Former President Donald Trump has escalated his long-running assault on the integrity of US elections as the 2024 presidential campaign enters its final stretch, using a new series of lies about ballots, vote-counting and the election process to lay the groundwork to challenge a potential defeat in November. read more
Trump falsely claimed Friday and Saturday that the statistics are specifically about criminal offenders who entered the US during the Biden-Harris administration; in reality, the figures are about offenders who entered the US over multiple decades, including during the Trump administration. And Trump falsely claimed that the statistics are specifically about people who are now living freely in the US; the figures actually include people who are currently in jails and prisons serving criminal sentences.
A former spokesperson for Kyle Rittenhouse says he became disillusioned with his ex-client after learning that he had sent text messages pledging to "fucking murder" shoplifters outside a pharmacy before later shooting two people to death during racial justice protests in Wisconsin in 2020.
In western Pennsylvania, Trump made one of his most savage anti-immigrant appeals yet. But one local official says it's all a lie. read more
PS Furthermore, Hunter Biden never agreed that the data on the laptop was his:
More importantly, Hines blatantly misstates Hunter Biden's view on the authenticity of the data on the laptop. In Abbe Lowell's response to Hines' motion to bypass any expert witness, he specifically debunked that claim.www.emptywheel.net
Defense counsel has numerous reasons to believe the data had been altered and compromised before investigators obtained the electronic material from Apple Inc. and The Mac Shop, such that the Special Counsel's claim that the underlying data is "authentic" (id. at 4) and accurately reflects "defendant's Apple Macbook Pro and [] hard drive" (id. at 2) is mistaken.
Mr. Biden's counsel told the Special Counsel on May 10, 2024 it agrees not to challenge the authenticity of the electronic data the Special Counsel intends to use with respect to it being what law enforcement received on December 9, 2019 from John Paul Mac Isaac (owner of The Mac Shop), and from Apple on August 29, 2019 and in a follow-up search on July 10, 2020. (Mot. at n.3.) However, Mr. Biden cannot agree this electronic data is "authentic" as to being his data as he used and stored it prior to Mac Issac obtaining it.
He pointedly did not agree that the data derived from the laptop (and hard drive, which I suspect has more irregularities) was "authentic" as to being his own data.
"#24. It was used as evidence in a criminal trial against Hunter Biden."
It was introduced as evidence, but despite that fact, the FBI never properly validated the material on the laptop:
I was suspicious, too, because Hines' claim that evidence obtained from the laptop was "largely duplicative" admits that it was not entirely duplicative. His choice of language made it clear there were things on the laptop that were not in the iCloud.www.emptywheel.net
And he did so in a paragraph that tried to obscure how the provenance of the laptop affects the provenance of his other evidence. . .
Over 1,500 days after receiving the laptop, the FBI has not done the things it would need to do to validate the laptop. They don't have an index of what they have and they don't know how all the embedded back-ups relate to one another. Without that, they cannot make representations that the laptop was not tampered with. Indeed, they're making laughably false claims about what they have found uniquely on the laptop, a testament that they don't have the most basic understanding about the laptop...
Since Derek Hines made dubious claims on January 16 that the laptop was "largely duplicative" of material found in Hunter Biden's iCloud, we've since learned one reason he was so squirrelly when he made that claim: his most important evidence for the gun crime doesn't appear to be duplicated in Hunter's iCloud And unless the FBI conducted an unlawful search of Hunter's digital evidence--or unless they indicted based on what they had seen in Murdoch publications--they did not learn that until months after they charged the President's son. And they didn't learn that because four years after obtaining the laptop, the FBI has still never taken basic steps to understand what is on it.
You can't say that with authority. Otherwise why have him speak at all.
He said what he said, and everyone heard it. Trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube at this point.
#116 | Posted by oneironat
Yes, I can. It is clear from the context. Why/when did you change your position on gun safety laws? When my office was filled with the parents of kids who died at Sandy Hook. You'll see when the transcript comes out.
If that's the best gotcha you got on Walz from this debate, you got nothing.