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A Hunter Biden Lap(top) Dance
Adorable young girl bearing all of the classic earmarks of a President Biden grandchild.
Allow me to cut through the BS that follows. One David Priess, billing himself as a former CIA officer and ensconced in a cloud of liberal arts confidence, proceeded to make the rather legalistic argument that neither he nor any other one of the 50 former intelligence officials who signed the now infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter ever, ever, said that it was in fact the product of Russian disinformation.
Huh? … you might ask. Followed by, say what? Mr. Priess proceeded to dance around the truth in the manner of the Ethiopian shim-sham. A laptop dance, or, lap dance, if you will.
You see, we just aren’t as smart as Mr. Priess. Seems they made very clear that it may well not be Russian disinformation. It just has “all the earmarks” of Russian disinformation. See the difference. Well, actually I do. I also see that Mr. Priess is an idiot.
But first, let’s see what Mr. Priess actually said:
“We write to say that the arrival on the U.S. political scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter, much of it related to his time serving on the Board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” the letter stated.
“Why did you sign onto that?” Baier asked.
“Because of what it says,” Priess replied. “It has all of the classic earmarks of one of these operations. You’ll note elsewhere in the letter – if you read it – that it also says we don’t know if this is a Russian operation at all. That has been dramatically changed in the retelling of the story.” …
“Do you regret signing on to the letter?” Baier asked.
“Absolutely not,” came the reply. “Because those words are still true.”
“It had the classic earmarks, but it wasn’t true,” Baier shot back, adding that the “nuance” appeared lost on Joe Biden.
“It’s not my fault if people don’t look up definitions,” Priess said.
Now, stay with me here. What Mr. Priess is claiming in his haughty and self-satisfied way is that they merely claimed that the laptop bore “all of the classic earmarks of [a Russian] operation.” In other words, this could be an exquisite instance of someone imitating a Russian operation. Or it could be authentic. In either of these latter scenarios, the laptop would bear “all of the classic earmarks” of a Russian operation and yet not be one. Mr. Priess is claiming that this nuance serves to negate the clear thrust of the letter and that anyone not so attuned to its beautiful complexity is but a Visigoth incapable of looking up definitions.
Oh, my dear sweet idiot Mr. Priess. Here’s the problem Mr. Priess, oh exalted overlord of precision in all that is expressed. The most important and, indeed, the only omnipresent hallmark of a Russian disinformation operation is that … wait for it … keep waiting … and, here it is … it is a Russian operation. Not to go all “looking up definitions” on Mr. Priess’ backside, but an “earmark” is defined as “a characteristic or identifying feature. “
Some Russian ops may or may not include the production of fake material. Others may or may not involve the leaking of such material to political rivals. Any individual Russian operation may or may not include any or all of these classic earmarks. But every Russian operation includes the earmark, or, “characteristic or identifying feature” that it is fact an operation of the Russians.
Therefore, had the letter said that the laptop “has [some] of the classic earmarks of one of these operations,” Mr. Priess might have been able to say that the one earmark that was, in fact, missing was the most important one, namely, that it was a Russian operation. Unfortunately for Mr. Priess, he and his accomplices said the laptop has “all of the classic earmarks of one of these operations.” The only way you can assert that the laptop story bore all of the earmarks is to assert that one of its characteristics is that it is, in fact, a Russian operation. Period. End of story.
It is the icing on the cake that this gang who can’t shoot straight further asserted that “we don’t know if this is a Russian operation at all.” So, to be clear, you asserted that (1) it is 100% a Russian operation and (2) we 50 signatories, while asserting that to be true, lack the mental acuity to judge it to be true. That’s like saying, “two plus two equals four. But we are uniquely unqualified to understand if that is true.”
And this guy worked for the CIA? Be afraid, be very afraid. Unasked of Mr. Priess was, since the earmarks of which we are aware include (1) Hunter Biden brought the laptop into the repair store and (2) signed his signature attesting to his identity, is it really the case that Russian operations routinely make use of Hunter Biden in this manner? Just how involved in Russian disinformation operations is Hunter Biden and, by extension, his father? We are to believe that the CIA often discovers Russian disinformation operations and very often the operations involve one Hunter Biden dropping off laptops? Really? Just how many different laptops has Hunter dropped off at the behest of Russians? I’d like to know.
