Bill Barr and his October Surprise

Well I don’t think the government should be paying an individual $114M. That’s it.
 
dirtywick said:
It’s too much.
Click to expand...

That's a personal opinion. If it brings in $228 million in fines and stops an illegal scheme going on, it's not too much IMO.

ETA: And it's not coming out of taxpayers' pockets to begin with so why not if it encourages whistleblowers to come forward?
 
Last edited:
Stacyhs said:
That's a personal opinion. If it brings in $228 million in fines and stops an illegal scheme going on, it's not too much IMO.

ETA: And it's not coming out of taxpayers' pockets to begin with so why not if it encourages whistleblowers to come forward?
Click to expand...

Yea it’s my personal opinion. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.
 
TahiniBinShawarma said:
I don't think it unusual for someone talking to the press to clam up.
Click to expand...
He didn't clam up; he evaded specific questions. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that but it's a far cry from the NYP claim that he tried "repeatedly" to contact the computer owner. There was something else going on. He might have been covering his ass regarding specific industry standards related to blabbing about a customer's data. Again, I don't really blame him. I suspect he's in over his head and just wants to protect his livelihood.
 
The Don said:
I can't access the article, but is the NYT's position that there is some compromising information there but Giuliani just shanked its release, or is it that the information itself is likely garbage ?
Click to expand...
The WSJ team that investigated the material found little in it except that Hunter Biden may have used his family name to get business opportunities. Nothing incriminating about Joe Biden.

From the NYT article:
While the Trump team was clearly jumpy, editors in The Journal’s Washington bureau were wrestling with a central question: Could the documents, or Mr. Bobulinski, prove that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s lobbying? Or was this yet another story of the younger Mr. Biden trading on his family’s name — a perfectly good theme, but not a new one or one that needed urgently to be revealed before the election.

...

As the debate ended, The Wall Street Journal published a brief item, just the stub of Mr. Areddy and Mr. Duehren’s reporting. The core of it was that Mr. Bobulinski had failed to prove the central claim. “Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden,” The Journal reported.
Click to expand...
 
Minoosh said:
I find all that reassuring, in a way. It makes the whole plot sound slightly less amateurish. Rudy-as-loose-cannon explains a lot.
Click to expand...

Lack of coordination amongst itself is a consistent hallmark of the Trump admin.
 
In that same NYT article, an interesting description of how the mainstream media, despite everything, still have learned something from their disastrous treatment of Clinton emails and Wikileaks in 2015-2016.
And why this "Hunter Biden Scandal" is going nowhere outside the right wing bubble.
Perhaps the most influential media document of the last four years is a chart by a co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, Yochai Benkler. The study showed that a dense new right-wing media sphere had emerged — and that the mainstream news “revolved around the agenda that the right-wing media sphere set.”

Mr. Bannon had known this, too. He described his strategy as “anchor left, pivot right,” and even as he ran Breitbart News, he worked to place attacks on Hillary Clinton in mainstream outlets. The validating power of those outlets was clear when The New York Times and Washington Post were given early access in the spring of 2015 to the book “Clinton Cash,” an investigation of the Clinton family’s blurring of business, philanthropic and political interests by the writer Peter Schweizer.

Mr. Schweizer is still around this cycle. But you won’t find his work in mainstream outlets. He’s over on Breitbart, with a couple of Hunter Biden stories this month.

And the fact that Mr. Bobulinski emerged not in the pages of the widely respected Journal but in a statement to Breitbart was essentially Mr. Bannon’s nightmare, and Mr. Benkler’s fondest wish. And a broad array of mainstream outlets, unpersuaded that Hunter Biden’s doings tie directly to the former vice president, have largely kept the story off their front pages, and confined to skeptical explanations of what Mr. Trump and his allies are claiming about his opponent.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
The Don said:
I can't access the article, but is the NYT's position that there is some compromising information there but Giuliani just shanked its release, or is it that the information itself is likely garbage ?
Click to expand...

The article doesn't take a position on the details. The main point of the story is to report that, despite having a conservative bent, the WSJ didn't just regurgitate whatever Trump and company wanted them to, instead choosing to vet the information thoroughly, as good journalists should. It is clear from the article that the staff at the WSJ haven't found enough credible information to even imply Joe Biden is guilty of anything but having a son who's made money internationally from his name, which is barely newsworthy and doesn't mean his dad is guilty of anything.
 
Hay, just because it's a fake story doesn't mean you shouldn't use it to try to smear Joe Biden.

Trump made that clear last Thursday, I reckon. The thing is, they don't have anything else to use to smear Joe Biden. So they're kind of stuck.
 
dirtywick said:
Well I don’t think the government should be paying an individual $114M. That’s it.
Click to expand...
It is a lot of money. Risk/reward I suppose. It seems generous, seeing as whoever crafted the policy/legislation could never have imagined that a POTUS would one day threaten the life of a whistleblower.
 
jadebox said:
That is bizarre. They start by disparaging other media outlets for not reporting on the laptop/emails story then provide an explanation of why the story should be ignored.
Click to expand...

It's almost funny. It literally reads like FoxNews is mad at other news outlets for treating their smear job as if it where actual news. As if FoxNews is trying to play the "journalistic integrity" card... on people reporting their own bad reporting.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom