so they are probably not actually going to work this out.

link