Paper publishes alleged emails, files of Biden’s son Hunter, claiming he peddled influence in Ukraine.
RT.com
14 Oct, 2020 16:31
Emails obtained by the New York Post suggest that Hunter Biden introduced a Ukrainian energy boss to his father, then-vice president Joe Biden. The former VP has insisted he knew nothing about his son’s dodgy dealings.
A year after Hunter Biden joined the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma in 2014, the then-vice president’s son’s family connections apparently paid off – at least that’s what the latest materials obtained by the New York Post claim to show. In a 2015
email published on Wednesday, Burisma adviser Vadym Pozharskyi thanked Hunter for an invitation to Washington, and for the “honor and pleasure” of meeting Joe Biden.
No details of the meeting are revealed, but a 2014 email between Pozharskyi reportedly shows the Burisma executive asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” to thwart a government investigation into the company, which hired him that year for a reported monthly salary of $50,000, despite Hunter’s lack of experience in the energy sector.
Joe Biden has repeatedly denied any knowledge of his son’s foreign business dealings, and has responded angrily when accused of peddling influence. Confronted by a voter at a town hall event last December, the Democratic nominee called the voter a “damn liar” and “fat.” Pressed by President Donald Trump in last month’s presidential debate, Biden replied that his son “did nothing wrong” at Burisma, and Joe has insisted since last year that he was uninvolved in Hunter’s work.
The emails seem to tell a different story. They do not, however, provide any more evidence that Hunter asked his father to have a Ukrainian prosecutor fired for investigating the firm, as President Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed.
Joe Biden himself has claimed responsibility for the firing though,
telling the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018 “I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,” referring to a billion-dollar Obama administration aid package to Ukraine. “Well, son of a bitch,” he quipped then, “he got fired.”
Biden’s supporters in the media have insisted that the former VP was just one of many international voices calling for the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to be fired for corruption, and that Shokin’s investigation into Burisma had gone “dormant.” Shokin himself
told ABC News that he had six investigations into the company open at the time of his ouster.
Coming so close to next month’s election, the timing of the New York Post’s article has raised some eyebrows. According to the Post, the emails came from a laptop handed in to a repair shop in Delaware by an unnamed customer last April. When the store owner realized the laptop contained Hunter Biden’s emails and photos, he alerted federal authorities, who seized it in December. However, the owner copied the hard drive’s contents and gave them to Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s lawyer.
Curiously, among the photos obtained by the Post is a bill for computer repair work made out to “Hunter Biden,” despite the store owner not knowing who the customer was.
Also among these photos are seemingly incriminating shots of Hunter asleep with what appears to be a crack pipe in his mouth, and according to the Post, a video of Hunter smoking crack while having sex with an “unidentified woman.” Hunter Biden’s struggle with drug addiction is well documented, and he has been to rehab at least six times. Joe Biden has claimed that he’s overcome his addiction.
With just three weeks to go until the presidential election, Giuliani himself
promised on Wednesday that he had “much more to come.” Asked by Los Angeles Times reporter Chris Megerian what this might mean, Giuliani reportedly
responded: “Print a headline saying ‘Lyin’ Joe’ and we can talk.”
Joe Biden's campaign
responded to the report later on Wednesday, with spokesman Andrew Bates saying that "no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place." Bates did not, however, deny that the photo of Hunter with the crack pipe in his mouth was genuine.
---------------
Twitter BLOCKS sharing links to NYPost’s Hunter Biden emails story, invoking ‘HACKED MATERIALS’ policy for first time ever.
RT.com
14 Oct, 2020 22:47
Twitter has one-upped Facebook’s censorship regarding a story based on alleged emails from Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter about his Ukraine dealings, blocking all users from sharing it via tweet or direct message.
Twitter users were blocked on Wednesday from sharing the New York Post story critical of the Bidens published just that morning. The decision was based on a never-before-invoked “hacked materials policy” that Twitter announced hours after Facebook had stomped on the same story.
