Just a day after more than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed on to a letter declaring that the recent disclosure of emails from the Hunter Biden laptop is likely Russian disinformation, the FBI reportedly confirmed that the material does not appear to be Russian disinformation. While former officials like John Brennan insisted that the story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” the FBI appears to have found no such evidence thus far. This followed a similar conclusion from the Director of National Intelligence in response to House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff saying that the story was pure Russian disinformation. The question is whether Twitter and Facebook will now bar access to Schiff’s statements pending further review since the actual intelligence agencies are suggesting that this could be democratic disinformation. After all, a former Twitter executive is calling for President Trump to be barred from all social media until after the election to prevent “misinformation.” The burden of being a free speech advocate is the the answer is clearly no. Those, like Schiff, who have called for censoring material on the Internet still should benefit from the protections of free speech.
From a free speech perspective, it does not matter if the Schiff statement and the letter have “all the classic earmarks of a [Democratic] information operation,” we all benefit from a free and robust discussion of such issues. We do not need these companies to censor or inhibit stories to protect us from misinformation.
The letter itself is striking not only in its sweeping conclusion (without actually reviewing the laptop or the emails), but it signatories. This includes some of those who have been associated with the Russian investigation of the Trump campaign, which was based in part on the Steele dossier. That dossier, funded by the Clinton campaign, was recently found to have been based on information supplied by a known Russian agent.
Throughout the campaign, and for many weeks after, the Clinton campaign denied any involvement in the creation of the dossier that was later used to secure a secret surveillance warrant against Trump associates during the Obama administration. Journalists later discovered that the Clinton campaign hid the payments to Fusion as a “legal fees” among the $5.6 million paid to the law firm. New York Times reporter Ken Vogel at the time said that Clinton lawyer Marc Elias had “vigorously” denied involvement in the anti-Trump dossier. When Vogel tried to report the story, he said, Elias “pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’” Times reporter Maggie Haberman likewise wrote: “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.” Even when Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was questioned by Congress on the matter, he denied any contractual agreement with Fusion GPS. Sitting beside him was Elias, who helped devise the contract.
Of course, the contents of the Steele dossier were reported in detail by the media. The reporting covered thousands of articles. It turns out that the FBI warned early in the investigation that Steele may have been used to spread Russian disinformation — a view that was strengthened by the disclosure of Steele’s many source. To this day, the media has largely ignored this story and how it was used to spread possible Russian disinformation.
If this is not disinformation, the emails magnify concerns that Hunter Biden was involved in a pay-to-play scheme. The emails appear to refer to Joe Biden receiving money and certainly refer to influence peddling.
I have previously stated that I remain suspicious of the timing and means of this disclosure. I want to see it investigation including the role of figures like Rudy Giuliani. Conversely, I have also been struck by what the Biden campaign has not said in response to the story. Both sides of the story should be investigated. However, there is a virtual news blackout on the contents of the emails even though (even with hacking) the emails could be legitimate. As discussed earlier, this is what a state media looks like . . . without the state apparatus. Major networks are still reporting that this is clearly Russian disinformation and dismissing the story. There is a clear effort to avoid scrutiny of the emails for just two more weeks. However, the disinformation claim is now being reportedly challenged by intelligence agencies. It does not matter. This is a fact too good to check. We are left with an entire media establishment turning blue holding its collective breath for weeks to see if they can make it across the line. There is an easier approach. It is called journalism. You investigate and report on both sides, including a demand that Hunter and Joe Biden respond to these specific emails as well as conflicting past statements. Sometimes the simplest things are the most difficult.
Bobulinski’s statement in full
My name is Tony Bobulinski.
The facts set forth below are true and accurate; they are not any form of domestic or foreign disinformation. Any suggestion to the contrary is false and offensive.
I am the recipient of the email published seven days ago by the New York Post which showed a copy to Hunter Biden and Rob Walker. That email is genuine.
This afternoon I received a request from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs and the Senate Committee on Finance requesting all documents relating to my business affairs with the Biden family as well as various foreign entities and individuals. I have extensive relevant records and communications and I intend to produce those items to both Committees in the immediate future.
I am the grandson of a 37 year Army Intelligence officer, the son of a 20+ year career Naval Officer and the brother of a 28 year career Naval Flight Officer. I myself served our country for 4 years and left the Navy as LT Bobulinski. I held a high level security clearance and was an instructor and then CTO for Naval Nuclear Power Training Command. I take great pride in the time my family and I served this country. I am also not a political person. What few campaign contributions I have made in my life were to Democrats.
