April 8, 2022

Mother Jones got access to WhatsApp messages that uncover the link between Steve Bannon's fugitive billionaire patron, Guo Wengui, and some of the outrageous smears against Hunter Biden:

Mother Jones obtained scores of WhatsApp audio messages Guo sent to supporters, along with underlying material from Biden’s hard drive that Guo’s assistant distributed at his behest. Previous reports have noted the role of Guo allies and companies in publicizing sex tapes and other material involving Hunter Biden. But the WhatsApp messages, and sources who were involved in the effort, reveal that Guo—who has been accused in lawsuits of fraud and rape and of secretly acting as an agent for the Chinese Communist Party—played a larger role than previously known in ensuring that explicit images and videos from the laptop appeared online, and in spreading lies about them. (Guo has denied the allegations made in the lawsuits against him.)

[...] The material Guo publicized seems to be real, but he instructed supporters to couple it with false claims that it came from Chinese sources, and that the Chinese government had used it to obtain leverage over Hunter Biden and his father, Joe Biden. “We have to express…The Chinese Communist Party used these to threaten Hunter and [Joe] Biden,” Guo told supporters in an October 24, 2020, message. (Mother Jones is quoting English translations of messages that were originally in Chinese. Multiple people independently verified the translations.)

People who helped Guo publish the material online said that it quickly became clear to them that he was lying about China’s role. “They tried to link the Biden family to the [Chinese Communist Party],” said a person involved in the effort, who shared Guo’s WhatsApp messages with Mother Jones and requested anonymity. “They wanted to help Trump win.”

And by the way, I still take that New York Times "proof" of the Hunter Biden scandal with a grain of salt. As Marcy Wheeler has pointed out, due to glaring problems with the laptop's chain of custody, and the agendas of the people involved, we still don't know what was originally on the laptop -- and what was uploaded later, which is not hard to do.

There's a lot there, go read the whole thing.

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