(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . What you need to know about about Hunter Biden, those "dick picks", and who's behind them [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-01-16 Steve Bannon - the unfortunately NOT missing link between humans and Jabba the Hutt House Republicans have made no secret of their plans to ride Hunter Biden and his father to death with endless hearings and allegations. I won’t go into all the details here, but one particular aspect of the story deserves some attention. In 2019 Hunter Biden is supposed to have left a laptop computer at a Delaware computer repair shop for repairs, but never retrieved it. The shop owner copied the contents of a hard drive and somehow information from it has been spreading through the right wing fever swamp, FBI investigations, and the press. Depending on who you talk to, the files ‘prove’ Hunter was involved in various financial schemes directly involving his father, in Ukraine, China, and so on. Or do they? The provenance of some of the claims, the chain of custody of the information — let’s just say that there are plenty of reasons to doubt some or possibly most of the claims as dubious. Also, we’re dealing with people with a documented record of lying chronically and systematically with strong motives to do so. What is not in dispute is that Hunter Biden is the son of President Joe Biden, and that his name has gotten him business opportunities. Unlike the family of his father’s predecessor however, he has never held a position in government or traded on official government ties. There is no evidence Hunter’s father had anything to do with getting business opportunities for his son or benefitted from them, but Republicans are determined to ‘prove’ it — going all the way back to plans to use them to win the 2020 election with allegations of criminal conduct. At the very least they are using lies, disinformation, and smears to attempt to discredit the Bidens the way they have been trashing prominent Democrats for decades. What's also not in dispute is that Hunter Biden is — as the saying goes — “a troubled individual” who has experienced problems with personal relationships and drug use. Apparently some of the material from his laptop include images of a personal nature, casually referred to as “dick pics”. Here’s where it gets interesting. Dan Friedman at Mother Jones has been doing some investigating. This is not a First Amendment thing. On the evening of October 24, 2020, a guy who goes by the name Wenyang tweeted a picture of Hunter Biden. Hunter was facing a mirror in what looked like a hotel room, with his penis exposed. Within an hour, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign asked Twitter to take down the post. We know this because journalist Matt Taibbi—using documents that Twitter owner Elon Musk provided to him—has been tweeting out internal communications between Twitter executives who, at the time, were discussing how to deal with material from Hunter’s laptop. Wenyang’s tweet is the third of five listed in a screenshot of an email from one Twitter staffer to another. “More to review from the Biden team,” the email said. “Handled these,” a Twitter employee responded a few hours later. Musk and Taibbi have been screaming about censorship, first amendment infringement, etc. etc. at Twitter. Friedman notes that there were two types of material here: Mostly overlooked in the howling is that Twitter blocked two different kinds of material connected to Hunter’s laptop. The first category was reporting by the New York Post, which detailed—in some cases, inaccurately—Hunter’s efforts during and after the Obama administration to profit off being the son of the vice president. The second category was far different: scores of photos and videos that showed Hunter having sex and using drugs. Twitter’s decision to suppress reporting on Hunter’s business efforts was purportedly based on suspicions that the stories relied on documents that might have been hacked by Russians—the precise scenario that occurred in 2016—and that those documents might include forgeries mixed with real material, a tactic Russian agents reportedly tried in France in 2017. But those fears were not borne out. In retrospect, as former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey later acknowledged, the decision to block the Post story appears to have been a serious misstep. But Taibbi, Musk, and company seem to have focused a lot of their fire on Twitter’s suppression of Hunter’s dick pics and similar stuff. The currently accessible tweets cited in the email that elicited Musk’s First Amendment comment were about sex, not political corruption. All that is revealed by the emails in that screenshot is Twitter following its own terms of service. Nonconsensual pictures of people’s junk are not protected speech. As Jeffrey Lebowski once told Walter Sobchak, “This is not a First Amendment thing, man.” Why the emphasis? I’d suspect they figure it’s better scandal material, the kind of thing people can get upset over where business corruption may be less ‘exciting’. As for who would think that way, well: But let’s look at who was posting those pics in the first place. The third tweet cited in Taibbi’s screenshot, the Internet Archive shows, came from an account that features a logo and slogan indicating the user is a member of New Federal State of China. The NFSC is an organization set up in 2020 by Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese mogul, who has aggressively promoted false claims about Covid vaccines and the 2020 election. ...I have previously reported on various