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For context: this follow the departure of the other co-founder of the The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-i

by kome 6y ago

For context: this follow the departure of the other co-founder of the The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int...

walrus01 6y ago
> "horrifyingly, took the lead in falsely branding the Hunter Biden archive as “Russian disinformation”" Calling it an "archive" is laughable at best, the provenance of the supposed Hunter Biden laptop which was left in the custody of a randomly chosen computer repair shop guy who has ties to Giuliani and the Trump apparatus is clear. The entire thing was an intelligence plant that Greenwald swallowed hook, line and sinker. There's a reason why dozens of highly respected, experienced investigative journalists took a good look at the information supposedly retrieved from this "laptop" and decided not to proceed with publishing any of it. Because they didn't want to embarrass themselves by publishing obvious fabrications. From USA Today: "John Paul Mac Isaac — owner of The Mac Shop — told reporters that a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden brought three liquid-damaged laptops to his repair shop in April 2019, per the Delaware News Journal. The man left one laptop for repair and never returned to retrieve it. Eventually, Mac Isaac gave a copy of the laptop's hard drive to Brian Costello, an attorney for Rudy Giuliani, who is the personal lawyer for President Donald Trump. Mac Isaac said he turned the hard drive over to Costello because of fears for his safety."
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- DevKoala 6y ago
  What are you talking about? The story was worth reporting and it wasn’t until the election was over and verified that major news sources decided to push it to the public. https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/09/politics/hunter-biden-tax-investigtation/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/09/politics/hunter-biden-tax-inv... Greenwald was right in calling the bias.
  - walrus01 6y ago
    So either the "laptop" was given to Giuliani, or to the custody of the FBI, which is it? If it was given to the FBI, how did Giuliani come into possession of a large number of files supposedly retrieved from it, and share them with any journalist who would listen?
    - DevKoala 6y ago
      The laptop was given to the FBI first and then someone from the FBI leaked it to Giuliani after the investigation was not moving. Once it became public a senate committee verified the validity of the evidence and the investigation made it to the public. Edit: I stand corrected. The repair shop owner shared an image of the disk with Giuliani, after first sharing it with the FBI.
      - mthoms 6y ago
        If I recall, it was the repair shop owner who shared an image of the hard drive with Giuliani's people. He thought the FBI wasn't doing enough with it. Edit: Source https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2020/10/14/meet-wilmington-repairman-who-reportedly-gave-biden-laptop-giuliani-associate/3655753001/ https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2020/10/14/meet-wi...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - haroldp 6y ago
      Digital data is not hard to duplicate. Both can be true.
    - fit2rule 6y ago
      The repair shop made disk images (part of the repair process), then gave the laptop to the FBI, and then shared the disk images.