If the media and big tech companies had done their jobs over the past several weeks I would be irrelevant in this story. Given my long standing service and devotion to this great country, I could no longer allow my family’s name to be associated or tied to Russian disinformation or implied lies and false narratives dominating the media right now.
After leaving the military I became an institutional investor investing extensively around the world and on every continent. I have traveled to over 50 countries. I believe, hands down, we live in the greatest country in the world.
What I am outlining is fact. I know it is fact because I lived it. I am the CEO of Sinohawk Holdings which was a partnership between the Chinese operating through CEFC/Chairman Ye and the Biden family. I was brought into the company to be the CEO by James Gilliar and Hunter Biden. The reference to ‘the Big Guy’ in the much publicized May 13, 2017 email is in fact a reference to Joe Biden. The other ‘JB’ referenced in that email is Jim Biden, Joe’s brother.
Hunter Biden called his dad ‘the Big Guy’ or ‘my Chairman,’ and frequently referenced asking him for his sign-off or advice on various potential deals that we were discussing. I’ve seen Vice President Biden saying he never talked to Hunter about his business. I’ve seen firsthand that that’s not true, because it wasn’t just Hunter’s business, they said they were putting the Biden family name and its legacy on the line.
I realized the Chinese were not really focused on a healthy financial ROI. They were looking at this as a political or influence investment. Once I realized that Hunter wanted to use the company as his personal piggy bank by just taking money out of it as soon as it came from the Chinese, I took steps to prevent that from happening.
The Johnson Report connected some dots in a way that shocked me — it made me realize the Bidens had gone behind my back and gotten paid millions of dollars by the Chinese, even though they told me they hadn’t and wouldn’t do that to their partners.
I would ask the Biden family to address the American people and outline the facts so I can go back to being irrelevant — and so I am not put in a position to have to answer those questions for them.
I don’t have a political ax to grind; I just saw behind the Biden curtain and I grew concerned with what I saw. The Biden family aggressively leveraged the Biden family name to make millions of dollars from foreign entities even though some were from communist controlled China.
God Bless America!!!!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8866713/Hunter-Bidens-ex-business-partner-says-Joe-Biden-talked-son-deal-Chinese-firm.html
60 Minutes uncut tape of Trump being interviewed by Stahl just recently released. Excellent to see the uncut version. I wonder what the cut version will look like if actually shown.
https://www.facebook.com/DonaldTrump/videos/350524406214941/
Honest article , unfortunate that some behaviorally challenged people can’t handle the truth.
“This includes some of those who have been associated with the Russian investigation of the Trump campaign, which was based in part on the Steele dossier. That dossier, funded by the Clinton campaign, was recently found to have been based on information supplied by a known Russian agent.”
Actually no, the investigation party got started when a Trump staffer drunkenly popped off in a bar. And the Steele dossier got its beginnings as opo research for other Republican candidates in the ’16 campaign, being initially funded by the Washington Times.
Of course, the dossier had information from a Russian agent. It would be impossible for it not to have that input. They’re the one that clearly have a lot of information on Trump.
Hell, I’ll admit to being saddened by your venture into being such a hack for Trump, Jon.
Jon, your should be ashamed in calling Professor Turley a Hack, your the hack and your so blinded with Trump and Russia while the Democrats Lie Rings around your dumb stuck Brain. The problem with people who call names such as hacks and trolls shows that they are very Juvenile. They never make good Attorneys nor good citizens..
REPUBLICANS NOT ‘ENTITLED’ TO OCTOBER SURPRISE
Turley and Trumpers keep expressing outrage that the Hunter Biden story was stillborn as a scandal. According to one source, Rudy Guiliani has possessed that hard drive since early this year. In other words, this October Surprise was planned long in advance. It was supposed to ‘upend the campaign’!
Had Social Media played along, this story would have broke wide; forcing mainstream media to ‘cover it objectively’.
‘X’ number of Democrats would have been disgusted enough to not bother voting. Allowing Trump to squeak out another Electoral College-Only ‘victory’. That’s how this story would have gone had Facebook and Twitter been willing partners.
So of course conservatives boil with indignation. They were ‘entitled’ to this October Surprise, or so they believed. But their ‘surprise’ was too much like last time. That became the problem. .
Emails on a laptop again’? ..Like no one remembers..?? We saw that before! No wonder Facebook and Twitter put a lid on this.
When dirty tricksters attempt the same trick 4 years later, it deserves to be blocked. Americans don’t need a repeat of 2016’s freak election. That would be the death of our democracy. Everyone outside the rightwing bubble would have seen the race as stolen again.
