Flashback: Hunter's Laptop Russian Disinformation

[Xenophon]

Even if he only got the gig 100% because of his last name, as long as Joe Biden didn't actually provide any benefit to the company it would literally be no different than quite a lot of companies boards/leadership across the globe. So if you can't detail out what exactly Biden's Senator/VP connections actually provided to Burisma then the complaints are little more than hot air.

Anyone who thinks boards and executive level positions are only filled with titans of industry have clearly never spent any time directly working with them. I have had to personally explain very basic things like variable costs, how profits are calculated, how supply chains function, etc. to countless folks with positions significantly higher than mine. Every single day people are promoted because of who they know, who they are related to, dumb luck, having a likeable personality, backstabbing their colleagues and countless other reasons. I can probably count the number of executives that I believe were highly qualified for their positions and contributed true value to their companies that I've met on my hands alone (and I likely only need 1). Even then, the best executives I've encountered were mostly successful because they were good at surrounding themselves with smart people and facilitating those people's ideas.

[Dr Exiled]

Even if he only got the gig 100% because of his last name, as long as Joe Biden didn't actually provide any benefit to the company it would literally be no different than quite a lot of companies boards/leadership across the globe. So if you can't detail out what exactly Biden's Senator/VP connections actually provided to Burisma then the complaints are little more than hot air.

Anyone who thinks boards and executive level positions are only filled with titans of industry have clearly never spent any time directly working with them. I have had to personally explain very basic things like variable costs, how profits are calculated, how supply chains function, etc. to countless folks with positions significantly higher than mine. Every single day people are promoted because of who they know, who they are related to, dumb luck, having a likeable personality, backstabbing their colleagues and countless other reasons. I can probably count the number of executives that I believe were highly qualified for their positions and contributed true value to their companies that I've met on my hands alone (and I likely only need 1). Even then, the best executives I've encountered were mostly successful because they were good at surrounding themselves with smart people and facilitating those people's ideas.

I think we can say that from Burisma's point of view, the hiring of the inexperienced Hunter Biden was done in hopes to gain influence with the US, with the "big guy." Why else hire him?

Then the question becomes like you say, what happened next? What influence was actually gained? Did the "big guy" get part of Hunter's lucrative salary? Shokin says he was investigating Burisma and was asked to lay off of it and was fired because he wouldn't. The US position at the time is that Shokin was dragging his feet on corruption cases and that is why Biden involved himself in another country's affairs, threatening the withholding of money unless Shokin was fired. So, what cases was Shokin not pursuing? There are official memos praising Shokin and his efforts some 6 months prior. What changed if he was doing such a good job? https://justthenews.com/accountability/ ... asts-doubt

[K Graham]

I think we can say that from Burisma's point of view, the hiring of the inexperienced Hunter Biden was done in hopes to gain influence with the US, with the "big guy." Why else hire him?

Because Burisma was trying to clean up their image.

Then the question becomes like you say, what happened next? What influence was actually gained?

That's the million dollar question which has been left to speculation and innuendo in Right Wing fake news.

Here is something Doc relayed from Reddit a couple years ago:

Here’s a funny and on-point Redditor reply to the Hunter Biden B.S. Rudy and Bannon tried pulling:

“I will have enough for an entire book before this “scandal” is done.

Hunter, while living in California, decides to fly 3,000 miles to Delaware. All to drop off a laptop for repair, coincidentally at a huge MAGA fan shop. he decided to never pick up his own laptop.

There’s security footage of it, but it got lost. Epstein style. But don’t worry- the MAGA man swears he saw him drop it off. Turns out he has a mental condition where he CANNOT RECOGNIZE FACES (I’m not joking) he knew it was hunters though, cause of the stickers on the laptop... MAGA man, naturally, didn’t just erase and resell the laptop, but did the totally normal thing of duplicating the hard drive and spending hours sorting through thousands of emails to find one that suggests Hunter might’ve tried to arrange a meeting with daddy Biden no evidence any meeting ever occurred, but who cares.

