Bill Barr and his October Surprise

I Am The Scum said:
I don't think you've given your proposal very much consideration. Allow me to illustrate. I am going to make a claim, and just so it's 100% clear, the following is not an accusation, but an attempt at establishing a principle:

3 years ago, I sent you (shuttlt) an e-mail thanking you for the very high quality heroin you sold me.

Please tell me how you would go about proving that the e-mail described above was never actually sent to you.
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Sure. To begin with, I have access to my own email... so I would know 100% whether I had or hadn't received such an email and could give an unequivocal denial without fear of contradiction. That doesn't seem to be happening at the moment.

Then I'd say that it depends a bit on what is being refuted. If somebody is falsely claiming to have a copy of my emails, then I have a way to refute that because I have access to the genuine emails from the period which they won't have. If somebody does have a copy of my email, but has altered some message... then again, I have access to the originals and have a way to refute them. We have a third possibility, that they have access to my emails, but have added some additional emails to their copy. In that instance, it is trickier... I would expect Apple as well as the company who sent the email to have logs. Depending on what is being denied, I agree it is easier/harder. I'm not clear at this point what is being denied.

Don't we now have somebody related to the China emails confirming that they are genuine?

Given that the FBI have had this for months, hopefully what ever investigation is necessary to get to the bottom of it has already been done.
 
shuttlt said:
Sure. To begin with, I have access to my own email... so I would know 100% whether I had or hadn't received such an email and could give an unequivocal denial without fear of contradiction. That doesn't seem to be happening at the moment.
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You might "know" but you can't prove you didn't get an email. How do you prove you didn't delete it?
 
Stacyhs said:
So, let me get this straight....

And if it is fabricated, we're supposed to believe it's China behind it, not Russia? When China has been quite clear they prefer Biden to win and Russia has been quite clear in both word and action that they prefer Trump to win. I don't think it would take Sherlock Holmes to figure this one out.
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Remember when Trump claimed Russia wanted Clinton to win the election? :rolleyes:
 
Stacyhs said:
How long do you think it would take the FBI to find out if Hunter B was in Delaware when the computer was left at the shop? I'd say just long enough to access his credit card records for around that time. Or telephone records.

ETA: I'm not saying it's unreasonable. I'm saying he could have gone back for some reason. You're assuming I think it's unreasonable.
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It is unreasonable. The story is fishier than a tin of sardines.

Trump lies don't need to be the least bit credible. He puts them out there then cries CT when they are discredited. And sadly people suck up the nonsense the same way they have latched onto Qanon which is as ludicrous as claiming lizard people are running the country.
 
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shuttlt said:
I would expect Apple as well as the company who sent the email to have logs.
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1. Keeping e-mails indefinitely is not the common practice you are implying it is. Even my sister, who uses GMail (with virtually unlimited e-mail storage) and would never have an outsider interested in her communications, deletes every message as soon as she's dealt with the contents.
2. E-mail servers do not keep records indefinitely either.
3. AFAIK, most companies have data retention policies that include regularly purging old e-mails.
4. Apple wouldn't have records of e-mails at all unless you were using Apple as your service provider, an extremely uncommon situation.
 
I Am The Scum said:
Beat me to the punch. This raises the question: Why would Biden waste his time trying to satisfy the "Obama's birth certificate is fake" crowd?
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Because this is the opposite. Biden isn't producing something called "fake" it's the other side producing something people here and elsewhere are calling "fake."

Well, the other side is actually NOT producing it, that's my problem with it.
 
TahiniBinShawarma said:
"Likely" from "unnamed sources" gotcha.
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I like how the best counter-argument you can offer is to quote-mine disparate parts of my post and pretend that the two quotes* are the entire content of the post and both refer to the same thing.

*Well, one isn't a quote, but is instead a disingenuous paraphrase of the article I quoted.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
It is unreasonable. The story is fishier than a tin of sardines.

Trump lies don't need to be the least bit credible. He puts them out there then cries CT when they are discredited. And sadly people suck up the nonsense the same way they have latched onto Qanon which is as ludicrous as claiming lizard people are running the country.
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Eh, not sure what's so unreasonable about a drug addict rich kid leaving his laptop at a repair shop in his home state where his alleged crooked father he shares his money with lives.

Speaking of Qanon, that crazy Chinese video that was posted last month says the hard drive has pedo stuff with Biden on it lol. I'm really surprised no one if flipping out about this considering we have the picture of Rudy, crazy Chinese guy, crazy Chinese virus girl, and Bannon in the room all at the same time.

The other thing is that crazy Chinese guy says the hard drives are from China. At least the ones he's talking about. So that would go against RUdy's story about the hard drives. Unless this is a whole other set of drives lol.

It's entertaining to say the least.
 