So ‘no’, you don’t get your long-planned October Surprise. It was planned too long to ‘be’ a surprise. Thank you, Facebook and Twitter. This time you guys sided with the country.
With the Media covering for the Bidens and Democrats refusing to deal with facts just opens up to what the claim Trump will do, Suppress an Open Society to Dictatorship. The Democrats and the Press have already conditioned people like you to their schemes.
thubtengompel, Rhodes and Gray Anonymous are all the same person, our usual troll who monitors these thread 16 hours per day.
“Americans don’t need a repeat of 2016’s freak election.”
The result of the 2016 election certainly spawned a lot of freaks. You being a perfect example.
But thanks to the scamdemic, and the Democrats purposefully using it to demand much more early mail-in voting, the 2020 election will be a
clusterfvck of epic proportions. Which is what they want, and it’s why they have hundreds of lawyers lined up in an attempt to sway the results in their favor.
So, that will be the November (non) surprise. Which of course will be accompanied by the usual rioting from Antifa and other associated groups of psychopaths like Antifa.
As to the Biden boys being owned by the ChiCom’s. There is nothing new about that reality. But thanks to Twitter, the Streisand effect has served to enlighten a much larger percentage of the general public than would have become aware of their malfeasance had Twitter not blocked/banned the NYPost article.
This is all about the Globalists war on populism. The combination of Trump winning the 2016 election and Brexit were the 2 Black Swans they never saw coming. So they launched their “Corona 2019” plan in January of 2020. Instead of coming from Mexico, it came from China. That’s because Pooh Bear’s China was a much more pliable and willing participant than Mexico.
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=harris+husband+next+president+youtube&docid=14055626090311&mid=05136D9537B9550BEC4005136D9537B9550BEC40&view=detail&FORM=VIRE
Trump is a buffoon and after 4 years in office most people know he is unfit and throughly corrupt.
Does anyone think this is an intelligent response? Shouldn’t an adult be able to provide a few Cogent reasons along with some logic?
KAMALA HARRIS’ HUSBAND
SAYING THAT HE IS MARRIED TO
“THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES”
WAS TAKEN DOWN FROM YOUTUBE.
AIN’T THAT AMERICA?
THE DEEP DEEP STATE IS IN FULL CONTROL.
Youtube isn’t controlled by the state, deep or otherwise.
Or did I miss something new from Q-Anon?
Where’s your fellow communist (liberal, progressive, socialist, democrat, RINO) bot, Needs-To-Be-Committed?
Did your Chief Political Officer reassign her to a more influential blog?
I certainly hope the politburo didn’t order that she be Seth Riched on a back street at 2 AM.
Q-Anon is a PsyOp, Sanpete.
Which makes you as big a fool as anyone else who doesn’t know that it’s a PsyOp.
That was random! Lots of free association in the comments at the blog.
I’m glad to see you saying this, but please–proofread better! For example, in the opening two paragraphs:
The burden of being a free speech advocate is the the answer is clearly no. Those, like Schiff, who have called for censoring material on the Internet still should benefit from the protections of free speech.
I think you meant “The burden of being a free speech advocate is THAT the answer is clearly no.” ?
From a free speech perspective, it does not matter if the Schiff statement and the letter have “all the classic earmarks of a [Democratic] information operation,”
I think you meant a Democratic DISinformation campaign?
Again, thank you for using your megaphone, which is far louder than mine, to say this and similar inconvenient truths.
The best case against a Biden presidency: Him
Joe Biden is the biggest beneficiary of a biased media that seemingly will do anything to protect the Democratic Party. If the media covered Biden honestly, he most likely wouldn’t be the Democratic nominee. To put it simply, he doesn’t have what it takes to be president.
That’s precisely why many in the media and Big Tech have worked to protect him. Facebook and Twitter have suppressed or censored information damaging to Biden’s candidacy; much of the media has downplayed negative news stories about him and refused to ask him tough questions, all while pushing dubious, anonymously sourced hit jobs on President Trump.
When you take a clear-eyed look at Biden, there is no meaningful case for his candidacy. His biggest argument is that he is the “good guy” in this election, which he describes as a “battle for the soul of the nation.” However, that façade was destroyed when the New York Post published his son’s alleged emails. According to the Post’s reporting, those emails show Hunter Biden leveraging his last name to make millions of dollars from foreign actors while his father was vice president — and Joe Biden apparently knowing about it.
Last year, Joe Biden told the American people that “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” Yet the emails appear to contradict that. According to the Post’s reporting, a top Burisma Holdings executive emailed Hunter to thank him for an introduction to his father, then the vice president. If the email is authentic, the meeting would have taken place one year before Joe Biden publicly bragged about forcing the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating that Ukrainian energy firm for corruption.