In comes Rudy Giuliani, cyber security expert, and talking set of teeth -who was tricked by Borat, and periodically butt dials reporters on accident -he has ‘confirmed’ the information not even the FBI could. Rudy was so worried about the intel, he sat on the laptop for months until 3 weeks before the election.

Naturally, it proves Hunter was into pedo devil sex too, but the proof is secret and for Rudy’s eyes only. there’s a video of said drug fueled sexcapades, but again, you just gotta trust rudy

Rudy refuses to send any electronic proof of the emails to anyone. But it’s definitely real, and definitely exists Heh. Again- not a single news agency has actually seen any proof, except for photos of printed emails. This is why ThEY WoNT CoVeR iT
He was ‘confirming’ it the same time Trump received an intel briefing that Rudy was unknowingly being used by Russian operatives to spread disinformation. Lmao.

Rudy, tired of getting made fun of, tweets some more ‘source material’ text messages... except the text is in an app that didn’t exist at the time it supposedly happened, and...literally in Russia. Poor guy.

This was all also investigated by a real Post reporter who refused to put their name on it, as no part of it could be verified. Several news outlets also passed on the story for the same reason, including FoxNews and WSJ. Ended up written by Sean Hannity’s producer. Lol.

Now comes a guy named Bobulinski - alleging he, uhh met with Biden to discuss a Chinese business deal. He has proof, of course: ‘documents’ he says naturally, he actually hasn’t released anything.

The WSJ opinion section finally publishes a Bobulinkski piece. Note: opinion section, not news, as they still couldn’t verify anything. It alleges the above Chinese deal. They very next day, the WSJ news section refutes the entire thing, using Bobulinksi’s own source material.

Here comes Tucker Carlson. He is about to release a bombshell. All the emails. Proving everything. Unfortunately, these apparently only existed as single physical copies. The emails. Electronic mails. Only existed as one physical copy. (Got that?). Sadly, these printed non-electronic emails were lost (stolen!) in the mail, and no one ever made a copy , so we may never know which dog ate Tucker’s homework or who made-up this made-up story.

Next up is Martin Aspen, Swiss intelligence operative. He is the basis for many of these allegations and brought it public in a dossier that the PRESIDENT received.. it turns out he is not real. Literally, they made his face on a face generator and gave him a cute linkedIn profile at a fake company. Probably just a cover for the deep state.

I think I’ve got it all, but hard to say as they keep making new stuff up.
​
Edit: Tucker has retrieved the mystery documents. Still don't know what's in them, but coincidentally he thinks we should give Hunter a break, and pretend like none of this happened.

- Doc

[Morley]

I think we can say that from Burisma's point of view, the hiring of the inexperienced Hunter Biden was done in hopes to gain influence with the US, with the "big guy." Why else hire him?

Then the question becomes like you say, what happened next? What influence was actually gained? Did the "big guy" get part of Hunter's lucrative salary? Shokin says he was investigating Burisma and was asked to lay off of it and was fired because he wouldn't. The US position at the time is that Shokin was dragging his feet on corruption cases and that is why Biden involved himself in another country's affairs, threatening the withholding of money unless Shokin was fired. So, what cases was Shokin not pursuing? There are official memos praising Shokin and his efforts some 6 months prior. What changed if he was doing such a good job? https://justthenews.com/accountability/ ... asts-doubt

Doc Exiled: Viktor Shokin was dismissed because he was corrupt. Said dismissal was backed by the EU, the World Bank, the Ukrainian Parliament, and the International Monetary Fund. John Solomon, the author of your "Just the News" article, is not an reliable journalist.

