A Laptop with an Implausible Origin Story
Hunter Biden, Rudy Giuliani, and media standards
Quick programming note: I wrote a whole big newsletter and when I went to publish it, Substack had a server hiccup and couldn’t publish it. It also hadn’t saved it as a draft, so I totally lost the last third. Which means I’m now recreating it from memory, which is fine because it’s not like it was Gone With the Wind in the first place. Maybe it’ll even be better.
Passing the Laugh Test
This is sort of a niche story, but it’s something that interests me.
Last week, the University of Chicago held a conference on “disinformation,” during which a student who works for a conservative publication asked Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum if she thought “the media acted inappropriately when they instantly dismissed Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation.” Applebaum, er, made waves when she said that her “problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop is,” she thought, “[it’s] totally irrelevant. It’s not whether it’s disinformation — I don’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States. So, I don’t find it to be interesting.”
Of course that set off tantrums from the usual corners of Trumpism about how the media was blocking and tackling for the Biden campaign — a not-totally-unwarranted complaint, if disingenuous. But it’s important to remember how the entire story came about: In mid-October of 2020, less than three weeks before the election, a story appeared in the New York Post that purported to show emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop in which Hunter was promising to introduce his father to a board member of a Ukrainian energy company. So, a pretty standard scandal — the son of a prominent political figure trading on his last name, exchanging large sums of money for supposed access to political power.
But the origin story for how the New York Post came to possess the laptop simply didn’t — and to my knowledge, hasn’t since — passed the laugh test. Just a little refresher on that whole Comedy of Errors: An unnamed customer [who we are apparently supposed to believe was Hunter Biden himself] brought a laptop into a Delaware computer repair shop in April of 2019; but never retrieved the laptop after the repairs were made. The owner of the repair shop then perused the files on the laptop, at which time he supposedly discovered the scandalous/incriminating emails from 2015, along with videos of Hunter Biden engaging in various sexual activity and illegal drug use. The shop owner then alerts federal authorities to the laptop’s existence; but before turning over the laptop to the authorities, he makes a copy of its contents [which is itself a crime], and provides that copy to a lawyer representing [drum roll]…Rudy Giuliani. And then, after being alerted to the existence of the laptop by none other than Steve Bannon, the New York Post received a copy of the laptop from Rudy Giuliani, which they then printed in a story written by a former producer for the Sean Hannity show.
So at the time, pretty much every media outlet who takes themselves more seriously than the New York Post looked at the facts and said “well this is clearly an attempted hack job by the sitting president’s attorney and former chief advisor in the last three weeks of a presidential campaign, we’re not going anywhere near this.” A group of foreign policy and intelligence experts went so far as to say it was likely the result of Russian disinformation [which is what the student was referencing above]. And to be fair, it certainly looked like it. It looked like the platonic ideal of a Russian disinformation scam — taking a real piece of scandalous information (the laptop of the son of a prominent political figure with evidence of genuine criminal activity) and then inserting fake criminal activity amongst the real criminal activity.
Facebook and Twitter actually banned the sharing of the article on their platforms because of concerns it was Russian disinformation; which in hindsight might have been a mistake if for no other reason than they Streisand Effect-ed the whole thing into getting way more attention than it otherwise would’ve.
The Streisand Effect, for those of you who don’t live on the internet, is the phenomenon of efforts trying to suppress or censor information actually bringing more attention to the information than would have otherwise occurred. It’s so named because Barbara Streisand once tried to sue to have a picture of her house removed from the internet, and the news story surrounding her effort actually led to exponentially more people seeing the picture than would have encountered it otherwise.
Now, some — even most — of the contents on the laptop have been verified as genuine. But much of it simply cannot be verified because there’s nothing at all resembling a chain of custody; and apparently things have been added to the hard drive at various times and are of unknown origin. But even if you accept at face value that everything on the laptop is genuine, the origin story for how it became public information still, as I said, doesn’t pass the laugh test.
These questions still have not, to my knowledge, been answered: Why did Hunter Biden, who apparently lived in Los Angeles at the time, take his laptop to Delaware for repairs? When the laptop was not retrieved by the customer, why didn’t the shop owner, as is protocol, wipe the hard drive and sell the computer for parts? Why was the shop owner perusing a customer’s private files? How did the shop owner even recognize the supposed criminality referenced in the emails? Why did he make a copy of the hard drive before turning it over to the authorities? And why did he then provide the copy of that hard drive to the president’s attorney during the campaign?
Even if you accept the premise — and perhaps we can — that Hunter Biden is a laughably inept criminal who makes his criming so obvious that a[n albeit unethical yet surprisingly informed] laptop repairman can spot it just by looking at his computer, there is no scenario where that information honestly ends up in the pages of an American newspaper.
And given the timing of the whole enterprise, it doesn’t bother me at all that most media organizations looked at the available evidence and said “yeah, no.” Even if everything on the laptop is genuine, it was clearly an attempted “October surprise” — and not even a particularly well-executed one! — by the Trump campaign. And I don’t think news organizations are obligated to go along with ham-fisted political efforts.