The Post cited emails that appeared to show Joe Biden – then vice president to Barack Obama – had met with Ukrainian Burisma exec Vadim Pozharskyi at the behest of his son and Burisma adviser Hunter Biden, less than a year before the current Democratic presidential candidate allegedly demanded Kiev fire its top prosecutor.
Twitter “errors” started pouring in just a few hours after Andy Stone, a Facebook executive with a long history of working for the Democratic Party, warned Facebook was “reducing [the Hunter Biden story’s] distribution” on its platform and seemingly invited Facebook’s fact-checkers to tear the story apart.
While Twitter users were able to share the offending Post link for hours after Stone tagged it for destruction, what Twitter lacked in temporal primacy it made up in intensity.
Users who attempted to share the story on Wednesday afternoon were informed they could not retweet the “potentially harmful” link. Unlike typical Twitter warning screens that can be clicked through, the link to the Post story was not even allowed to be posted.
As speculation swirled regarding the Biden emails, Forbes reporter Jack Brewster posted a statement, allegedly from Twitter, reading that “in line with our Hacked Materials Policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links to or images of the material in question on Twitter.”
While Twitter has outlawed entire domains in the past – most notably Bitchute.com, a YouTube competitor whose exile it partially walked back after widespread protest from users – nothing like the blanket ban on the Post URL has ever been seen before.
Many readers opined that by blocking the URL and deleting the Post’s tweet Twitter had inadvertently confirmed the authenticity of the Biden emails.
Others merely interpreted the secondhand missive as Twitter throwing its hat in the ring for Biden, deeming the act “brazen election interference.”
Meanwhile, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) said he wrote to Facebook to complain about executive Andy Stone’s actions, asking if the preemptive shadowbanning pending fact-checking was “normal” and whether the Biden campaign had played some role in reducing the article’s reach.
---------------
Six years after MH17 tragedy, Russia withdraws from ‘pointless’ investigation consultations with Netherlands & Australia.
RT.com
15 Oct, 2020 09:01
Russia’s Foreign Ministry believes it’s “impossible” for Moscow to continue consultations with the Netherlands and Australia on the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, as they are not interested in uncovering the truth.
Instead, in a Thursday morning statement, Russian diplomats accused the two countries of seeking only to blame Moscow, and arriving at the process with a preconceived outcome.
It added that Russia agreed to trilateral consultations two years ago, hoping that these would help establish, based on hard facts, the true reasons behind the 2014 tragedy. The Boeing 777 crash, which occurred six years ago, during the hot phase of the war in Eastern Ukraine, took 298 lives, with 193 victims from the Netherlands and 27 from Australia.
But, according to the ministry, the Dutch and Australian governments had other goals in mind, as they only wanted “Russia to be declared the guilty party and compensation paid to the relatives of those that died,” the statement outlined.
In July this year, the Netherlands filed a suit against Russia at the European Court of Human Rights, alleging that Moscow had played a part in the downing of the Malaysia Airlines plane. Only three rounds of consultations had been held up to that point, but the Dutch authorities made the move without even waiting for the preliminary results from these.
“Such unfriendly actions of the Netherlands make trilateral consultations and our participation in them pointless,” Moscow insisted, adding that the blame for the failure of the process lay entirely with The Hague.
Russia is not curbing all contacts with the Netherlands on the issue, however. Its cooperation with Dutch officials on the MH17 tragedy will continue, but in other formats, the ministry said. Moscow denies any involvement in the downing of the plane, and regards the finding of the Dutch-led probe by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) into the incident as politically biased.
The JIT ruled that Flight MH17 was shot down by a Soviet-made Buk air defense system, and claimed that rebels fighting the post-Maidan government in Kiev, in the Donbass Region, had obtained the system from Russia. Moscow insisted that the probe ignored a large batch of data on the crash that Russia was eager to provide, instead relying largely on the evidence from Ukraine, and on ‘open-source’ information such as clips of purported evidence posted on social media.
The material in the JIT’s case also lacked crucial data from Ukrainian radars and from photos made by US satellites, which Kiev and Washington respectively said they couldn’t provide. Another question that had been raised by Moscow is why the Ukrainian authorities hadn’t moved to close the airspace over an active war zone in Donbass.