[Xenophon]

For me this was about the most comprehensive timeline I've seen and really helped me wrapped my brain around the mess that was this whole thing: https://www.justsecurity.org/66271/time ... rainegate/

There is a ton of interesting things there and lots of additional sources to run through if you want to get lost down the rabbit hole but I'd call attention to a few things:

Vitaliy Kasko, a former deputy prosecutor general who had worked under Shokin and resigned in frustration at his stymying of corruption investigations, told Bloomberg News (in a May 2019 interview) that the office’s probe into Burisma Holdings had been long dormant by the time Joe Biden issued his ultimatum in 2016. “There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against” Burisma owner Zlochevskiy, Bloomberg quoted Kasko as saying. “It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015,” Kasko said.

“Shokin was not investigating. He didn’t want to investigate Burisma,” Daria Kaleniuk a leading Ukrainian anti-corruption advocate, told the Washington Post. “And Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.”

See also entries above: At time of British investigation in 2014-2015, Shokin’s Office sent letters to Zlochevskiy’s attorneys attesting that there was no case against him.

So for Dr. Exiled, I guess my question would be. Why would I believe Shokin when the folks who worked directly under him, his fellow countrymen, and the international community consensus is that he was not investigating Burisma properly (including documentation of his inaction within the UK's independent investigation)? It seems based on the evidence that had Joe Biden wanted to help his son and Burisma the best angle would have been to NOT oust Shokin.

[canpakes]

Doc Exiled: Viktor Shokin was dismissed because he was corrupt. Said dismissal was backed by the EU, the World Bank, the Ukrainian Parliament, and the International Monetary Fund. John Solomon, the author of your "Just the News" article, is not an reliable journalist.

The fact that all of these folks were in Hunter Biden’s pocket just shows what a powerful figure he is within the world.

He also knows where Jimmy Hoffa is buried. But, you’d best not ask.

[Dr Exiled]

For me this was about the most comprehensive timeline I've seen and really helped me wrapped my brain around the mess that was this whole thing: https://www.justsecurity.org/66271/time ... rainegate/

There is a ton of interesting things there and lots of additional sources to run through if you want to get lost down the rabbit hole but I'd call attention to a few things:

Vitaliy Kasko, a former deputy prosecutor general who had worked under Shokin and resigned in frustration at his stymying of corruption investigations, told Bloomberg News (in a May 2019 interview) that the office’s probe into Burisma Holdings had been long dormant by the time Joe Biden issued his ultimatum in 2016. “There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against” Burisma owner Zlochevskiy, Bloomberg quoted Kasko as saying. “It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015,” Kasko said.

“Shokin was not investigating. He didn’t want to investigate Burisma,” Daria Kaleniuk a leading Ukrainian anti-corruption advocate, told the Washington Post. “And Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.”

See also entries above: At time of British investigation in 2014-2015, Shokin’s Office sent letters to Zlochevskiy’s attorneys attesting that there was no case against him.

So for Dr. Exiled, I guess my question would be. Why would I believe Shokin when the folks who worked directly under him, his fellow countrymen, and the international community consensus is that he was not investigating Burisma properly (including documentation of his inaction within the UK's independent investigation)? It seems based on the evidence that had Joe Biden wanted to help his son and Burisma the best angle would have been to NOT oust Shokin.

Was Burisma ultimately investigated after the Shokin ouster? If so, what was found? This article says the investigation was allowed to die after Shokin left: https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house ... is-revived

From the article:

Most of the general prosecutor’s investigative work on Burisma focused on three separate cases, and most stopped abruptly once Shokin was fired. The most prominent of the Burisma cases was transferred to a different Ukrainian agency, closely aligned with the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, known as the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), according to the case file and current General Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko.

NABU closed that case, and a second case involving alleged improper money transfers in London was dropped when Ukrainian officials failed to file the necessary documents by the required deadline. The general prosecutor’s office successfully secured a multimillion-dollar judgment in a tax evasion case, Lutsenko said. He did not say who was the actual defendant in that case.

