Starker on 21/6/2023 at 20:33
So, what exactly was on that laptop that they should have made it public during the election?
Not that I'm exactly familiar with the FBI, but I have gotten the impression that they should, at least in idea, be non-political and not announce any investigations the way Comey did with Clinton.
demagogue on 21/6/2023 at 20:51
That's a really apt comparison too of course. Comey felt that the FBI was under extreme pressure to show itself "politically neutral" evidently just like the prosecutors here feel (and given the kinds of attacks and calls for its dissolution it was subjected to under Trump, he wasn't just imagining it), so much so he ended up subjecting Clinton to unjustified scrutiny for political reasons and probably tipped the electoral balance towards Trump by incensing republicans for the same reason this Hunter news is going to incense them. (Any slap on the wrist that's not an outright life sentence or firing squad is evidently beyond the pale and only lampshading the whole liberal original sin trope.) The only difference is that the Hunter news isn't literally a few days before the election. Better to do this now than any later.
Starker on 21/6/2023 at 21:01
Also, it was only the investigation into Clinton that they made public and the other one they kept silent about.
heywood on 21/6/2023 at 22:37
The FBI shouldn't decide whether or how hard to pursue a case based on the election schedule.
Because the discovery of Clinton's emails happened so close to the election, Comey knew he was going to be accused of election interference either way. If he announced the discovery before the election, he would be accused by the left, and if he held the announcement until after the election, he would be accused by the right. The default right thing to do in situations where your ethics could be questioned is to be as open and transparent as possible, and that's what he did.
There's multiple accusations of double standards going around. The main complaint against the FBI seems to be that early in the 2016 campaign, the FBI suspected Russian actors were trying to meddle in both campaigns. But the FBI gave Clinton a friendly defensive briefing at the start of the investigation and closed it quickly, whereas the FBI didn't inform Trump and pursued it all through the campaign. Despite the superficial appearance of a double standard, I think hindsight shows the FBI did the right thing there as well.
Regarding Hunter's laptop, the accusations of a double standard are best directed at the mainstream media. A copy of the hard drive was made by the shop owner before the FBI took the laptop in 2019, which was given to Giuliani who passed it on to Republican ops and the right wing media who held it for an October surprise. It went public 20 days before the election, and the MSM responded by immediately trying to discredit the story. The FBI could have cleared it up by saying the laptop is real and they're looking into it. I don't know why they didn't, probably because they learned the wrong lesson from Clinton's email investigation. The result was that the story got banned from discussion on some social media sites through the election. That's where the double standard comes from.
Starker on 22/6/2023 at 03:57
I don't know if the FBI should be reacting to media narratives and political campaigns in the first place. It's not like they have a duty to prove or disprove news stories or that they have to treat an issue differently because a political faction is making a big deal about it.
As an aside, it's interesting that Fox News isn't considered to be mainstream media in the US. They are a huge network watched by tens of millions of people, after all.
Nicker on 22/6/2023 at 12:15
Quote Posted by RippedPhreak
This is a power flex by the Regime, showing that its connected favorites are untouchable.
He said, completely ignoring the facts.
HINT: January 6 was a power flex, thankfully by a weak and stupid man. I know that's waddaboutism but in this case it is entirely justified. You love the wrong things for the worst reasons.
Nicker on 22/6/2023 at 12:25
Quote Posted by Starker
As an aside, it's interesting that Fox News isn't considered to be mainstream media in the US. They are a huge network watched by tens of millions of people, after all.
Twinkies are consumed, by mouth, by millions of people. That doesn't necessarily qualify them as a healthy food source.
As an aside to your aside: The Right often complains about a Leftist Media Bias, as if is was some sort of front-loading conspiracy to force a political agenda into the news. I think the association with the left is because good news reporting reflects values of fairness, balance, nuance and intelligence. Guilt by association.
heywood on 22/6/2023 at 20:05
I get stuck in the habit of using MSM to refer to the old national TV & radio networks and newspapers that served a general interest audience.
The older networks were shaped by the Fairness Doctrine (ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN). Fox News started after that doctrine was repealed. Even so, I recall the network started out with straight news coverage and even the opinion wasn't that one sided. Hannity used to be partnered with center-left Alan Colmes, for example. That seemed to change when the tea party movement got going.
Now we have two main streams I guess.
Jason Moyer on 22/6/2023 at 22:44
Every time I read "MSM" I confuse it with MSN and wonder why anyone would be obsessed with that now. Then I think about it more and realize that MSN was relevant more recently than basically everything else the right obsesses over.
Cipheron on 25/6/2023 at 03:05
Quote Posted by RippedPhreak
Oh is that so? Too bad any discussion of it on social media was banned as "misinformation" up until recently.
Lol, except for the fact that people have been constantly talking about it on social media for years now. "any discussion" is banned? On what platforms?
What did happen in reality is that news was leaked a few weeks before the 2020 election and people who worked at Twitter - RIGHTFULLY - were suspicious that the articles were an attempt at election tampering, so they delayed the story.
Election tampering was 100% the reason the stories were leaked with the timing just before the election, and it was all smoke, no fire. Nothing came out of the story, not one single provable claim that had any bearing on who you should vote for.
The whole reason to push a story like that RIGHT before the election is usually because the people pushing it don't actually believe it themselves, so they want to spread the outrage before the fact-checkers can actually get onto it and disprove key points. If someone actually had evidence of wrongdoing that would survive fact checkers, then they'd have pushed it for months beforehand, not weeks.