messages and recordings detailing what Guo and Bannon and their backers were up to in 2020. One thing this material shows is that in October 2020, Bannon—working with Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer—arranged for Guo and his followers to spread salacious videos and pictures from Hunter Biden’s laptop. ...And it’s worse than that. From the start, Guo and his supporters accompanied the pictures of Hunter Biden with repugnant lies. According to multiple people involved in distributing the material, Guo ordered them to claim that the laptop material included images of Hunter Biden having sex with underage Chinese girls. There is no evidence supporting this allegation against Hunter. Guo also told subordinates to assert that the Chinese government had obtained the material and used it to blackmail both Hunter and Joe Biden. That, too, was made up, people involved said. Such nice people: Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui — www.theguardian.com/... emphasis added Just how evil is Steve Bannon? But the lies got traction. One of Guo’s concocted claims about China blackmailing the Biden family was repeated by the Washington Examiner and theDaily Mail in stories that quoted from the text accompanying a sex video of Hunter that Guo backers had posted. Versions of the allegations about sexual abuse of children were picked up by multiple Guo websites, by other right-wing publications and figures; by Giuliani; and, after the election, by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Bannon later said he believed that the Biden campaign’s reluctance to address false claims helped them spread. “Nobody came out and said anything you’re saying’s not true,” Bannon asserted in an October 31 meeting with Guo backers. “Even the wildest allegations.” During that meeting, Bannon acknowledged passing the material to Guo’s backers and then praised their lies, which he laughingly described as “editorial creativity over the pictures.” Bannon said in this meeting that he thought the onslaught had made an impact. “The negatives just keep going up,” Bannon claimed, “because people are sitting there, going, ‘I didn’t know that about Joe Biden.'” Bannon argued the effort had made the presidential contest close enough that Trump could execute a plan to falsely declare victory and try to use bogus voter fraud claims to persuade the courts or Congress to help him remain in office. emphasis added Read the whole thing. ...The effort by Guo and his backers to propagate explicit images and lies to hurt the Bidens was very much the kind of disinformation campaign that social media companies have good reason, even a responsibility, to combat. Twitter’s decision to suppress those tweets, in retrospect, holds up just fine. Guo is a piece of work all by himself — it’s no wonder he and Bannon are such good buddies. As part of the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process, lawyers for Guo’s largest creditor and attorneys for a court-appointed trustee representing other creditors have been trying to find assets that they assert Guo is hiding from the court. Guo’s reaction to these efforts has been to accusethese lawyers of acting as agents for China’s government and of committing extortion, along with other outlandish allegations. Guo has also encouraged his supporters to protest opposing lawyers at their offices and homes, the bankruptcy judge, Julie Manning, said in a ruling on Wednesday. Egged on by Guo, his fans doxed not only lawyers he was targeting but also their children and family members, including the daughters and ex-wife of the bankruptcy trustee, Luc Despins of the law firm Paul Hastings. Guo “supports, encourages, and is the leader of a social media and protest campaign targeting the plaintiffs, their counsel, and their relatives, at personal homes and workplaces,” Manning wrote. ...Manning found that the harassment campaign is slowing down the bankruptcy case. It is also having “a chilling effect on potential witnesses and creditors in these cases,” she wrote, by causing Guo’s creditors, many of them Chinese immigrants, to worry they too will be harassed if they come forward. “The irreparable harm continues to occur, which is extremely alarming,” Manning wrote. When life imitates art… I have a number of novels and short stories by the late Leslie Charteris, creator of Simon Templar, aka The Saint. As we are living in a time of rising fascism once more, the Saint’s adventures from the 1930s and into the 1940s include a fair number of crooks and villains who have a remarkable resemblance to the Ungodly duo Bannon and Guo. Greedy, corrupt, destroyers of lives, war-mongers; these two would be prime candidates for a little Saintly intervention — especially given the way the Law seems helpless to deal with them adequately. In his more merciful moods, the Saint would arrange for individuals like this to be trapped by their own vices, exposing them to ridicule, humiliation, blackmail, and even criminal prosecution — while also relieving them of their ill-gotten gains. Beyond that, he might arrange for them to meet an untimely end at the hands of their own associates by using their own code of values against them. And sometimes the Saint would personally see that the Ungodly were removed from the world. Parallels with a more recent bit of fiction are a little too close for comfort. The problem with life imitating art is that life is good at throwing up villains, not so big on crafting heroes that can take them down. But helping Mother Jones keep up their work is one way to address that lack. 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