The adult son of Sarah Palin was arrested by Wasilla police on Saturday afternoon for operating a vehicle under the influence of a controlled substance. He was released and faces a out date “pending.”
Palin, 33, has had a number of run-ins with the law, ranging from domestic violence to resisting arrest and weapons misconduct, and he has spent time in prison.
In 2016, just as Palin was endorsing Donald Trump for the presidency, Track was arrested and charged with assault, interfering with the report of a domestic violence crime, and possessing a weapon while under the influence. The incident took place at the Wasilla home of Sarah and Todd Palin, after calls were made to 911 to report a domestic violence situation. Track’s girlfriend reported he had punched her in the eye and kicked her knee, and she thought Track was going to shoot himself.
Track was also a problem guest at a party in Anchorage in 2014, when members of the family got into a brawl at a party on the hillside. No charges were filed in that incident.
Track isn’t alone in the politics of getting arrested for DUI this summer. The executive director of the Alaska Democratic Party also was stopped and ultimately arrested for attempting to interfere with the law enforcement’s detection equipment.
The Democrats also had trouble with its former executive director, Jay Parmley, with reported incidences of sexual harassment before he came to Alaska.
For the first time in almost 50 years, Alaska is sending a Democrat to the House of Representatives.
She still faces an uphill battle in the fall, when she has to run again to stay in the House, but there's something happening that feels pretty encouraging right now.
(pay wall)
Democrat Mary Peltola wins special election in Alaska, defeating Palin
Peltola scored a rare Democratic win in the state while also becoming the first Alaska Native elected to Congress
Democrat Mary Peltola has won a special election for the U.S. House in Alaska, defeating Republican Sarah Palin and becoming the first Alaska Native to win a seat in Congress as well as the first woman to clinch the state’s at-large district.
Peltola’s win flips a seat that had long been in Republican hands. She will serve the remainder of a term left open by the sudden death of Rep. Don Young (R) in March. Young represented Alaska in Congress for 49 years.
Peltola, who’s Yup’ik, is a tribal fisheries manager and former state representative who led in initial counts after the Aug. 16 election. But her win wasn’t assured until Wednesday, when Alaska election officials made decisive second-choice counts using the state’s new ranked-choice voting system. Republican Nick Begich III, who finished third, was eliminated, and his supporters’ second-choice votes were redistributed to the remaining candidates.
“It is overwhelming. And it’s a very good feeling. I’m very grateful Alaskans have put their trust in me,” Peltola said in an interview with The Washington Post shortly after her victory at the office of her campaign consultants, where she had to break away in the middle of the conversation to take a call from Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). “I will be immediately going to work.”
Alaska’s special-election results come after other summer special elections for the House in which Democrats outperformed President Biden’s showing in their districts. Those outcomes, all following the Supreme Court decision to end a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy, have been hailed by Democrats as encouraging signs for the November midterms that show voters are angered by the court’s decision and eager to vote for candidates supporting abortion rights.
The Alaska race adds another data point to the clues both parties are examining as they gear up for the stretch run to the Nov. 8 elections. But since it was decided under a unique new voting system, the Alaska race could be harder to read as an indicator of the national environment than the other contests.
For the moment, it helps Democrats expand their current narrow House majority and gives the party a better chance of winning the seat in the fall, according to at least one nonpartisan elections analyst.
Peltola had nearly 40 percent of first-choice votes after preliminary counts, which put her about 16,000 votes ahead of Palin. Half of the Alaskans who made Begich their first choice ranked Palin second, and 21 percent did not make a second choice. The remaining 29 percent — a surprisingly large fraction, even to some of Peltola’s supporters — ranked Peltola second, flipping from a Republican to a Democrat. The second-choice support for Peltola was enough for her to hold off Palin, leaving the Democrat about 5,200 votes ahead.
Peltola said in the interview that she thinks her win shows that Alaskans “want someone who has a proven track record of working well with people and setting aside partisanship.” She added, “I think it also reveals that Alaskans are very tired of the bickering and the personal attacks.”
Palin’s defeat comes in her first campaign since she stepped down as Alaska’s governor in 2009; former president Donald Trump endorsed her and held a rally on her behalf in Anchorage.
Peltola’s campaign focused on local issues, such as what to do about declining salmon returns. She is expected to be sworn in to office in mid-September.
