FBI put the Hunter Biden story right in Facebook's lap
Category: News & Politics
Via: vic-eldred • 3 years ago • 101 commentsBy: Miranda Devine (New York Post)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
In his eagerness to ingratiate himself with mega-podcaster Joe Rogan, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg inadvertently revealed that the FBI had been more explicit than previously known in its private warning about Russian disinformation shortly before The Post published the Hunter Biden laptop story, which the social media company suppressed before the 2020 election.
While Facebook won't say exactly what the FBI told them, it has told The Post that Hunter Biden was not mentioned. But it refuses to rule out whether Joe Biden or Ukraine were raised in the FBI's defensive briefing to Facebook weeks before the Oct. 14, 2020, publication of our story implicating the then-Democratic presidential candidate in his son's lucrative Ukrainian influence-peddling schemes.
"Basically, the background here is the FBI basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, 'Hey, just so you know you should be on high alert,' " said Zuckerberg. " 'We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that so just be vigilant.' "
When Rogan asked if the FBI had told Facebook to be on guard specifically for our story about Hunter Biden's laptop, Zuckerberg claimed, rather unconvincingly that he did "not remember . . . specifically" but "it basically fit the pattern."
In response to questions from The Post, last week Facebook refused to give the date of the FBI private briefing or details of the "pattern" the FBI told them to look out for.
Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that the FBI approached Facebook and warned of a Russian propaganda "dump."PowerfulJRE /YouTube
Since our story had nothing to do with Russian disinformation, what made Facebook think it was the "dump" the FBI warned them about? We asked Facebook: "Was there mention made in the FBI briefing of Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Ukraine or a laptop?"
Facebook's answer was curious. "The FBI shared general warnings about foreign interference — nothing specific about Hunter Biden."
Note the omissions.
Suspicious timeline
Whatever was said, the briefing must have been specific enough for Facebook to recognize immediately that our story was exactly what the FBI was warning about and move at record speed to throttle it. At 11:10 a.m. the morning the story went live, Democratic operative Andy Stone, Facebook's communications manager, issued a statement on Twitter announcing "we are reducing its distribution on our platform" while the story is "fact checked by Facebook's third-party fact checking partners."
All morning the bombshell story had been the subject of frenetic commentary from journalists on twitter. But Stone's announcement killed it stone dead. Twitter followed Facebook's lead and locked The Post's account for two weeks.
Mission accomplished. Polls show that the outcome of the election may have been different if the story had not been censored.
The FBI's involvement in the censorship amounted to election interference, and as we have learned since from whistleblowers, the interference by a cabal of FBI agents to suppress derogatory information about the Biden family extended well beyond The Post's story.
While Facebook won't say exactly what the FBI told them, it has told The Post that Hunter Biden was not mentioned.
So, the question is, how did the FBI know about our story weeks before it was published, maybe even before we were told about the laptop by Rudy Giuliani's lawyer Bob Costello?
Were they spying on John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the Delaware Mac repair shop where Hunter had abandoned his laptop in April 2019? Mac Isaac believed he was under surveillance after he first contacted the FBI on October 9, 2019, via his father, to tell them he had the laptop and was concerned about evidence of crimes he believed it contained. The FBI's response was oddly hostile.
What followed was a curious visit to his Delaware home by FBI agents Mike DeMeo and Joshua Wilson of the FBI's Baltimore office a month later, and again to his store on December 9, this time with a subpoena for Hunter's water-damaged laptop and a hard drive clone of its contents which Mac Isaac had made.
John Paul Mac Issac believes he was under surveillance after he first contacted the FBI in 2019 about the laptop.Robert Miller
The case ID on the receipt the FBI gave him was linked to a money-laundering case out of the Baltimore field office. What we didn't know until after the election was that the US attorney in Delaware, David Weiss, had been investigating Hunter since 2018 over alleged tax evasion, money laundering and violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA), and the Baltimore FBI office supposedly was conducting the associated investigation.
Rudy's role
We don't know whether Mac Isaac was under FBI surveillance. But we don't have to speculate about Rudy Giuliani.
We know the FBI spied on the former mayor's cloud for two years from May, 2019, a month after he began working as then president Donald Trump's personal attorney. A year after raiding Giuliani's Upper East Side apartment last April, ostensibly over FARA violations, the FBI returned all his devices, without charging him, and told the New York Times he was no longer under investigation.
FBI agents raided former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's Upper East Side apartment in April 2021.AP/John Bazemore
So the FBI had access to all Giuliani's emails and iMessages for two years. Were they spying on Giuliani in order to spy on Trump?
Unfortunately for them, Trump rarely writes emails or texts so they came up empty there. But it is possible that they saw the email to Giuliani from his lawyer Bob Costello at 4.28 p.m. on Aug. 27, 2020, telling him of Mac Isaac's "amazing discovery."