I Am The Scum said:
Beat me to the punch. This raises the question: Why would Biden waste his time trying to satisfy the "Obama's birth certificate is fake" crowd?
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This is exactly it - you don't want to give it oxygen. Denials are never as impactful as scandal, regardless of whether or not the scandal is obviously fake, and by engaging with it all you're doing is providing the media the opportunity to run stories on your engagement.

Its the Streisand Effect, only moreso because FOX, OANN, Breitbart, etc. weren't specifically out to get Streisand, and that story wasn't deliberately seeded in order to be propagated in this manner.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
I like how the best counter-argument you can offer is to quote-mine disparate parts of my post and pretend that the two quotes* are the entire content of the post and both refer to the same thing.

*Well, one isn't a quote, but is instead a disingenuous paraphrase of the article I quoted.
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My point is that no evidence has been presented that it's Russian disinfo, and no name is attached to anyone with authority that it's Russian disinfo. This is Steel Dossier 101 stuff all over again.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
I like how the best counter-argument you can offer is to quote-mine disparate parts of my post and pretend that the two quotes* are the entire content of the post and both refer to the same thing.

*Well, one isn't a quote, but is instead a disingenuous paraphrase of the article I quoted.
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It's Steele Dossier 101 level nonsense. No one of authority has come out and said this is Russian disinformation. All there is is "people familiar with the matter" and the media burned that bridge a long time ago.
 
I Am The Scum said:
The strategy seems to be a two-step process. 1: Keep pushing a weird story about e-mails, never saying anything specifically damning, but using lots of buzzwords like "scandal" and "smoking gun." 2: Complain like hell when the mainstream media doesn't pick it up.

To my knowledge, only one person is falling for it.
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Sadly, no. A whole bunch of idiots are trying to push the story out there, spreading it among themselves via social media. And the news media seems to think they are obligated to use weasel words to describe it instead of coming out and calling it what it is, ludicrous.

Four years of Trump spinning lie after lie and people are still convinced by the next one. The news media has begun saying some things aren't true like the claim mail-in voting is open to massive fraud. At least they've gone that far. But Barr is repeating the story.

Has this been posted yet?

Above the Law: Career Prosecutor Torches Bill Barr In Epic Resignation Editorial
“After 36 years, I’m fleeing what was the U.S. Department of Justice — where I proudly served 19 different attorneys general and six different presidents,” former Assistant U.S. Attorney Phillip Halpern wrote yesterday in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

"Unfortunately, over the last year, Barr’s resentment toward rule-of-law prosecutors became increasingly difficult to ignore, as did his slavish obedience to Donald Trump’s will in his selective meddling with the criminal justice system in the Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and Roger Stone cases. In each of these cases, Barr overruled career prosecutors in order to assist the president’s associates and/or friends, who potentially harbor incriminating information. This career bureaucrat seems determined to turn our democracy into an autocracy.

There is no other honest explanation for Barr’s parroting of the president’s wild and unsupported conspiracy theories regarding mail-in ballots (which have been contradicted by the president’s handpicked FBI director) and his support for the president’s sacking of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose office used the thinnest of veils to postpone charging the president in a criminal investigation along with Michael Cohen (who pled guilty and directly implicated the president)...."
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He said he would have left sooner but wanted to finish the prosecution of:
Congressman Duncan Hunter, who pled guilty to campaign finance violations, but spent a year screaming bloody murder that he was being persecuted for supporting Donald Trump. (Because he and his wife accidentally used the campaign credit card to pay for tuition, vacations, dental work, and trips to Burger King.)
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Sounds just like a prosecution Barr and Trump would have derailed.
 
The Greater Fool said:
You might "know" but you can't prove you didn't get an email. How do you prove you didn't delete it?
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Like I said, it depends what is being refuted. If I'm saying that the emails on the laptop aren't mine, then that is easily dealt with since I have access to my own email. If I am claiming they were altered, then again I have access to my emails so I can prove it. If I am claiming that the emails on the laptop are mine, but some additional emails have been slipped in, then I would expect the logs of Apple, or the other service providers who handled the email, to be able to show that the emails weren't sent. Given that the FBI are involved and presumably the owners of the mailboxes would be cooperative, this doesn't seem beyond the bounds of possibility.

The other thing is that what I can easily prove and what Biden's campaign can easily prove are very different things. I could not afford to get any lawyers, or computer forensics people involved, ISPs are unlikely to go out of their way to help me and the FBI are unlikely to care.

One weird thing in all of this is the number of rich important people using what look like free/generic email services for their business. Biden is using iCloud, somebody else is using Nazent. Is this the email equivalent of a burner phone?

One of the companies that supposedly sent him a dodgy email was j2cr. They are an international legal consultancy based in DC. I would hope that they have a legally compliant and auditable email system capable of demonstrating that they did or didn't send an email.

If these emails aren't genuine, it shouldn't be hard for them to prove. It may well not be the strategic moment to do that yet.
 
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