The Democrat ran as a relatively moderate candidate with bipartisan bona fides; she conditionally supports hot-button natural resource projects like oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Ambler road, which would cross Gates of the Arctic National Park to access promising mining claims in the foothills of Alaska’s Brooks Range. But she also touted her abortion rights stance.
Asked in the interview about the significance of her soon becoming the first Alaska Native in Congress, Peltola said, “There’s maybe a little bit of personal significance, but really, I am a congressperson for every Alaskan, regardless of their background.” She added, “I am Alaska Native, but I am much more than just my ethnicity.”
Until she ran for Congress, Peltola was the executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, which co-manages federal salmon fisheries in a partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Peltola’s Yukon-Kuskokwim region — named for two major salmon rivers that flow through the area — has seen unprecedented collapses of key subsistence salmon runs in recent years. Peltola pledged to tackle the issue if elected.
Peltola, who turned 49 on Wednesday, is the daughter of a Yup’ik mother and a father from Nebraska, who started in Alaska as a teacher in the village of Fort Yukon. There, he worked with Young, who also was a teacher before he ran for Congress. Peltola’s family was close with Young’s, and her father flew Young on campaign stops when he was first seeking statewide office; her mother also campaigned for Young while she was pregnant with Peltola, speaking in the Yup’ik language.
Peltola was in the Alaska state House for 10 years, ending in 2008, and served while Palin was governor. She was first elected to the state House at age 25, two years after losing her first attempt, which began at age 22.
Forty-eight candidates ran in a special primary election in June. That race narrowed the field to four — independent Al Gross later dropped out — before the Aug. 16 general election.
Meanwhile, a regularly scheduled election is playing out to decide who will hold the same U.S. House seat for the next two years, once the rest of Young’s term concludes. The primary for that race also was held Aug. 16, and Peltola, Palin and Begich are projected to advance, according to the Associated Press. There will also be a fourth spot on the ranked-choice ballot in November.
“Mary Peltola’s victory is a clear message from AK voters that they will not compromise their values or their rights at the ballot box. Mary is a pro-choice, pro-fish, common sense leader who knows what it takes to protect and create AK jobs. On to November!” tweeted former Democratic senator Mark Begich of Alaska. Nick Begich III is the nephew of the former senator.
Following Peltola’s win, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report moved the Alaska seat’s rating from “Likely Republican” to “Toss-up.”
National Democratic groups did not participate in the special election race even as Peltola was outraised by Palin, according to federal campaign finance reports. But party officials say they’re closely watching the general election race.
Palin and Peltola were at a candidate forum earlier Wednesday. Peltola mentioned the joint appearance in the interview with The Post and said that she had not yet heard from Palin, but “we are going to be reaching out to her.”
Asked what both campaigning for the seat and representing Alaskans in Congress would look like in the months ahead, Peltola said, “I don’t.” She added, “I will supposedly have the benefit of incumbency.” She added, “We’ll see how that works.”
Palin, Begich and other conservatives have sharply criticized Alaska’s new ranked-choice voting system, and the nonpartisan primary system that accompanies it. Palin, in an election night statement, called it “convoluted,” “cockamamie” and untrustworthy.
“The biggest lesson as we move into the 2022 General Election, is that ranked choice voting showed that a vote for Sarah Palin is in reality a vote for Mary Peltola. Palin simply doesn’t have enough support from Alaskans to win an election,” Nick Begich III said in a statement Wednesday.
The system’s supporters — some of whom are aligned with Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski — argue that it will result in the election of more-moderate candidates and reduce the risk of third-party politicians “spoiling” an election, because their supporters will be able also to rank mainstream candidates.
In the congressional race, Alaska Republicans ran a campaign urging voters to “rank the red” and fill out ballots for both Palin and Begich, rather than just one of them.
John Coghill, a Republican former state senator who ran in the special primary, attributed Peltola’s win to negative campaigning between the two GOP candidates in the race — which, according to Coghill and multiple strategists, may have made Begich supporters less likely to rank Palin second.
“They started taking shots at each other, and the supporters of one would not dare vote for the other Republican, because of so many cross words,” Coghill said in a phone interview Wednesday. “It’s a new system, and people campaigned like it was the old system.”
Coghill served with Peltola in the Alaska Legislature and said that he was still somewhat pleased to see her elected even though he only ranked the two Republicans on his own ballot. “I think she represents a very good chunk of Alaskans, and she has a broad view,” he said. “She and I argued a lot. And I found her to be a formidable debater, but willing to work where you could.”