Nazar Kholodnytskyi, the lead anti-corruption prosecutor in Lutsenko’s office, confirmed to me in an interview that part of the Burisma investigation was reopened in 2018, after Joe Biden made his remarks. “We were able to start this case again,” Kholodnytskyi said.

But he said the separate Ukrainian police agency that investigates corruption has dragged its feet in gathering evidence. “We don’t see any result from this case one year after the reopening because of some external influence,” he said, declining to be more specific.

[Res Ipsa]

For me this was about the most comprehensive timeline I've seen and really helped me wrapped my brain around the mess that was this whole thing: https://www.justsecurity.org/66271/time ... rainegate/

There is a ton of interesting things there and lots of additional sources to run through if you want to get lost down the rabbit hole but I'd call attention to a few things: So for Dr. Exiled, I guess my question would be. Why would I believe Shokin when the folks who worked directly under him, his fellow countrymen, and the international community consensus is that he was not investigating Burisma properly (including documentation of his inaction within the UK's independent investigation)? It seems based on the evidence that had Joe Biden wanted to help his son and Burisma the best angle would have been to NOT oust Shokin.

Was Burisma ultimately investigated after the Shokin ouster? If so, what was found? This article says the investigation was allowed to die after Shokin left: https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house ... is-revived

From the article:

Most of the general prosecutor’s investigative work on Burisma focused on three separate cases, and most stopped abruptly once Shokin was fired. The most prominent of the Burisma cases was transferred to a different Ukrainian agency, closely aligned with the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, known as the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), according to the case file and current General Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko.

NABU closed that case, and a second case involving alleged improper money transfers in London was dropped when Ukrainian officials failed to file the necessary documents by the required deadline. The general prosecutor’s office successfully secured a multimillion-dollar judgment in a tax evasion case, Lutsenko said. He did not say who was the actual defendant in that case.

Nazar Kholodnytskyi, the lead anti-corruption prosecutor in Lutsenko’s office, confirmed to me in an interview that part of the Burisma investigation was reopened in 2018, after Joe Biden made his remarks. “We were able to start this case again,” Kholodnytskyi said.

But he said the separate Ukrainian police agency that investigates corruption has dragged its feet in gathering evidence. “We don’t see any result from this case one year after the reopening because of some external influence,” he said, declining to be more specific.

Were Solomon's claims in the opinion piece ever verified?

Here's an article from the Washington Post on John Solomon's role in the Burisma political smear.

What’s clear is that Solomon — a former Washington Post investigative reporter who later became editor of the conservative Washington Times — has played an important role in advancing a flawed, Trump-friendly tale of corruption in Ukraine, particularly involving Biden and his son Hunter. The younger Biden was a director of a Ukrainian energy company at the time his father, the vice president, was beseeching Ukrainian officials to crack down on corruption.

Solomon’s stories, in turn, have been echoed and amplified by Trump, his son Donald Jr. and Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has been at the heart of Trump’s effort to extract damaging information from Ukrainian officials about the Bidens.
Trump and his son, for example, highlighted Solomon’s Lutsenko story to accuse Yovanovitch, an appointee of President Barack Obama, of disloyalty and political betrayal.

After Solomon appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program in March to promote Lutsenko’s allegations, President Trump tweeted a reference to Solomon’s Hill story. A few days later, Trump Jr. tweeted a link to a story published by the conservative Daily Wire that reprised Solomon’s claims about Yovanovitch.

A week later, Solomon was back on the Ukraine story, this time raising “some hard questions,” as he put it, about the Bidens’ diplomatic and business activities in the eastern European nation. In an interview on Fox News a few days later, Giuliani urged the Justice Department to look into the matter.

Trump seemed to put the biggest bow of all on Solomon’s work, telling Hannity in an interview in late April that Lutsenko’s claims were “big” and that Attorney General William P. Barr “would want to see this.”