"I am arranging to get a complete copy of the hard drive as it contains lots of materials beyond the Ukraine stuff according to the owner . . . The five emails he sent show that Hunter was directly involved in orchestrating his father Joe Biden's intervention to stop the Ukrainian investigation of Burisma," Costello wrote. "I believe that we are on the verge of a game changing production of indisputable evidence of the corruption we have long suspected involving the Biden's and Ukraine — but there is more."
Costello then forwarded Mac Isaac's original email addressed to Giuliani, which described how Hunter came into his store disheveled and reeking of alcohol, and attaching a copy of the work order with Hunter's signature, the FBI receipt and subpoena.
The FBI had access to it all. They had had the laptop for nine months and they knew Mac Isaac was legitimate.
We know they looked at the laptop because Mac Isaac received a series of calls from an agent the day after they seized it, asking how to plug it in.
A whistleblower told Sen. Chuck Grassley that the FBI had "developed information about Hunter Biden's criminal financial and related activity."AP/Andrew Harnik
'Same playbook'
As we know now from whistleblowers who came forward to Sen. Chuck Grassley, the FBI obstructed its own investigation of the laptop.
Timothy Thibault, an FBI assistant special agent in charge at the Washington field office, has been on leave since Grassley started raising concerns about his suppression of negative information about Hunter before the 2020 election.
The whistleblowers also told Grassley that the FBI had "developed information about Hunter Biden's criminal financial and related activity . . . verified and verifiable derogatory information" but that was "falsely labeled as disinformation" by FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten in August 2020.
Auten has been identified as the analyst who failed to alert his colleagues in 2016 to the "inconsistencies" in the phony Steele dossier, cooked up by the Clinton campaign to claim Trump was a Russian agent.
The same playbook was being applied to the Hunter Biden information.
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Miranda Devine is the New York Post Columnist who broke the Hunter Biden Laptop story. The explosive story had been suppressed by social media during the 2020 election. We have now learned through Mark Zuckerberg that the FBI interfered in the 2020 election and according to FBI whistleblowers, have sabotaged their own "investigation" of Hunter Biden. They have notably "lost" the Hunter Biden laptop.
The FBI response:
"After the release of the episode on Thursday, the FBI said it "routinely notifies U.S. private sector entities, including social media providers , of potential threat information, so that they can decide how to better defend against threats."
In a statement released to FOX Business, the agency said it has provided companies with "foreign threat indicators to help them protect their platforms and customers from abuse by foreign malign influence actors."
"The FBI will continue to work closely with federal, state, local, and private sector partners to keep the public informed of potential threats, but the FBI cannot ask, or direct, companies to take action on information received," the agency said.
"The FBI shared general warnings about foreign interference — nothing specific about Hunter Biden," the company said.
In the final weeks of the 2020 presidential election, both Big Tech and the liberal media suppressed the New York Post's reporting that shed light on the shady foreign business dealings of the son of then-candidate Joe Biden.
Both Zuckerberg and then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey expressed regret for their actions at limiting the distribution of the Post's reporting, and several news organizations, including the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News and Politico, have since verified the authenticity of the laptop.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., revealed this week in a letter to Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz that whistleblowers allege that FBI officials told agents not to investigate Hunter Biden's laptop for months over concerns it would impact the 2020 election.
According to Johnson, "individuals with knowledge" of the Hunter Biden case told his office that the investigation was intentionally slowed on orders from "local FBI leadership."
Thursday, FBI Director Wray will have to return and testify before a Congressional Committee, to explain what he found out about Whistleblower complaints concerning the stifling of the Hunter Biden "investigation."
This is such horse shit. The warning from the FBI about Russian propaganda was a good thing and apparently did not mention Hunter at all, it was just a general warning to social media companies. People imagining some nefarious suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story have their heads shoved so far up their own asses they are breathing fumes which is why they are clearly so fucking stupid.
The Hunter Biden laptop story was covered, everyone fucking knew about it who even paid the tiniest bit of attention to the news. This claim it was "suppressed" is total bull shit. Did the MSM give it the 24 hour a day coverage that right wing media wanted? Fuck no, because there was no actual evidence of any crime to report on, just a bunch of conservative conspiracy theories about what "The Big Guy" must mean.
I also find the blatant hypocrisy hilarious of conservatives using unnamed "whistleblower" claims as evidence the FBI was somehow covering up the laptop story when every fucking time we had whistleblowers or claims from unnamed sources within the Trump administration of his malfeasance those same conservatives poo pooed their claims because they came from "unnamed sources".
The FBI did their jobs, they are not an arm of some fantasy liberal 'deep state' trying to sabotage conservative politics or politicians. If anyone believes they are then show ANY fucking evidence of it, otherwise they should shove their moronic conservative conspiracy theories up the same hole they have their heads.
“The FBI did their jobs, they are not an arm of some fantasy liberal 'deep state' trying to sabotage conservative politics or politicians.”
This cannot be said often enough. To say otherwise is but chasing a tale [sic].
You can loudly and profanely bitch about this all day...but the truth well come out.