Times Radio - Carole Walker with Gen Ben Hodges (3-Star USArmy Ret)
The Russians can't defend their rear areas, they've lost the initiative, the Black Sea Fleet is hiding, the Russian air force won't fly in Ukrainian airspace, and now they're obviously vulnerable at home in Moscow - no matter who planted that bomb, it shows a real weakness.
Expect to see Ukraine pushing Russia back to pre-24FEB lines before winter.
Wondering if the coastal states might ever get together and go after the oil companies and their PR pimps - like the AGs got the tobacco companies to pony up for the shit they caused.
Anyway, there's a part of me that feels resigned to it - saying, "Well fuck, the damage is done". But thinking a little further, that's the kind of surrender the plutocrats are gunning for.
Greenland may have already committed us to almost a foot of sea level rise
How long that takes to play out is unclear.
While it's possible to halt global warming by halting our greenhouse gas emissions, sea level rise is a consequence that keeps on giving. Great ice sheets like Greenland and Antarctica have tremendous inertia—they're slow to melt but carry on melting even after the thermometer stabilizes. There are many reasons for this, including complex processes beneath glaciers that control their rate of downhill flow. And this complexity makes projecting ice loss over the coming century—and centuries—exceptionally challenging.
In the face of this formidable complexity, a new study led by Jason Box at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland opts for a simple approach to projecting Greenland's future. Rather than attempting to simulate as much physics and detail as possible in a model, the team used a simple equation to calculate what portion of the ice is vulnerable in the current climate.
Finding the line
Glacial ice deforms under its own weight, flowing outward and downhill like slow-motion pancake batter. The low elevation and—for an ice sheet like Greenland's—coastal environment at the ice's edge is much warmer, and ice melts away here even as snow accumulates over the colder interior of the ice sheet. The point where the net result changes from gaining mass to losing mass is called the "equilibrium line." Increase air temperatures, and this line will push up to higher elevations, exposing more ice to melting until the glacier shrinks.
The new study maps the average equilibrium line from 2000 to 2019, based on data from NASA's Terra satellite. (You can identify it because snow cover above the equilibrium line is more reflective than bare ice below it.) Given that equilibrium line position, the researchers then apply the geometry of glacial ice to estimate the volume of ice that would disappear to bring the ice sheet into balance with its new climate.
That blurs over a ton of critical processes, like meltwater lubricating the base of the ice or ice flow changing the portion of the ice sheet that contacts a warming ocean. One consequence of this is that the study can give no time frame for its predicted ice loss. Their method assumes that enough time passes until the ice sheet finishes shrinking.
The result, they say, is that the Greenland ice sheet would lose about 3.3 percent of its ice—enough to raise the global sea level about 27 centimeters (almost 11 inches). That's the long-term commitment of warming so far. Since we aren't close to eliminating greenhouse gas emissions, the world is continuing to warm, which would push this number higher.
What’s in a number?
Is this number shocking? That depends on the time frame you assign to it. The latest IPCC report projected about 5–18 centimeters (2-7 inches) of sea level contribution from Greenland by 2100, depending on the greenhouse gas emissions scenario. But it also presented long-term sea level commitments. For a world that only warms 2° C, for example, total sea level rise came to about 50 centimeters for 2100—but two to six meters when given 2,000 years to respond.
Some authors of the new study have been quoted saying that they suspect their estimated sea level contribution could manifest by 2100 or 2150, but that is their personal judgment and not a conclusion of this particular study. Ice sheet responses are generally discussed in terms of centuries to millennia, depending on the scale, so 2100 would be a very rapid timeline.
One more thing worth noting is that the analysis only had 20 years of data to work with. Greenland sees a lot of variability in its weather, and ice loss accelerated considerably in the early 2000s. To illustrate the impact of this variability, the researchers repeat their calculations using the dataset's warmest (2012) and coolest (2018) years.
In permanent 2012 conditions, the committed sea level contribution grows almost by a factor of three to 78 centimeters. But in permanent 2018 conditions, Greenland ice would actually grow, lowering sea level by 17 centimeters. Both are unlikely extremes, but they highlight the importance of basing the calculation on a representative average.
In the end, this is another study adding to our understanding of future sea level rise. And applying multiple independent methods helps firm up that understanding, even if no individual answer is the ultimate one. This latest analysis certainly reminds us of a well-worn truth—that warming now commits us to sea level rise long into the future.