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > What are you talking about? The story was worth reporting and it wasn’t until the election was over and verified that major news sources decided to push it to the public. "Hunter Biden" is not one monolithic story. IIRC, Giuliani's story was all about that laptop (and trying to make it look like Joe Biden was involved), but that laptop may in fact have nothing to do with this tax probe. The existence of the latter doesn't necessarily validate the former. According to the story you posted: > Hints of the investigation emerged after President Donald Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, helped orchestrate news stories centered on a laptop purported to belong to Hunter Biden and said to include his business documents and other personal material. > The FBI took possession of the laptop in late 2019, according to a computer repairman in Delaware who showed reporters a copy of a subpoena. The subpoena is real, according to people briefed on the matter, but the FBI and prosecutors in Delaware have refused to confirm the existence of the investigation. > It's unclear whether the laptop's contents are relevant to the ongoing federal probe and whether investigators can even use them, given potential chain of custody requirements for evidence. Pay attention to that last paragraph.
- rodgerd 6y ago
  Greenwald's sources for his claim that (initially none, then walked back to no active) parler users weren't involved in the Capitol attacks was an un-named Parler exec, a claim which he published with zero fact-checking, since if quickly emerged there were rather a lot of active Parler users involved. At this point he's just a laundering service for far-right scumbags.
cwyers 6y ago
Some context to the context: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/useful-idiots-glenn-greenwald-reality-winner-trump-pardon-snowden-1062491/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/useful-i... > Greenwald rebuts Ben Smith’s recent New York Times piece on The Intercept publishing the Reality Winner leak. “It wasn’t like The Intercept was free from mistakes, there were mistakes made, and they acknowledged those mistakes. The parent company paid for the source’s, Reality Winner’s, legal defense,” says Greenwald. “I just don’t know what this New York Times article added other than to try and just take shots at people incoherently.” I don't think Greenwald and Poitras see eye to eye on this one.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  Greenwald is permanently wearing some kind of Democrat-hatred goggles that render everything he creates spastic and aligned with fascists purely to take the piss because he’s bitter. I don’t think he could even see eye to eye with himself in the mirror at this point, he such an incoherent mess of poorly constructed anti-Democrat gripes. I would trust Poitras’s take on this way, way more than Greenwald’s.
  - cwyers 6y ago
    Yeah, I think Greenwald has blinders about Winner because what she leaked doesn't fit his narratives about the Dems and Russia. I wouldn't link his quitting because they tried to edit his Hunter Biden takes with Poitras' very legitimate outrage over not protecting a source.
  - xnyan 6y ago
    I can't get in greenwald's head but if I had to make a judgement, I agree with you. The intercept decided not to publish greenwald's piece because the sourcing was too thin (in their opinion and mine, I get it if others don't agree), and he took it personally. I've reacted badly to this kind of thing too, so I get it I guess, but it still makes him a bitter man who can't handle the hit to his ego.
    - 6y ago
h_anna_h 6y ago
I find it weird how the co-founders were fired or basically forced to resign. Shouldn't they be the ones with the most power?
- ganoushoreilly 6y ago
  When external funding is involved and there are determined parties, things will happen. It happens all too often.
- toyg 6y ago
  When they took the investor’s money, Greenwald and Poitras both explicitly decided to focus almost exclusively on their jobs rather than becoming media execs; they weren’t their own boss as much as they had an arrangement where the boss would never speak. Obviously that was a strategic mistake on their part, in hindsight, but there is no proof they would have been good managers anyway. I guess they underestimated how quickly a well can be poisoned by just a few individuals, once steering is agreed up top.