This claim it was "suppressed" is total bull shit.
Do you not know what that word means? Twitter and Facebook literally admitted suppressing the story. How dishonest do you have to be to claim they didn't when they've admitted doing it?
also find the blatant hypocrisy hilarious
As you attack conservative for hypocrisy by lying about what's already been admitted happened. Bravo.
It's bizarre. They deny what's been admitted and isn't even contested.
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The Russians and far right wing republicans had everything to do with the fake laptop data.The FBI and the NSA said it was full of Russian propaganda.
Fuck all right-wing fascist assholes who try to spin reality.
Lol. Here we go.
There are people who still claim Michael Brown put his hands and said don't shoot.
So a social media outlet that claimed it would fight misinformation, in fact participated in pushing misinformation and could be complicit with election interference.
Zuckerberg was never an angel.
That became evident when his "fact checkers" based everything off opinion and not real information.
Isn't it amazing! Where were the so-called "critical thinkers?"
Critical Thinkers? LMAO. That's non existent. They are too worried about being offended for somebody over something that happened a decade ago. [deleted]
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Oh, they are going to whine and cry regardless. It's all about playing a role.
My role is to try to stop far right-wing fascists from destroying this site with lies.
Pretty sure that there are many Russian bots on this site. You know who you are!
(dont turn around uhoooh , da commisars in town ut oooow...)
By spreading your own lies?
Once again, the FBI and social media companies influenced an election. What a surprise ... not.
Once again, the FBI and social media companies influenced an election... not.
The FBI warning social media companies of a real and present danger of enemy foreign governments attempting to use their platforms to push biased propaganda to tilt the election towards their ideological compatriot political party IS NOT "influencing" an election, it's protecting the election from foreign enemy threats.
Believe that 2-year-old fake news if you wish, but the fact remains that the FBI had Hunter Biden's laptop in its possession long before Miranda Devine's October 2020 article appeared in the NY Post and knew exactly what was stored on it.
It's amazing how much the masters of misinformation (the left-wingers) are in denial
I'm sure they also pretend to know nothing about Thibault, Auten, and the 50+ "Intel" letter-signers.
"There are none so blind as those who will not see."
And? Was anything criminal found? Or were the FBI just supposed to act like a bunch of moronic right wing conservatives and 'jump to conclusions' without actually proving a crime was committed. So far I have not seen any evidence proving anything on the laptop was a crime. It might eventually help in their possible tax evasion investigation, but nothing that's been released about it so far proves any crime. It might prove Hunter is an idiot, but if that was a crime then all of Trumps sycophant army would be in jail.
And why would conservatives care about a tax evasion investigation anyway? They clearly don't give a fuck since Trumps been being investigated for tax evasion and bank fraud for a while now and his CFO has plead guilty to grand larceny, tax fraud, falsifying business records and 12 other felony's but you never hear conservatives talking about that. Weird huh?
So just off the top of my head, I would ask, smoking crack and engaging in prostitution aren't crimes in your opinion?
Like I said, it proves he was an idiot, and no, frankly I think all states should legalize and regulate prostitution and illicit drugs. Prostitution is legal in Vegas and they're regularly tested, regulated and taxed. And addicts need treatment not incarceration.
But of course none of this gets to the heart of the issue which is Republicans desperate to use Biden's loser son to attack him and claim somehow Biden must be connected in someway to Hunters irresponsible behavior. And when the MSM failed to treat the story with as much passion as the Trumpites they claim it must be a corrupt FBI and some fantasy 'deep state' at work, which anyone with more than half a brain can see is total horse shit.
Happens all the time and the feds wouldn't get involved. Nor would they for crack.
Following the conversation.
I would like to hear your thoughts about this sometime,...
Ahhhh that made it so much clearer.....
The feds don't get involved in crack or prostitution?
The big boys, not the little guys.
?
Sorry but the feds are not going to do anything about some idiot with a crackpipe and a woman.
If they did they could probably arrest a lot of people.
I have yet to see any evidence that the average American gives a rats ass about Hunter Biden or his laptop.
I have yet to see any evidence that you have a clue what an average American give a rats ass about...
Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?
How so?
What differentiates the big boys from the little guys? In your opinion..
Large drug smuggling operations across borders...
Like fentanyl?
Among other things.
I agree... now back to the topic, obviously you have heard of someone being prosecuted because of evidence of illegal behavior found on their computer before right?
You are basically getting into the talk about can laws keep up with technology.
Imo the feds know what we are all doing anyway. They are not all to concerned about smaller time people which could be left to the state or local.
I seriously doubt someone is going to take another to court because they saw a crackpipe in a video. Much less the government. Nor should they.
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
Apparently, influence-peddling while one's father is VP also isn't a crime.
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Lmao!
There are several Russian bots on this site.
The anger expressed by some are funny as hell.
Who are they? Bots aren’t people so naming them wouldn’t be against the coc. Come on, who are they?
Intensity is right! And that’s what makes it so funny to me.
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