Except both stories had major defects. The State Department called Lutsenko’s allegations against Yovanovitch “an outright fabrication.” And Lutsenko eventually backed off, retracting his claim in April that the ambassador had given him a do-not-prosecute list. He further said in May that there was no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden or his son. (Lutsenko was eventually replaced as chief prosecutor by Ukraine’s reform-minded new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.)

Solomon, 52, has had a long, and occasionally decorated, career as an editor and investigative reporter in Washington, though his more recent work has been trailed by claims that it is biased and lacks rigor.

His career includes nearly 20 years at the Associated Press and shorter stints at The Post, Washington Times, the Center for Public Integrity, Newsweek/the Daily Beast and Circa, an online news outlet that was closed by its owner, Sinclair Broadcast Group, in March. He also co-founded an online publication titled the Washington Guardian.

At The Post, he was a hard-charging national investigative correspondent, with a knack for turning out important stories — such as one in 2007 detailing Giuliani’s efforts to enrich himself after serving as New York’s mayor on Sept. 11, 2001.

Over the past decade or so, his work has taken on a more conservative cast. His prominence within the conservative media ecosystem has been abetted by Fox News’s Hannity, who has featured him in segments highlighting his columns, particularly those casting doubt about special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia.

The attention from Hannity — a fierce supporter of the president — has led other conservative outlets to aggregate Solomon’s work, boosting his influence.

But Solomon has left a trail of critics, too.

The Columbia Journalism Review, in one of several critiques of Solomon, wrote in 2012 that he “has a history of bending the truth to his story line” and “distorting facts and hyping petty stories.”

He has been a figure of some controversy within his own shop, the Hill, which he joined in 2017 as an “investigative columnist” and the head of its video unit. In late 2018, a group of newsroom staffers complained that his stories about a liberal lawyer’s effort to raise money for women who had considered making sexual misconduct allegations against Trump during the 2016 campaign lacked adequate context.

He also reported, in an October 2017 column, that Russian sources had paid Bill Clinton $500,000 for a speech and waged “an influence campaign” with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the time the Obama administration approved the sale of an energy company, Uranium One, to a Russian company, suggesting but not confirming a quid pro quo.

Similar internal complaints at the Hill trailed another Solomon-authored story that was favorable to Trump. Other news organizations have reached unfavorable verdicts on his columns.

Solomon said last week that he was moving on again, announcing that he was leaving the Hill next week to start his own, unspecified online media venture.

Ah, the Uranium One guy. At least you're consistent.

[Xenophon]

Oof, I had quite a lengthy post sucked to the void (user error I'm sure). I'll try to make this round short and sweet for my own sanity.

I think your article is exceptionally short on citations and has the timeline really twisted. I also reiterate that literally only Shokin believes he was actively investigating Burisma, there is no evidence that he was able to bring any legal pressure to bear and countless testimonies from multiple third parties contend that he wasn't doing the work.

• The only investigation around London wire transfers I'm familiar with was from the UK SFO office and that investigation was stalled out as early as 2014 and was focused on the company long before Hunter ever touched the board
• At the end of 2017 the case against Burisma was closed. They ended up paying some 6 million USD in tax liabilities.
• It appears that Zlochevsky is back in the hot seat,but primarily for his suspected dealings as a government official in 2010-2012. Because he is in hiding the investigation is effectively stalled.

So to answer you question, it isn't until well after cleaning house that any action is actually taken against Burisma or its owner who has had to give up his ownership of the company and has fled the country. Again, pre-international pressure to push out corrupt prosecutors Burisma/Zlochevsky are sitting pretty and it isn't until post-pressure that they face consequences. If Biden was really protecting Burisma he did about the worst job possible.

Is Burisma squeaky clean? Absolutely not. Was Hunter hired because of his last name and connections? Almost certainly. Did that translate to protections for Burisma or Zlochevsky? Sure doesn't look like it.

[ajax18]

If Biden was really protecting Burisma he did about the worst job possible.

Wasn't it your favorite Barack Husein Obama who said, "Never underestimate Joe's ability to **** things up."