As we discussed here some time ago, Hal Sparks took apart the Washington Post for their godawful reporting on the so-called Hunter Biden laptop, and why no one should trust any of the data that supposedly came from it given the amount of hands its gone through, the fact that no one has been able to examine the metadata from the actual laptop, and there's no way to know how much of the data has been tampered with or put there by someone else.

This week, Marcy Wheeler who blogs under the name Emptywheel did another fine job of taking apart the Washington Post, which is once again doing their part to carry water for Republicans and the rest of their enablers on the right who continue to aid and abet the right and their ratf***ing of Hunter Biden.

Here's some of Marcy's reporting, which was written just ahead of yesterday's farce of a hearing by the House Judiciary Committee, laying out just how much of Hunter Biden's data has been compromised. The list is quite breathtaking:

That all led me to start looking at the publicly released (but unreliable) emails at BidenLaptopEmails dot com, where I’ve discovered that during a period when Hunter Biden was getting Ketamine treatment and bookended by two communications from him that indicated he was not getting outside comms, someone:

• Split Hunter’s Uber account, on which his two iCloud accounts had previously been joined
• Accessed Hunter’s rhb iCloud account from a browser
• Changed the password and related phone numbers to his rhb iCloud account
• Installed and gave full access to his droidhunter gmail account a real app, called Hunter, that can send email on someone else’s behalf
• Signed into that droidhunter account using a new device
• Again changed emails and phone numbers associated with his rhb account
• Asked for a full copy of his rhbdc iCloud account
• Reset the password of that rhbdc iCloud account
• Made droidhunter account the notification email for the rhbdc account
• Downloaded all Hunter’s Apple Store purchases
• Made changes to the Uber (and Waze) account associated with an XS phone that would be included in the “laptop”
• Restored rhb as an alternate address to the account
• Restored contacts from an unidentified prior change
• Obtained — including at the droidhunter email account — a download link of the entire rhbdc iCloud account
• Backed up the XS phone to the laptop
• Gotten a trial app of a photo editor
• Backed up an iPad to the laptop
• Changed the iTunes password
• Added the Dr. Fone account, allowing you to adopt a chosen second phone number for a phone, to a second of Hunter’s accounts
• Signed into the droidhunter account from a burner phone
• Restored the prior trusted phone number
• Added software that could record calls
• Started erasing and then locked a laptop — probably the one that would eventually end up in Mac Isaac’s store
• Got a new Mac phone for the droidhunter account

That series of changes are not the only emails in the MarcoPolo set that should raise questions about whether Hunter Biden’s digital identity may have been compromised.

Go read the rest for more on the shoddy reporting by the WaPo, the so-called "whistleblowers" from yesterday's hearing, and the fact that the Washington Post is withholding two reports that raise questions about the "quality and completeness of the drive."

From her post:

According to Devlin Barrett’s own standard — at least the standard he applies when he’s parroting right wingers — withholding such a report is a sign of corruption.

Even the plain language of Gary Shapley’s contemporaneous notes show that Devlin’s claim that, “information provided by IRS agents to Congress” “put[s] … the accusations” that “the data might have been doctored or possibly a Russian-backed disinformation campaign” … “to rest” is wildly false (dishonest or stupid?). It does the opposite: It shows that ten months after beginning to rely on the laptop, the FBI still had not done basic forensic checks of the data on it and the AUSA leading the investigation didn’t think doing so was a priority.

That should be the story. That’s the scandal.

Not in Fox-land though. In right-wing propaganda land, they're pretending any of us on the left are saying the laptop doesn't exist, rather than the fact that we shouldn't trust the information they claim they've obtained from it, and having hissy fits like this one which you can watch in the clip above. Here's Brian Kilmeade and Ainsley Earhardt from this Thursday's Fox & Friends:

KILMEADE: You just actually brought up a great point. They were talking about the laptop. They wanted access to the laptop. While we were debating and were finding out that the laptop wasn't real, we all knew it was real, but they were telling us it wasn't real, the IRS was like we need access to it. They all knew it was real. The FBI knew it was real.

EARHARDT: It's just a double standard.

KILMEADE: The IRS was dealing as if it was real. In the social media world they were destroying and freezing and suspending accounts that are saying it's real. And then when they went to say I need to geo-locate President Biden to see if he is next to his son, don't touch anything on the laptop. Really?

Don't touch anything on the laptop? We're told -- we are in two realities. Our reality is the laptop's not real, they want us to believe and the rest of the media does believe it. In their reality they're just trying to get do it to investigate it.

What we need some answers to is who hacked into Hunter's data and who were they coordinating with?