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Notes -
I'm also a little confused about the importance of the laptop. I thought the publicly known facts were damning enough. Hunter Biden got a cushy very high salary job with a company in Ukraine, and Hunter Biden's only real qualification for that job was that he was the Vice President's son. It seems pretty clear that he was selling insider access to the US political process.
Hunter could plausibly have lied to foreign companies about influence that he would never deliver on, and Joe could have been 100% ignorant that Hunter was doing this.
If Hunter was giving Joe a 10% cut, funneling the money to him by paying his credit card bills, Joe not being on the take or being in the dark becomes very implausible.
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It’s about tying it to Biden Sr.
Hunter is thoroughly damned and will never hold public office in America, but that isn’t a strong attack on Biden. Failing to control/raise/whatever his kids is a legitimate criticism that’s too decoupled to disqualify him from the Presidency. If the VP was personally involved in delivering his son a cushy job, that’s a lot more ammunition.
So long as the laptop remains “suppressed,” it gets to be a Mueller report, sure to destroy Democrats’ faith in Joe Biden. It turns out most people don’t really want to see pictures of Hunter’s dick, so hard-hitting investigative reporting has been...limited.
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Hunter could possibly have gotten a cushy job for nothing and then done nothing; given his personal history, that seems like it should be the default assumption. But this would have only looked especially bad for Hunter Biden, and no one was voting for him.
At the very least, the laptop includes cryptographically-signed e-mails from Pozharskyi, a Burisma executive, thanking Hunter for an introduction to his father in 2015, which the White House denied and continued to deny after the e-mail was first released. There are some ways that this might not be illegal, and a far greater number where it's the sort of illegal that doesn't actually get prosecuted (who wants to learn about FARA today, not fucking me), but it's still much stronger evidence of a scandal involving Joe Biden.
Separately, there's evidence included that is almost certainly violation of the law for Hunter, in ways that mouching off international executives might not be, and that had connections or funding from Joe Biden. The first half of that's not new -- getting the kid glove treatment when a drug addict was throwing around handguns was an older story -- and while it's improper it's one of those things that's got a long history. The latter is a more serious issue. I don't think Joe realized he was funding Russian-linked prostitution rings when wiring his son cash, but it's also a pretty big oopsie.
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