I'd like to know why the "grownups" have no legal problems on this one.
If you let your dog loose and it's seen as a threaten to school kids, you could at least get a ticket, if not have to face a charge of misdemeanor negligence.
WTF, America?
2nd grader in Arizona brings 2 guns and ammunition to school
BOWIE, Ariz. (AP) — A second-grade student at a southeastern Arizona elementary school is facing charges for allegedly bringing two guns and ammunition to school, authorities said Wednesday.
Cochise County Sheriff’s officials said they were called Monday to Cochise Elementary School in Bowie on reports that a 7-year-old student had a weapon.
Deputies met with school officials and the student and said a handgun and ammunition was found in his backpack and a second gun also was discovered.
Authorities contacted the student’s parents and gave the boy a juvenile referral for charges of misconduct with a weapon and a minor in possession of a firearm.
A sheriff’s spokeswoman said it was unlikely that the boy’s parents will face charges in the incident, which remains under investigation.
The chain of custody is a problem, which leads to problems of file integrity and the fact that it's an open question on the possibility someone added files to the laptop at a time when the thing was not in Hunter Biden's possession.
Of course, none of that matters. What matters is the innuendo - the public negative you can attach to your opponent's image.
Remember, these Trump goons are always way more interested in cultivating the appearance of impropriety on the part of their opponents than they are in discovering what the truth is.
And also too:
Daddy State Awareness
Rule 1. Every accusation is a confession.
(pay wall) Here’s how The Post analyzed Hunter Biden’s laptop
Two experts confirm the veracity of thousands of emails, but say a thorough examination was stymied by missing data
Thousands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures from Google and other technology companies, say two security experts who examined the data at the request of The Washington Post.
The verifiable emails are a small fraction of 217 gigabytes of data provided to The Post on a portable hard drive by Republican activist Jack Maxey. He said the contents of the portable drive originated from Hunter Biden’s MacBook Pro, which Hunter reportedly dropped off at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Del., in April 2019 and never reclaimed.
The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post. Neither found clear evidence of tampering in their examinations, but some of the records that might have helped verify contents were not available for analysis, they said. The Post was able in some instances to find documents from other sources that matched content on the laptop that the experts were not able to assess.
Among the reasons for the inconclusive findings was sloppy handling of the data, which damaged some records. The experts found the data had been repeatedly accessed and copied by people other than Hunter Biden over nearly three years. The MacBook itself is now in the hands of the FBI, which is investigating whether Hunter Biden properly reported income from business dealings.
Most of the data obtained by The Post lacks cryptographic features that would help experts make a reliable determination of authenticity, especially in a case where the original computer and its hard drive are not available for forensic examination. Other factors, such as emails that were only partially downloaded, also stymied the security experts’ efforts to verify content.
The contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop computer have sparked debate and controversy since the New York Post and other news organizations in the closing month of the 2020 presidential campaign reported stories based on data purportedly taken from it.
Many Republicans have portrayed this data as offering evidence of misbehavior by Hunter Biden that implicated his father in scandal, while Democrats have dismissed it as probable disinformation, perhaps pushed by Russian operatives acting in a well-documented effort to undermine the elder Biden. Facebook and Twitter in 2020 restricted distribution of stories about the drive’s contents out of concern that the revelations might have resulted from a nefarious hacking campaign intended to upend the election, much as Russian hacks of sensitive Democratic Party emails shaped the trajectory of the 2016 election.
The Washington Post’s forensic findings are unlikely to resolve that debate, offering instead only the limited revelation that some of the data on the portable drive appears to be authentic. The security experts who examined the data for The Post struggled to reach definitive conclusions about the contents as a whole, including whether all of it originated from a single computer or could have been assembled from files from multiple computers and put on the portable drive.
At The Post’s request, Matt Green, a Johns Hopkins University security researcher who specializes in cryptography, and Jake Williams, a forensics expert and former National Security Agency operative who once hacked the computers of foreign adversaries, separately examined two copies The Post made of the portable drive Maxey provided.
The portable drive provided to The Post contains 286,000 individual user files, including documents, photos, videos and chat logs. Of those, Green and Williams concluded that nearly 22,000 emails among those files carried cryptographic signatures that could be verified using technology that would be difficult for even the most sophisticated hackers to fake.