I think that’s really what upsets the people howling about Anne Applebaum’s dismissive answer. They think that Rudy had the goods on Hunter, and by extension Joe, and it shouldn’t matter that the sequence of events for how Rudy came to possess that information is less believable than a Cohen Brothers movie. It makes them angry that the media suddenly found publication standards when it came to scandalous accusations about the Bidens after running with every unconfirmed rumor about Donald Trump. Which, again, is not altogether unreasonable. (It’s also worth noting that the then-Republican Senate investigated many of these claims against Joe Biden and didn’t uncover anything untoward.) But there are few issues more tedious to me than hearing rightwingers complain about media bias. Does the media generally have an inherent bias against Republicans and toward Democrats? Sure. The solution, though, obviously is not to have lower media standards when it comes to Democrats, it’s to have higher standards for Republicans. But that’s a subject for another newsletter.
I think Facebook and Twitter probably went too far in preventing the story from being shared on their platforms; but given the accusations from 2016 about being unwitting accomplices to Russian election meddling, I can understand the overreaction. I also think media organizations generally acted perfectly reasonably by not allowing themselves to be used in an obvious political ploy.
And not for nothin’, I just can’t take seriously Trump supporters’ concerns about corrupt nepotism. That’s not just rank whataboutism. Hunter Biden is pretty obviously a tragically flawed individual seeking to cash in on the family name through proximity to political power. It’s gross. But people don’t get to cry foul about that when they had no such protestations between 2017 and 2021 when the then-president’s children were still engaging in international business dealings while employed by the White House. Goose, gander, etc. Hunter Biden at least has the decency to try to keep his corrupt nepotism secret. It’s much more disrespectful, I think, to engage in it from a West Wing desk.
It’s also just yet more evidence of our civic failure as a people. 330 million people in this country, and we narrow our choices for president down to two septuagenarians with unscrupulous children. We could do better, but we repeatedly choose not to.
Great Minds?
The same day I put out my thoughts on the search for a Unified Theory for Why Everything Sucks, the Atlantic’s Jonathan Haidt put out an impressively lengthy piece laying much of our recent unpleasantness squarely at the feet of social media. Like I said, it’s lengthy but well worth your time. The gist of it is that social media brings out the worst in human nature while stifling our better instincts. It provides a platform for the most extreme voices in our politics and allows a mechanism to enforce ideological uniformity. It also reduces trust in important cultural organizations and provides a means for otherwise crazy people to find other crazy people and give them the impression that they’re not actually so crazy.
But I wonder if there’s not also something to the idea that we, as human beings, simply aren’t wired to know as much about each other as we do. There used to be a saying that “all politics is local.” Meaning, politics is chiefly driven by the mundane concerns usually addressed at city council and school board meetings. Well, not anymore. All politics these days is national. We seem to be driven by the anger that someone, somewhere in the country, might be living wrong. Go to a city council or school board meeting these days, and you’ll find people shouting about other people far outside the jurisdiction they’re addressing about issues over which the city council or school board has no authority.
The most prominent recent example of this phenomenon is when a bunch of traditionalists on social media became incensed at the fact that [I believe] a single library in California was hosting a Drag Queen Story Hour in which drag queens would read books to children. To my knowledge, attendance to such an event was not compulsory, nor did it involve the use of government funds (other than taking place inside a library). Before the advent of social media, the odds of most people even knowing about such an event were slim. But now not only do people know about it, it makes them mad.
I’ll admit, this is something I struggle with myself. For all my talk about the preferable live-and-let-live philosophy of federalism, I too find myself getting annoyed at people who live far away from me behaving in ways I find objectionable. I mean, hell, an inordinate amount of content of this newsletter is devoted to complaining about a member of Congress who does not represent me, has never passed a single piece of legislation, and does not even sit on a single committee. But thanks to social media, I’m aware of every hot belch of insanity that bubbles out of her brain.
And that, I think, raises another question that I don’t yet have a satisfactory answer to: What are we supposed to do about people who use social media to reveal themselves to be, well, insane? Or just generally gross and unpleasant to be around?
To give an oddly specific example, I didn’t need to know that various people I went to high school with, or members of my family, believe that vaccines contain microchips that the government could use to…I’m not entirely clear what; or that various elites are engaged in a widespread child trafficking scheme they use to do all manner of unspeakable things to children; or that there’s a shadowy cabal of socialists conspiring to rig our elections, or that it’s more important to be so spitefully individualist that they would rather performatively violate public health guidelines than practice civic responsibility. I didn’t need to know any of that. I could’ve had cordial relationships with such people never knowing that they were, in their own minds, cranks. But they decided to publicly profess their crankery, and I’m not entirely sure what to do with that information. I certainly can’t un-know it; and I’m not a good enough actor to pretend they didn’t say it.
It’s a new aspect of interpersonal relationships that I’m not sure how to navigate.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: Chemistry
Clue: The chemical symbol for sulfuric acid it completes this rhyme:
Say farewell to the professor
He’ll be with us no more
For what he thought was H2O
Was...
H2SO4
Today’s clue:
Category: WWI
Clue: Early leadership of an all-black regiment earned him the nickname “Black Jack.”
Dispatches from the Homefront
Passover starts tonight, and it’s the first time our older daughter is old enough to notice that she won’t be able to eat, for a whole week, many foods that she enjoys. And a week might as well be a prison sentence for a toddler. We’re not even going to bother trying to get her abstain from leavening at school, but we’re bracing for meltdowns when there aren’t waffles for breakfast or PBJs for…well pretty much every meal.
Which reminds me, I have about a year’s worth of cookies, crackers, and sandwich crusts to vacuum out of my backseat before sundown.