Slate | Last week, the New York Post began publishing reports on a series of photos, emails, and documents allegedly taken from a laptop hard drive that belonged to Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. As it became increasingly clear that the Post was using hacked, unverified information that may have been manipulated by a foreign entity for the purposes of influencing the upcoming presidential election, social media companies started to ban or otherwise attempt to reduce the spread of the Post’s initial story. But the tabloid continued printing information from the hard drive, a copy of which it says it received from disgraced Donald Trump associate and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Given that Giuliani and Steve Bannon were the Post’s two sources of information about the hard drive, the provenance of the Rupert Murdoch–owned paper’s information is more than a little suspect. Giuliani, for one, has said that there’s a 50-50 chance he worked with a Russian spy to dig up embarrassing material about the Biden family. And the computer repair shop owner who allegedly obtained the hard drive and turned it over to Giuliani’s lawyer doesn’t exactly seem like a trustworthy fellow either. So it is with a massive grain of salt that we consider the contents of the hard drive itself. One of the stories contains an alleged text exchange between Hunter and Joe Biden from two months before Joe announced his presidential campaign. It began with a text Joe sent around 7 a.m. to Hunter, who was residing in a rehab facility. “Good morning my beautiful son,” the text reads. “I miss you and love you. Dad.”
Whether or not the hacked material is accurate and complete, the
father-son text exchange does the exact opposite of what Giuliani and
Trump have been trying to do. For years, Trump and his allies have
attempted to paint Hunter as the beneficiary of (Trump-style) nepotism
and a shameful sleazeball who reflects poorly on his father. Yet, in the
text conversation, Biden comes off as loving and concerned. Hunter
certainly admits to struggling with addiction and the pressures of
living under intense public scrutiny, but there is nothing politically
damaging about the exchange—only a sad, humanizing portrait of a family
working through a difficult time.
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