by kome 6y ago

walrus01 6y ago

> "horrifyingly, took the lead in falsely branding the Hunter Biden archive as “Russian disinformation”" Calling it an "archive" is laughable at best, the provenance of the supposed Hunter Biden laptop which was left in the custody of a randomly chosen computer repair shop guy who has ties to Giuliani and the Trump apparatus is clear. The entire thing was an intelligence plant that Greenwald swallowed hook, line and sinker. There's a reason why dozens of highly respected, experienced investigative journalists took a good look at the information supposedly retrieved from this "laptop" and decided not to proceed with publishing any of it. Because they didn't want to embarrass themselves by publishing obvious fabrications. From USA Today: "John Paul Mac Isaac — owner of The Mac Shop — told reporters that a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden brought three liquid-damaged laptops to his repair shop in April 2019, per the Delaware News Journal. The man left one laptop for repair and never returned to retrieve it. Eventually, Mac Isaac gave a copy of the laptop's hard drive to Brian Costello, an attorney for Rudy Giuliani, who is the personal lawyer for President Donald Trump. Mac Isaac said he turned the hard drive over to Costello because of fears for his safety."

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
DevKoala 6y ago
What are you talking about? The story was worth reporting and it wasn’t until the election was over and verified that major news sources decided to push it to the public. https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/09/politics/hunter-biden-tax-investigtation/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/09/politics/hunter-biden-tax-inv... Greenwald was right in calling the bias.
- walrus01 6y ago
  So either the "laptop" was given to Giuliani, or to the custody of the FBI, which is it? If it was given to the FBI, how did Giuliani come into possession of a large number of files supposedly retrieved from it, and share them with any journalist who would listen?
  - DevKoala 6y ago
    The laptop was given to the FBI first and then someone from the FBI leaked it to Giuliani after the investigation was not moving. Once it became public a senate committee verified the validity of the evidence and the investigation made it to the public. Edit: I stand corrected. The repair shop owner shared an image of the disk with Giuliani, after first sharing it with the FBI.
    - mthoms 6y ago
      If I recall, it was the repair shop owner who shared an image of the hard drive with Giuliani's people. He thought the FBI wasn't doing enough with it. Edit: Source https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2020/10/14/meet-wilmington-repairman-who-reportedly-gave-biden-laptop-giuliani-associate/3655753001/ https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2020/10/14/meet-wi...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - haroldp 6y ago
    Digital data is not hard to duplicate. Both can be true.
  - fit2rule 6y ago
    The repair shop made disk images (part of the repair process), then gave the laptop to the FBI, and then shared the disk images.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > What are you talking about? The story was worth reporting and it wasn’t until the election was over and verified that major news sources decided to push it to the public. "Hunter Biden" is not one monolithic story. IIRC, Giuliani's story was all about that laptop (and trying to make it look like Joe Biden was involved), but that laptop may in fact have nothing to do with this tax probe. The existence of the latter doesn't necessarily validate the former. According to the story you posted: > Hints of the investigation emerged after President Donald Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, helped orchestrate news stories centered on a laptop purported to belong to Hunter Biden and said to include his business documents and other personal material. > The FBI took possession of the laptop in late 2019, according to a computer repairman in Delaware who showed reporters a copy of a subpoena. The subpoena is real, according to people briefed on the matter, but the FBI and prosecutors in Delaware have refused to confirm the existence of the investigation. > It's unclear whether the laptop's contents are relevant to the ongoing federal probe and whether investigators can even use them, given potential chain of custody requirements for evidence. Pay attention to that last paragraph.
rodgerd 6y ago
Greenwald's sources for his claim that (initially none, then walked back to no active) parler users weren't involved in the Capitol attacks was an un-named Parler exec, a claim which he published with zero fact-checking, since if quickly emerged there were rather a lot of active Parler users involved. At this point he's just a laundering service for far-right scumbags.

cwyers 6y ago

Some context to the context: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/useful-idiots-glenn-greenwald-reality-winner-trump-pardon-snowden-1062491/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/useful-i... > Greenwald rebuts Ben Smith’s recent New York Times piece on The Intercept publishing the Reality Winner leak. “It wasn’t like The Intercept was free from mistakes, there were mistakes made, and they acknowledged those mistakes. The parent company paid for the source’s, Reality Winner’s, legal defense,” says Greenwald. “I just don’t know what this New York Times article added other than to try and just take shots at people incoherently.” I don't think Greenwald and Poitras see eye to eye on this one.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
Greenwald is permanently wearing some kind of Democrat-hatred goggles that render everything he creates spastic and aligned with fascists purely to take the piss because he’s bitter. I don’t think he could even see eye to eye with himself in the mirror at this point, he such an incoherent mess of poorly constructed anti-Democrat gripes. I would trust Poitras’s take on this way, way more than Greenwald’s.
- cwyers 6y ago
  Yeah, I think Greenwald has blinders about Winner because what she leaked doesn't fit his narratives about the Dems and Russia. I wouldn't link his quitting because they tried to edit his Hunter Biden takes with Poitras' very legitimate outrage over not protecting a source.
- xnyan 6y ago
  I can't get in greenwald's head but if I had to make a judgement, I agree with you. The intercept decided not to publish greenwald's piece because the sourcing was too thin (in their opinion and mine, I get it if others don't agree), and he took it personally. I've reacted badly to this kind of thing too, so I get it I guess, but it still makes him a bitter man who can't handle the hit to his ego.
  - 6y ago

h_anna_h 6y ago

I find it weird how the co-founders were fired or basically forced to resign. Shouldn't they be the ones with the most power?

ganoushoreilly 6y ago
When external funding is involved and there are determined parties, things will happen. It happens all too often.
toyg 6y ago
When they took the investor’s money, Greenwald and Poitras both explicitly decided to focus almost exclusively on their jobs rather than becoming media execs; they weren’t their own boss as much as they had an arrangement where the boss would never speak. Obviously that was a strategic mistake on their part, in hindsight, but there is no proof they would have been good managers anyway. I guess they underestimated how quickly a well can be poisoned by just a few individuals, once steering is agreed up top.