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Here’s the story of Twitter, Elon Musk, Matt Taibbi, and the Hunter Biden laptop

If you read the news last night, it looked pretty ordinary. An election in Georgia. War in Ukraine. College football playoffs producing joy and tears.

But if you were on Twitter you would hardly know any of that stuff was happening. Instead, the conversation was overwhelmingly about the actions of Twitter itself during a 24-hour period at the tail end of the 2020 presidential campaign. We'll get to that in a moment, but first, here's my best crack at a super-short bit of background.


Hunter Biden, Joe's son, has led a precarious life. He did lots of drugs. He traded on his name. He got himself involved in lots of dubious enterprises with lots of dubious partners. At one point he held a sketchy but well-paid board position with Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company.

But this was not the wartime Ukraine of today, led by the valiant Volodymyr Zelensky and supported by all right-thinking foes of Vladimir Putin. It was the shockingly corrupt Ukraine that existed in the wake of, first, the Orange Revolution, and then the Maidan Uprising. It is the Ukraine that formed the background of Donald Trump's first impeachment.

At the time our story starts properly (2015-16) the official position of the Obama administration was to pressure Ukraine to rein in its endemic corruption, and in particular to fire chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Obama made Joe Biden, then vice president, the point man for this, a job that Biden took on with his usual gusto. Eventually Shokin was fired and the US agreed to release aid funding.

Republicans then invented a story about this: namely that the real reason Joe Biden wanted Shokin fired was because Shokin was investigating Burisma and was likely to find some dirt on Hunter. The reality, unsurprisingly, was just the opposite: Shokin wasn't investigating Burisma at the time and posed no danger to Hunter. However, the new prosecutor did investigate Burisma, although he says he never found anything about Hunter. This all happened during the Trump administration, when Joe Biden was entirely out of power.


Are you with me so far? Now let's fast forward to October 2020, just before the presidential election. At the time, Trump allies had been working for months trying to sell a story to the nation's press. Unfortunately, nobody would take it. Finally, feeling panicked that the story might never appear—and having run out of alternatives—Rudy Giuliani offered it to the New York Post and they agreed to publish it.

The story turned out to be bizarre in several ways. First, the lead reporter who worked on it refused to allow his byline to be used. He just didn't feel the story was credible. Second, the story was all about Hunter Biden and was based on a mysterious hard drive that was allegedly full of his emails.

But where did the hard drive come from? The Post explained that an unknown customer had dropped off a broken laptop for repair at a shop in Delaware. It was never picked up and apparently the customer never even left his name so the shop owner could contact him. Very peculiar. Eventually, for reasons that are unclear, the shop owner gave the laptop to the FBI, but first he made a copy of the hard drive, which—again, for unclear reasons—he turned over to Giuliani's lawyer.

This is . . . a very sketchy story at best. But that's the story they had, so that's the story the Post published. The rest of the media remained reluctant to publish anything because they couldn't verify the whole story no matter how hard they tried. The problem was that Giuliani resolutely refused to turn over a copy of the hard drive, which made it impossible to forensically analyze it, and without that there was nothing to go on. Maybe it was a fake. Maybe it was a Russian plant. In any case, why on earth would the guy who wants the story publicized refuse to make the hard drive available to reporters?

Federal law mandates that all news stories about Hunter Biden be accompanied by an embarrassing photo of him looking vaguely strung out.

While the rest of the media pondered this and tried to follow up the laptop story, executives at Twitter made an even more momentous decision. They went beyond merely declining to follow up the Post story. They decided to ban anyone on Twitter from even linking to the Post story.


Finally! We're now up to the present day and the eye of Sauron turns away from Hunter Biden and squarely onto Twitter, which was recently acquired by tycoon/showman Elon Musk. And Musk's supporters wanted answers. Why did Twitter ban links to the Post story? Were they in the tank for Hunter Biden? Currying favor with the Joe Biden campaign? Trying to do anything they could to hurt Donald Trump?

So Musk announced that, by God, he was going to get to the bottom of the whole sordid affair. He hired Matt Taibbi, a muckraking but hard-to-describe journalist, to investigate and gave him access to all of Twitter's internal emails and chat logs from around the time the decision was made. Taibbi dived in, and on Friday published his findings in the form of a long tweet thread.

So what bombshells did Taibbi expose during his tweet-by-tweet unveiling on Friday afternoon? Would you believe me if I said none?

