HUNTER BIDEN’S LAPTOP 💻!

J6 masterminds also 'fabricated' Hunter Biden laptop lies — and ex-tea party Republican has proofhttps://t.co/5NSFlN0edC

— Raw Story (@RawStory) July 10, 2023

I’m just connecting a few things here. I leave to you to read behind the tweets, if you want.

Or, C, the Hunter Biden investigation was riddled with misconduct far worse than anything on the Carter Page investigation and a misdemeanor plea was DOJ’s was to cut their losses. https://t.co/2NHumdwfsK

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) July 9, 2023

emptywheel has excellent data and analysis, but she tends to assume you know what she knows, or at least you’re conversant with everything she’s written. I offer the above tweet as an example.

But her best articles are worth the reading:

The Laptop Everyone Knows as Hunter Biden's Appears to Have Been Deleted Starting February 15, 2019https://t.co/uaz9CZarjE

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) July 8, 2023

Start there and a good deal of what Riggleman hints at (it’s a CNN interview, not a comprehensive report) is made clearer. But still, there is no patch of weeds emptywheel won’t classify to the last plant.

I wrote about that -- and other hints of problems with the Hunter Biden investigation -- here.https://t.co/4RyfUGpF6X

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) July 8, 2023

This is Jesse Kelly lying about what it showed. WHAT IT SHOWS is that the FBI didn't do the most basic things to ensure chain of custody/forensic integrity. https://t.co/S5HtbD3w2f

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) July 7, 2023

Here's the report from purported whistleblower Gary Shapley. It claims that to access the LAPTOP, FBI installed it in a new laptop and rebooted.

They were still laughing about this 10 months later. https://t.co/uzlkhVwxOw pic.twitter.com/GiEwCQoAPF

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) July 7, 2023

The tl:dr? Riggleman is absolutely right. “Hunter Biden’s laptop” fits the definition of the child’s string game “Cat’s Cradle,” in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel of the same name, an observation immediately obvious to anyone who’s ever seen the game: “No damned cat, and no damned cradle!” One could likewise call on Gertrude Stein’s observation of Oakland that there is no there there. Except she was referring to the place of her youth (I could say the same about where I grew up. Even 2 of the 3 schools I attended are gone.); the laptop in question is not as substantial as a memory.

That can only mean the purported contents of the purported laptop are the invention of some very nasty, very busy people. And it isn’t AI in politics we need to fear. This “scandal” was invented completely without it.

It’s the whole notion of intelligence that needs to be re-examined. Intelligence agencies know the difference between reports, and verified, data. Would that our journalists did, too.

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