Seems worth asking.
Published in General
I saw that interview live, and I give kudos to Baier for hanging in there and stringing up the guy. I probably enjoyed Priess’ discomfort more than I should have, but, oh well . . . .
Of course, he’s playing the Clintonian parsing game. He’s smarter than all of this — he knows just like Harry Reid did (“word on the street is”) and Bill (“there is no sexual relationship”) and Hillary Clinton did (let me count the ways!) and Barack Obama did (“I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman”) that they can tell legalistic lies with no hazard if they just couch their words right.
One of the upstream hazards to our form of government is rampant functional illiteracy. I consider somebody functionally illiterate if they can not parse a sentence for weasel words, rather than considering their ability to read the signs at the supermarket. We can not sustain a representative form of government if we as a population can not understand the words spoken by our shifty dictatorial aspirants. And indeed, we are not sustaining it. It is slipping away.
I caught this weasel-word nonsense at the time — many did. But countless many more did not.
I didn’t accept it just because I knew who it was coming from.
I would go further. Mr. Priess thinks he really showed Brett up. He dove into the language and whipped up a seemingly solid and legalistic explanation followed by an expression of pity for those who lack his acumen. Problem is, Priess was wrong. He is too stupid to understand the consequences of his argument.
Well, calling the fact in question itself an earmark of the fact in question is a rickety bridge. But I like the post and you are of course right (IMHO) about the rest of it. It’s crazy-making.
BDB, that is an incisive point and one I wrestled with. You will note he refers to “these operations” in the same response that he refers to the narrower subset of “Russian operation[s].” I believe he is clearly referring to to all disinformation operations and then those that are specifically Russian operations that have defined earmarks, or, “identifying features.” One of those features being that they are Russian. These Russian operations may be differentiated from others in the universe of “these operations” that bear many of the earmarks of Russian operations but are not Russian operations. Like, for instance, perhaps, the present case where Hunter did drop off the laptop. I say “perhaps” because, again, are they really saying that Hunter’s involvement is a common trait amongst instances of Russian disinformation?
I stand by my conclusion. But you raise a very good point. Cheers.
Somewhere out there is a girl with a crackhead for a father, a stripper for a mom, and the President of the United States as her grandfather.
Another vile item on the list of vile things Biden has done is his denial of her existence. Especially now that it’s been proven that she’s Hunter’s child. “How many grandkids do you have Mr. President?” “Six.” Bzzt. The answer is seven. Imagine having the President as your granddad and never getting a White House visit.
As a lawyer, I read the statement at the time as a lawyeresque statement designed to give the general public a broad meaning that the facts could in no way support, with careful sentence structure and enough weasel-words thrown in that the public (and the morons of the “news” media) wouldn’t notice, but would give the signers plausible deniability, so that the signers could dance around and be factually accurate that they didn’t actually say what the wording was clearly designed to convey to the general public.
[Nonetheless, in spite of what we didn’t know, we went on the record and signed this letter for publication to the world. Because we wanted everyone to know that we didn’t know. All 50 of us intelligence leaders didn’t know, and it was necessary to communicate that to everyone. On the record.]
+++++++++++
It is obvious that everyone outside the intelligence community is a rube.
Pardon me while I put on my uniform and do my Gomer Pyle impression. GOOLY! SHAZAM!
The open letter had all the classic earmarks of CIA disinformation.
Very funny. And true.
This was after Tony Bobulinski confirmed many of the emails (because he was copied on them originally) and after the FBI had the laptop .
Yes, it had all of the earmarks, but I won’t say what those earmarks were. The whole point of the letter was to give justification to censors at Twitter and the nightly news to continue to ignore the story. If he honestly did not see that the letter he signed was 100% political, then what is he doing in a field that calls itself “intelligence”?
And sadly the last one is more embarrassing than the first two.
The supposed BS is not BS.
He didn’t say what you claim that he said. The Leftist media claimed the same thing.
Y’all are either careless, or lying.
