Meanwhile, you have actual US policy moves that just happened to be aligned with how certain countries treated the Trump/Kusher businesses and meh, they did a few things you liked so get a pass.
Priorities are definitely messed up here.
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As to the “decent at this job” thing, I don’t think you can undersell how good of a saleman Hunter apparently is. FFS, he’s got a history of not delivering, yet people keep throwing millions at him. He’s clearly got some talent.
Hmm, sounds very familiar. Maybe Hunter should run for president.
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Real access to the POTUS is worth billions, see the Trump administration.
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I’m not sure “Kushner isn’t a drug-addled, whore-searching grifter, plus he played a part in an inconsequential agreement that doesn’t have any meaningful impact on the area of the world it was targeted toward” is a winning talking point of any kind, especially when you go through his past real estate deals and see failure after failure where he needed to be bailed out repeatedly.
Also pretty sure one of them doesn’t currently have / never received a top-security clearance ordered at the behest of a President, despite the concerns of others in the administration - a clearance that could be used to solicit favors from other countries (and also be exploited by those other countries for various reasons).
But, mid-high 6 figure salary monthly … which, at say $750K/month is going to take … [does the actuarials] … 2,666.67 months (222.22 years for those too lazy to make that conversion) to get to $2 billion. Poor bastards, the lot of 'em. Probably need to pass a few more tax breaks so they can all make ends meet.
Maybe one year, we’ll find the perfect family where no one has done anything illegal of any kind and there’s no possible potential for embarassment, much less exploitation by a foreign government. Probably going to be about 222.22 years, best-case.
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Everyone said this.
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Kissinger’s description of kushner when the latter made time’s 100 influential people is hilarious. it says nothing actually complimentary. The last line, which implicitly compares him to icarus, seems laced with irony.
Summary
Transitioning the presidency between parties is one of the most complex undertakings in American politics. The change triggers an upheaval in the intangible mechanisms by which Washington runs: an incoming President is likely to be less familiar with formal structures, and the greater that gap, the heavier the responsibility of those advisers who are asked to fill it.
This space has been traversed for nearly four months by Jared Kushner, whom I first met about 18 months ago, when he introduced himself after a foreign policy lecture I had given. We have sporadically exchanged views since. As part of the Trump family, Jared is familiar with the intangibles of the President. As a graduate of Harvard and NYU, he has a broad education; as a businessman, a knowledge of administration. All this should help him make a success of his daunting role flying close to the sun.
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The Hunter Biden stuff has never interested me, but currently the Republican and Conservative subreddits are melting down over the laptop so I did a quick dive into it out of morbid curiosity. Of course all their sources are things like FreeAmericanConservatives.com but anyway, piqued my curiosity
From what I understand the timeline is roughly:
- In April 2019, somebody dropped off a laptop that may have belonged to Hunter Biden at a laptop repair shop. The owner could not verify the identity of the person due to being legally blind.
- Rudy Giuliani was contacted about it and he and Donald Trump released it to the New York Post in October 2020 to try to influence the election
- About 5% (? there are a few reports but mostly in this range) of the ~129,000 emails on the laptop are believed to be from Hunter but forensic experts warn that the digital signatures are not impossible to fake.
- Also in October 2020, the NYP reported that Joe Biden met with Ukrainian business leaders, but eyewitnesses at the charity event this purportedly took place say that Biden briefly stopped in to greet a friend and left, never sitting down.
- In September 2020, somebody created six new folders of files on it called things like “Hunter Burisma”, “Salacious Pics Package”, and “Hunter. Burisma Documents” (things that a guilty person would definitely do).
- Forensic scientists found numerous entities had accessed the laptop before and after the NYP article.
- The emails on the laptop are believed to have been tampered with at least on 145 dates after Hunter no longer had the laptop, assuming it was his.
- US senior intelligence officials (51 former ones anyway) have cautioned it appears to be Russian disinformation.
There’s also the fact that the unverifiable emails aren’t particularly damning?
The story has been quiet for a while now. Maybe we’ll find out more in October 2024.