Hunter Biden wasn’t just doing business in Ukraine, however. Separate emails suggest that he expected to be paid $10 million a year for “introductions alone” from China’s largest private energy company in a deal he allegedly said was of interest to him and his family, according to the Post. As Fox News reported, the emails raise questions about whether Joe Biden may have profited from some of the deals along with other family members.
But questions about Joe Biden’s character run deeper than this issue. His entire campaign was launched on a falsehood about a 2017 protest/rally in Charlottesville, Va., that turned deadly. Biden falsely asserted that President Trump called white supremacist protesters “very fine people,” which many news stories have repeated to this day. Perhaps that kind of fabrication should come as no surprise from someone who dropped out of the 1988 presidential race following a plagiarism scandal.
In reality, a transcript of Trump’s remarks on Charlottesville shows that he explicitly denounced white supremacists, stating: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.”
Biden has unequivocally called Trump a racist. Yet, his own record on race has been widely criticized by fellow Democrats and others. In a June 2019 Democratic debate when they were still political rivals, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) famously attacked him over that record, which includes working closely with Senate segregationists in the 1970s, eulogizing the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) in 2010 despite Byrd’s past association with the KKK, and once declaring he didn’t want his children “to grow up in … a racial jungle” caused by tensions over desegregation policies.
In this campaign, Biden has called for a return to national civility — yet he paved the way for incivility as a senator. As Senate Judiciary Committee chairman in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he led two of the most vitriolic, destructive Supreme Court confirmation hearings, for Judge Robert Bork and Justice Clarence Thomas. The smearing of Bork was so savage that to “Bork” someone has become a verb; Thomas called his hearing a “high-tech lynching.”
Voters have no reason to trust Biden on policies, either, because he has flip-flopped on nearly every major issue in his career. He abandoned his decades-held belief on the Hyde Amendment, which prevents taxpayer-funded abortions, after receiving 24 hours of criticism from pro-abortion groups. He changed his positions on China and on fracking, and he has refused repeatedly to explain his position on packing the Supreme Court. In fact, he first said voters would know “my position on court-packing the day after the election” before saying in last week’s ABC News town-hall interview that he would announce his position before Election Day — maybe.
Obama hits trail to help Biden, protect legacy
Meadows tempers expectations of Hunter Biden probe
Biden is the epitome of a Washington “swamp creature.” Despite being in public office for nearly five decades, he has managed to amass a nearly $9 million fortune; he has never been an executive or run anything. He is the very reason that many people support term limits for elected officials.
The 2020 election will come down to a binary choice between Joe Biden and President Trump. While Trump certainly has his own faults, you always know where he stands and what he believes. What’s the case for Biden?
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/522050-the-best-case-against-a-biden-presidency-him
Turley writes: “From a free speech perspective, it does not matter if the Schiff statement and the letter have “all the classic earmarks of a [Democratic] information operation,” we all benefit from a free and robust discussion of such issues. We do not need these companies to censor or inhibit stories to protect us from misinformation.”
Does this mean a “potentially misleading” label is not in a private platform’s purview and should not be applied in this or any case?
Legislation recently proposed by Schiff:
https://schiff.house.gov/news/press-releases/schiff-introduces-legislation-to-protect-journalists-from-human-rights-abuses
“Washington DC – Today, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) introduced the Jamal Khashoggi Press Freedom Accountability Act to ensure that the United States holds accountable those who commit extrajudicial killings and other gross violations of human rights against journalists.”
“This legislation would prohibit U.S. foreign assistance to government entities and levy targeted sanctions against individuals that perpetrate gross human rights violation against journalists, and would require the Department of State to document incidents of online harassment and electronic surveillance of journalists in its annual Human Rights Reports.”
The FBI’s subpoena of a laptop and hard drive purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden came in connection with a money-laundering investigation in late 2019, according to documents obtained by Fox News and verified by multiple federal law enforcement officials who reviewed them.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/laptop-hunter-biden-linked-fbi-money-laundering-probe
Hmmm? 🤔
Kamala Harris Shall Be Ensconced By the Deep Deep State of the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” as the General Secretary of the Politburo of the United Sates of America.
Professor Turley is a scholar of the U.S. Constitution.
Professor Turley is going to lose his position.
Is there a school that awards a Juris Doctorate in the Communist Manifesto?
Best of luck, Professor.
KAMALA HARRIS’ HUSBAND
SAYING THAT HE IS MARRIED TO
“THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES”
WAS TAKEN DOWN FROM YOUTUBE.
AIN’T THAT AMERICA?