It’s no wonder that the media can lead people around the way that they do. It’s almost as if most people can’t understand any statement made at higher than a sixth grade reading level. That wouldn’t be so bad, if they understood their limitations, but they don’t seem to. Instead, they seem to insist that their misunderstanding is correct, and get outraged if anyone contradicts them.
Your argument about earmarks is just silly. Being Russian disinformation is not one of the “earmarks” of Russian disinformation. The “earmarks” mean indicia suggesting that something is Russian disinformation.
The original letter was transparently silly — the “earmarks” were basically, well, it was a type of computer espionage and the Russians have done that, and, by the way, we think that the Russians would want to do it. Because the Russians wanted Hillary to win, you know, because she was so hard on them with the whole “reset button” thing.
Yup. The stripper is the least indecent one of the bunch. Seems she was stripping her way through college. I don’t view that as anything but tacky, trashy, tawdry prostitution-by-proxy (if even that), but it’s miles better than that infernal minefield-of-cowpies Biden family.
I’ll just let you read the rest of the thread.
Georgetown, dude. She got into Georgetown. That would put her a cut above Tiffany, Angel, and Bambi.
And maybe Jerry, too since he is on the wrong election.
So to sum up the last 25 years of American political discourse…
I did not have sex with that laptop computer!
And even if I did, what difference does it make?
^ Fed ^
Depends on what your definition of tan suit is. (I don’t remember that “scandal” but it’s the Dems’ go to item to laugh at conservatives concerning Obama.)
Maybe the standards at Georgetown are not what they once were.
I am rewatching the series, The Wire on HBO. It is one of the most honest depictions of where the big cities in this country are heading and exactly why. The entire political structure of this country has degenerated into a wealth producing machine for a certain class of people, some white, some minority, who hold power and use it for no other reason than to do so. The Democrat party is perfectly content to allow this country to disintegrate so long as its leaders can hold the reins of power and accumulate wealth enough to become “citizens of the world.”
That dispicable group of sell-outs who signed that letter are nothing more than cyphers who were only too pleased to hold an office of trust in order to protect the elite class who insured their positions. There are very few real patriots anymore, at least not at that level of society, and most certainly not among Democrats. The party of John Kennedy and Robert is no longer there. It has been replaced by oligarchs who clearly see that there is no future for this country, that they must accumulate as much wealth as they can to insure their families’ futures in the coming world. They are no better than the filth ruling the CCP in China, only less honest about their real motivations. The individualism that built this country has been replaced with a kind selfish acquisitiveness of every man for himself. Joe Biden and his brood of misfits and degenerates are paradigms of American leadership and our new elite class. The media is little more than jackels and crows feeding at the periphery grabbing whatever they can and proving cover for the real predators they serve. There are no ethics, no morality, no honesty left. We saw it clearly during Covid. Hunter Biden’s laptop is simply the scum that shows up on the surface of a totally contaminated and poisoned pond.
No surprise that you are the only one who does not understand the message that was clearly intended to discredit the hugely damaging evidence against Hunter and Joe Biden. You should refrain from calling people liars or simpletons who cannot read higher than a sixth grade level when you cannot even understand a rudimentary political ploy.
People manipulating election outcomes with false narratives is also consistent with Russian activity. Every Facebook page denigrating Hillary Clinton had “earmarks” of Russian disinformation. Starting with the transformation of the Communist Tet Offensive disaster into communist propaganda victory about US Government lies, every headline or lead story critical of an incumbent president for the last fifty years also has such “earmarks.” No responsible analyst would make such a statement about the laptop without a clear intent to cast suspicion on the item or action in question.
The fact that he does not have the integrity to admit the clear deceptive intent of that letter should bar him from any future government role.
The actions of the dirty 50 damaged what little remaining trust the public has in Federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies. He is a disgrace and if he still has any security clearance it should be revoked.
He wil be handsomely rewarded, if not already.
Actually, instead of the pitiful praise being dispensed by @arizonapatriot on this guy and other intelligence agents, as a qualified legal professional Jerry should be pointing out the grave dangers to the American people since the intelligence community has joined in our domestic law enforcement and regularly interferes with elections and other political activity.
Meh. Jerry’s posts have all the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.