Probably not, so let's go through what Taibbi found:

  • People sometimes ask Twitter to remove tweets.
  • In particular, presidential campaigns do this.
  • In particular particular, Joe Biden's campaign periodically asked Twitter to remove some tweets. Taibbi has a screen shot of one of the emails they sent.
  • In that case, the tweets turned out to be nude pictures of Hunter Biden. Twitter agreed to remove them because they were basically revenge porn, which Twitter doesn't allow.
  • When the Post story came out, Twitter execs engaged in a fairly normal, low-key conversation about what they should do. For various and obvious reasons, they thought the whole thing looked like a ratfuck and was quite possibly based on hacked material, which violated their rules.
  • So they banned links to the Post story. Then they spent the next day tying themselves in knots over whether they had done the right thing. Within 24 hours they changed their mind and rescinded the ban.
  • Neither the FBI nor the Biden campaign was involved in any of this.

Long story short, it turned out the material wasn't hacked and didn't violate Twitter's policies. The Twitter execs never displayed any kind of partisan bias here, but they did show some poor judgment. And even that's pretty understandable given the plain and obviously fishy nature of the Post story.

On a partisan note, I'll add that this whole thing was obviously an attempt to recreate the Great Comey Letter scandal of 2016, when a last minute bombshell about Hillary Clinton's emails sank her chances to beat Donald Trump. The Trumpies desperately wanted to replicate that stunning, last-minute victory, something that Rudy Giuliani all but admitted on national TV. The national press was keenly aware of all this, which makes it hardly surprising that they were reluctant to give the story much oxygen.


And where are we with the Hunter laptop story today? Same as always, I'd say. Most of the juicy details—drug use, dick pics, money problems, 10% for the "big guy," etc.—have been public for a long time. Hunter has been under investigation for tax problems for a few years, and charges might drop soon. But even if they do, there's simply never been anything implicating Joe Biden in any of it.

There still isn't, but Republicans have announced that they plan to hold Benghazi-style hearings about the Hunter Biden laptop as soon as they take over the House in January. Once again, they're trying to relive past triumphs because they have nothing else on tap. Good luck to them.

41 thoughts on “Here’s the story of Twitter, Elon Musk, Matt Taibbi, and the Hunter Biden laptop

  1. Rattus Norvegicus

    I'm just wondering if Project Veritas was somehow involved in all of this. After all, they stole Ashley Biden's diary and tried to get revelations from that published. The whole laptop origin story reads like a ratfuck. Not sure Twitter's initial decision was incorrect.

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      1. Salamander

        The way I heard it, a former landlord of Ashley Biden came to Project "Veritas" and told them he know where Ms Biden's diary had been left when she moved out. The PV folks told him they'd pay big bucks if he "acquired" it for them. He did and they paid.

        That might be what the police raid on O'Keefe's house was all about.

    1. civiltwilight

      Here is a quote from the article you linked: "And even if Trump administration officials had been the ones to flag the photos, posting unauthorized pictures of someone else’s genitalia is clearly against Twitter policies." Not so.

      https://reclaimthenet.org/twitter-sued-for-not-removing-images-of-child-sex-abuse/

      From what I hear, Elon Musk has cleaned up a lot of child porn that was being published on Twitter. Formerly your account could be suspended for so-called misgendering by calling a biological male who thought he was she a he, but apparently, these moderators were not suspending accounts that published pornography.

  2. tigersharktoo

    Thank heavens the GOP House is not going to investigate the KSA investing $2 billion into a fund run by a member of the (former) Presidents family.

    That would be an invasion of privacy.

    1. civiltwilight

      With all the investigations done by the Dem House - do you think they could have gotten around to it?

      I think the House GOP should not investigate the Biden family dealings. It will go nowhere and annoy people tired of the endless tit-for-tat investigations by both parties.

  3. kenalovell

    In the light of 'Bull' Durham's obvious sellout to the swamp - what else should we have expected from a Barr appointee? - it's imperative that House Republicans reconstitute the January 6 committee and have it investigate the origins of the scandalous FBI interference in the 2016 election.

    Americans deserve to know the truth, provided it conforms with the Trump Cult's predetermined narrative.

  4. D_Ohrk_E1

    The question that should be asked:

    What Twitter rule or protocol was Musk following when he released all this info to Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss?

    Follow-up question would be:

    Did the info implicate privacy releases from inside and outside Twitter, and if so, did he get them?

  5. KJK

    Looks like Elmo is trying to gin up interest and controversy in Tweety Bird, by pandering to the MAGA right wing of the universe. And for sure this type of partisan activity is going to be a big draw for all the mainstream corporate advertisers that have paused their involvement in the platform. For a guy with at least $25B of equity at stake, Elmo continuing to act like a fucking moron. Simply amazing that this guy was able to build an EV car company that can compete with all the big established players.

    I am sure the EU regulators will have field day with Tweety Bird in the next few months.

  6. painedumonde

    Besides all the sturm und drang, take a step back and reflect. That's all they've got. Besides the back room back stabbing for Speaker. And SCOTUS gone wild. That's all there is, a fever dream of justice.

    You can't run a country on dreams but you sure can ruin it.

