I can understand why it feels "too perfect" for an October surprise, sure, but then how did they get the pictures of Hunter sleeping with a meth pipe? I ran them through the tools on hackerfactor.com and I see no obvious fakery.
I've heard rumors that Hunter was allegedly hacked to get them, but I have yet to see media reports of this from prior to this story breaking. If you can provide some, please do!
Right now, my take is that, at best, this is an elaborate cover story for releasing real dirt and at worst, it's legit, like the time Hunter returned a rental car with a crack pipe in it. We'll need to dig into it further, though, I want to see if the emails have DKIM validation with a body hash parameter, etc.
Fundamentally, the reason this got banned and then ignored is that that need is SUPPOSED to be supplied by the journalists doing the research, not random conspiracy nerds on the internet.
> I've heard rumors that Hunter was allegedly hacked to get them, but I have yet to see media reports of this
Exactly! Which is the level of rigor you should expect to see from your sources. Which makes it doubly frustrating that you seem not to be applying that same logic to the original story.
FWIW: I'll bet you anything that no headers ever appear for those emails anywhere (at least none from western domains -- I'll admit to the possibility that the Kremlin could forge a DKIM signature for a Burisma address). They're almost certainly forgeries, which is why they're being distributed in the crazy obfuscated way they are.
Well, let's just say that there aren't many journalists I trust to validate a DKIM signature and even then it matters whether there's a body hash in it or not. The last time this came up, I know that I personally pulled the DKIM key to check and I never saw any journalist doing that, though several did repeat Donna Brazille's claim that the email was fabricated--something proven directly false by the body hash parameter on the email claimed to be fake.
Oh, and the relevant DKIM key in that case came from Hillary's DNS server, I know because I pulled it myself. Maybe the Kremlin hacked that, but that would implicate a lot more reporting than just Donna's claims.
So yes, I do want to see more journalism regarding this, but it also needs sufficient rigor. I don't just believe any random person who claims XYZ, whether or not I tend to agree with them, I want to see verifiable facts.
And yeah, those are in pretty short supply. I've seen tons of anonymous rumors, various forms of citogenesis, etc. far more often than I've seen things that can be subjected to some kind of objective fact finding process.
> Well, let's just say that there aren't many journalists I trust to validate a DKIM signature
Uh... why would the journalist "validate" the DKIM signature? Publish the RFC822 content of the email and let everyone do it themselves. That's the whole point of public key encryption. And the fact that the Post skipped that very obvious and easy step tells me that this is almost certainly faked data.
> I don't just believe any random person who claims XYZ
With all respect: you clearly seem inclined to believe this nonsense about the emails with only the barest of evidence. It's only the attempts to refute it that have you worried about "rigor".
Eh, sometimes the signatures fail to validate because mail clients do non-substantive modifications (spacing, etc.). We went through that before, too. You're right that one should always validate it themselves and I should've said that I don't think many journalists know how to work it, because honestly, I haven't seen anyone but Wikileaks actually do that validation, ever.
> With all respect: you clearly seem inclined to believe this nonsense about the emails with only the barest of evidence.
I haven't said anything about the email content, though. I investigated a photo of Hunter sleeping with a meth pipe using hackerfactor.com's tools to look for manipulation and did not find any. That doesn't mean they're real, but it gives them some level of credence, given that there are old reports about his rental car substantiated by police reports.
You're right that it doesn't validate the email content. I plan to withhold judgement until we have more data, but it looks like they do have some files of his.
It doesn't help that the last time we went through this sort of thing, there were spurious claims of manipulated documents which were actively disproved and some of the denials I've read parse very narrowly, which isn't right.
> but then how did they get the pictures of Hunter sleeping with a meth pipe?
Actually, and this is coming from someone who is definitely not a Democrat: I'd think that picture points towards planted evidence. The picture is probably real for what I know, but why would he keep it on his laptop?
A better question is why he'd take it to begin with, but I've seen enough people post stupid pics of them doing drugs that I can't fully discount it for that reason.
I mean, how many times have we heard variations on "Idiot caught doing drugs after posting pics on Facebook/Instagram/etc."?
I've heard rumors that Hunter was allegedly hacked to get them, but I have yet to see media reports of this from prior to this story breaking. If you can provide some, please do!
Right now, my take is that, at best, this is an elaborate cover story for releasing real dirt and at worst, it's legit, like the time Hunter returned a rental car with a crack pipe in it. We'll need to dig into it further, though, I want to see if the emails have DKIM validation with a body hash parameter, etc.