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I had a good laugh at this one. This is the perfect start for every conspiracy story.
I’d heard Step 2 before and it has always seemed pretty funny, too. Whose first thought would be to call Rudy Giuliani? Or did it pass through a bunch of hands to get to Rudy?
That was my second favorite after the idea that Hunter Biden put a folder on his own laptop called “Salacious Pics Package” 
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- US senior intelligence officials (51 former ones anyway) have cautioned it appears to be Russian disinformation.
Is there any objective basis for this? Because I haven’t seen this particular liberal misinformation proffered for a while. I thought everyone was admitting the laptop is genuine. Pulitzer prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald literally quit The Intercept over their censorship of the laptop. The NYT ran an article not too long ago about it:
People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity,” the Times writes. “Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/hunter-biden-tax-bill-investigation.html
So the NYT has authenticated at least some of the emails of relevance. And in any case, even if it were misinformation, that is often sorted out later like with the DNC’s Alfa bank and Russian collusion misinformation. Trying to censor the entire story is… a bit suspicious, something like a guilty party and their friends would do.
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Here’s the public letter. https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-4393-d7aa-af77-579f9b330000
Note they are not saying it is disinformation, rather that it has all of the markings of typical Russian disinformation. It was one point of information amongst several.
After reading a number of opinions it is my personal suspicion is that the laptop may have been Hunter’s at one time. It has been tampered with to an unknowable but significant degree. Hunter was likely involved in some deals unbecoming of a politician’s child. It’s likely that Joe Biden was aware, but how much I cannot say. I haven’t seen any legitimate allegations of inappropriate collusion or illegal business dealings.
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So it’s not disinformation. Got it.
Rather than “appears to be disinformation” I should have said “it’s deeply suspicious”, “has all the earmarks of Russian disinformation”, “consistent with Russian methods”, etc. My apologies, the tone of that bullet point could be misconstrued.
Ya, I was being a bit facetious. It feels like weasel words to me: “we’re not saying it’s disinformation, we’re saying it feels like it.” Ok, you have a hunch, during the presidential campaign, against the incumbent who often repeated the phrase “deep state.” It feels problematic to me.
In any case, we now have the NYT verifying at least some of the emails, which seems to imply the laptop is not fake at least not entirely. If you dig more into the content on the laptop, in particular the literally thousands of photos and videos of himself that Hunter obsessively took/kept, it also seems to verify. Why would Russia fake that many videos of Hunter smoking crack and banging prostitutes? The volume is truly astounding. It seems more likely that this self-absorbed cokehead did in fact compile a massive archive of his antics over time.
What I do think is possible, maybe even probable, is that Russia or another country aided in obtaining the laptop and/or disseminating the contents. So again, weasel words. I don’t see any reason to think the substantive content on the laptop isn’t real.
For sure, it seems like he was engaged in personal activities that, at least in the US, would be illegal. Although I only just started caring about this as it seemed like a non-story, I never really disbelieved that likelihood. I don’t know if what he did was legal where he did it. Hunter can go to jail for all I care. But I agree it’s possible (speculation influenced by my political affiliations and historical context) that Russian-allied actors likely put the wheels in motion just prior to the election. It’s just silly the way that the right seems to connect it to some deep state cabal.
I personally haven’t seen the cabal connection. I’ve seen the concern more around possible corruption. Yes, going on crack and prostitute benders is illegal, but it also calls into question being appointed to a foreign corporate board and getting paid something like $60-80k monthly for “legal advice.” It seems like Burisma was getting ripped off, which could imply corruption. Hunter’s business buddy Devon Archer was also on the board, as was former W Bush official Joseph Cofer Black. Again, all of this could imply corruption, as would Ukraine obviously being one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
If this exact same situation had happened to the prior President’s son, not only would everyone already know all the details, but there would already be a Special Counsel. The ability to manipulate the administration of justice should concern everyone.
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The exact same situation did happen. In fact considerably worse because the last president literally hired his own kids, but people were too busy with the general clusterfuck of the last president to care.
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Lol.
I could bring up a lot more, but don’t have the time to thoroughly research the giant pile.