Provenance of a Hard Drive: Leslie Stahl’s Bias Exposed

Leslie Stahl claimed in an interview that the Hunter Biden hard drive and/or contents and/or laptop “can’t be verified”. This claim means to discredit the material so that it lets Joe Biden off the corruption hook. If the material cannot be subjected to examination and learning of the truth or falsity of its contents, then it may as well be a rock from Mars and of no informational value about the Biden crime family. Then, as she says, reporters are wasting time to talk about the contents.

However, Stahl is completely wrong. There are numerous ways to verify the laptop, the hard drive and the hard drive’s contents. The provenance of all three items (laptop itself, hard drive itself, and hard drive contents themselves) can all be investigated and determined beyond a reasonable doubt. To begin with, there is a paper trail for the items coming into the hands of the repair shop owner. There are phone calls he made and that were made to him. His story can be checked by comparison to the item’s conditions. There is the testimony of the shop owner. There is testimony that can be obtained from all of those with whom he came in contact with respect to the materials as he tried to turn them over to the FBI. There are already several distinct and reputable witnesses to some e-mails that are on the hard drive or were recovered from it. There are ways to check the origins, dates and contents of e-mails and other video materials. A wealth of methods can be used to verify, if that is the correct word to use, that the items are what they have been purported to be, and that they have not been constructed by foreign hands.

As time passes and more and more people examine these items, more and more verification is going to be forthcoming.

Stahl should know that experts have been able to trace the origins of numerous books and manuscripts and works of art that go back 4,000 years or more. All it takes is thorough and smart investigations.

Taking Stahl at her word, that she really believes what she said, her thinking about this is simply wrong. It’s reasonable to suppose that she said what she did as a means of stopping a Trump parry. She didn’t want to concede to Trump the ground of truth, which would be that the materials are for real and that they impugn the Biden crime family. To protect them, she scraped her mind for a rebuttal and came up with the claim of unverifiability. The bottom line is that she exposed her bias for all to see. Biden ranks higher in her book than truth or law, and if it takes a specious argument to promote Biden over truth and law and the public knowledge, she takes Biden.

If the story is that these items are a plant from Russian agents, then Stahl has an awful lot of explaining to do about her proposed provenance of the items. If she denies that the ball is in her court to support a Russian conspiracy theory, then what is she saying? Did these items come from Mars? Did the owner manufacture a receipt and other details? Is he a Russian agent? Did he purposely commit several crimes of creating a hoax and lying to the FBI and then make sure he gets caught? What exactly can Stahl say that makes any sense at all, except that far beyond a reasonable doubt, the items are what they have been represented to be?

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6:17 pm on October 22, 2020