  7. nasruddin

    At this point, that "laptop" or whatever must be worthless, right? There's no chain of custody described in public that makes any sense, neither for any device or for any copy of any disk.

    It's also not clear that it has any evidence of interesting corruption or crime.

    I would think any attorney could make the laptop &al completely useless and unconvincing in any trial, if it were presented as some kind of evidence.

    So what are the purposes of bringing this story back to life?

  8. cld

    It's more than all that, though.

    The national joke population needs Hunter Biden's laptop to discredit the entire idea of governmental and social virtue.

    Conservatives used to universally pull out 'Chappaquiddick!' as their answer to anything at all, whatever came up they'd start blathering on about it as if it would entirely justify any act of crime, abuse and sleaziness that they happened to be guilty of at the moment.

    Hunter Biden's laptop is this generation's Chappaquiddick.

  9. Salamander

    It's beyond funny that Kevin McCarthy, Speaker in his own mind, announced "Benghazi-style hearings" on Joe, er, Hunter Biden. Given that six or eight years back, he announced that his Benghazi hearings on former SoS Hillary Clinton were just agitprop to defame Hillary Clinton before the 2016 election.

    I would really like to see the House GQP in such disarray that the 213 Democratic votes for Hakim Jeffries will be enough to elect Jeffries as Speaker. After all, the percentage vote for any candidate is based not on the total House contingent, but on the number of House members voting for a named candidate. No shows aren't counted, and "present" votes aren't counted.

  10. KenSchulz

    KD: “… it turned out the material wasn't hacked”.
    Citation needed. AFAIK, the FBI still has the physical hard drive, and has not issued a report of a forensic examination. All the information that the press and public has access to derives from copies of material from that drive, and cannot be definitively characterized, as metadata is lost in the copying process. Not to mention the multiple issues of provenance for the laptop itself.

    1. Salamander

      I was not aware that any actual physical "hard drive" was ever found. Just vaporware "copies." And why not the entire alleged "laptop", with features that might tie it back to ... someone?

  11. Dana Decker

    "an unknown customer had dropped off a broken laptop for repair at a shop in Delaware. It was never picked up and apparently the customer never even left his name so the shop owner could contact him."

    Bullshit.

    There was no user account info on it? Or name within office apps (e.g. word processing meta)? Or names and addresses in docs? Or identifiers via browser history (customer accounts' URL*)?

    Of course there was. Unless the disk drive was made up (along with salting it w/ genuine emails) which is almost certainly the case.

    * and related cookies

    1. DButch

      I've dropped off cheap appliances at repair shops that did a better job of tracking. They always required name, address, phone number, and a credit card and gave me a copy of the ticket with an estimated cost of repair. If they couldn't actually get a replacement part or it turned out to be more expensive than they expected, they'd call me and ask what I wanted to do.

      The few times I dropped a computer off at a repair shop they'd also take a copy of my driver's license and make sure the credit card was under the same name.

  12. Gilgit

    Within 24 hours they changed their mind and rescinded the ban.

    I thought the ban was much longer. I did a couple of searches and couldn’t confirm that the ban only lasted a day. Does anyone know when the ban was rescinded? [The only search result that said when the ban was rescinded pointed to Kevin’s own post.]

  13. Gilgit

    When I first heard about the story, my first thought was that the emails had obviously been stolen, put on a laptop and then given to a co-conspirator (or gullible rube). To this day this seems the most likely possibility. I guess I’d also believe that someone stole Hunter’s actual laptops and gave it to a co-conspirator/rube. I haven’t seen any evidence that proves these ideas false or any that proves the original story true.

    I recall some group, months after the election, studied and then claimed that some of the emails were from Hunter, although I don’t recall them saying they verified that they hadn’t been altered. I’ve yet to see anything proving that Hunter owned the laptop or was the one who dropped the laptops off for service. I’ve certainly never seen any evidence that proved the emails were not hacked.

    1. Gilgit

      I can't believe I've wasted more time on Hunter laptop searches. But it does seem like CSB news, just a few weeks ago, had the HD image examined and concluded that it most likely does come from a Hunter laptop.

      Of course, I still say the most likely explanation of what happened is that either the laptop was stolen or the entire image was copied and transferred.

  14. ElizabethVega

    My cousin could truly receive money in their sspare time on their laptop. their best friend had been doing this 4 only about 12 months and by now cleared the debt. in their mini mansion and bought a great Car.

    That is what we do..... https://rb.gy/n0gsld

    1. Gilgit

      At first I thought this was spam. Then I saw that there was a picture of a pretty lady next to the name. Now all I want is to give the poster money.

  15. Lounsbury

    The only lesson from this is Matt Tiaibi has always been a polemacist with weak logical and critical thinking capacity but quite the skills in fabulism.

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