Such signatures are a way for the company that handles the email — in the case of most of these, Google — to provide proof that the message came from a verified account and has not been altered in some way. Alterations made to an email after it has been sent cause the cryptographic signatures to become unverifiable.
The verified emails cover a time period from 2009 to 2019, when Hunter Biden was acting as a consultant to companies from China and Ukraine, and exploring opportunities in several other countries. His father was vice president from 2009 to 2017.
Many of the nearly 22,000 verified emails were routine messages, such as political newsletters, fundraising appeals, hotel receipts, news alerts, product ads, real estate listings and notifications related to his daughters’ schools or sports teams. There was also a large number of bank notifications, with about 1,200 emails from Wells Fargo alone.
Other emails contained exchanges with Hunter Biden’s business partners, personal assistants or members of his family. Some of these emails appear to offer insights into deals he developed and money he was paid for business activities that opponents of his father’s bid for the presidency sought to make a campaign issue in 2020.
In particular, there are verified emails illuminating a deal Hunter Biden developed with a fast-growing Chinese energy conglomerate, CEFC China Energy, for which he was paid nearly $5 million, and other business relationships. Those business dealings are the subject of a separate Washington Post story published at the same time as this one on the forensic examinations of the drive.
The drive also includes some verified emails from Hunter Biden’s work with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company for which he was a board member. President Donald Trump’s efforts to tie Joe Biden to the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma led to Trump’s first impeachment trial, which ended in acquittal in February 2020.
The Post’s review of these emails found that most were routine communications that provided little new insight into Hunter Biden’s work for the company.
The laptop’s journey begins
John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the Wilmington repair shop, has said he received the 13-inch MacBook Pro on April 12, 2019, when Hunter Biden asked him to recover data from the computer because it had been damaged by liquid.
According to Mac Isaac’s attorney, Brian Della Rocca, recovering the data was challenging for Mac Isaac.
“He would boot the computer and transfer as much as he could before the computer shut down. Then, he would boot up the computer again, verify what was copied, and then transfer more data until the computer shut down again. This process repeated several times,” Della Rocca said in a prepared statement.
When his work was completed, Della Rocca said, Mac Isaac repeatedly attempted to contact Hunter Biden, who had signed a repair authorization, to advise him the laptop was ready to be picked up, but Hunter never responded. Della Rocca added that Mac Isaac finally came to regard the MacBook as abandoned property.
In July 2019, when news of Hunter Biden’s business dealings with Ukraine was gaining attention — largely because Trump’s private attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was making public allegations of wrongdoing — Mac Isaac contacted the FBI about the MacBook.
Lemme say - if Hunter Biden is dirty, he should burn for it just like anybody else, but this looks more and more like it falls under the heading "Awful But Lawful" (at worst) - the typical nuthin' burger that the wingnuts are always cookin' up for the rubes.
On Dec. 9, 2019, FBI agents from the Wilmington field office served a subpoena on Mac Isaac for the laptop, the hard drive and all related paperwork.
“He willingly gave it to the FBI and was happy to see it go,” Della Rocca said.
He added that Mac Isaac, before turning over the computer, made a copy of its hard drive “in case he was ever thrown under the bus as a result of what he knew.”
By then, Trump’s first impeachment trial, which ran from Jan. 16 to Feb. 5, 2020, was underway and Mac Isaac attempted to contact several members of Congress, none of whom replied.
He later contacted Giuliani, whose attorney, Robert Costello, responded almost immediately.
In an email with the subject line “Why is it so difficult to be a whistleblower when you are on the right?” written on Aug. 26, 2020, Mac Isaac told Costello that he had copies of the hard drive from Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“For my protection I made sevral copies and I have been trying quietly to bring it to peoples attention. I am reaching out to you for assistance and making sure the people that need to know about this do.”
Costello said he received a copy of the laptop’s hard drive from Mac Isaac. Giuliani has said he provided that data to the New York Post.
After the New York Post began publishing reports on the contents of the laptop in October 2020, The Washington Post repeatedly asked Giuliani and Republican strategist Stephen K. Bannon for a copy of the data to review, but the requests were rebuffed or ignored.
In June 2021, Maxey, who previously worked as a researcher for Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, delivered to The Washington Post a portable hard drive that he said contained the data. He said he had obtained it from Giuliani.
Responding to findings from news organizations that some material on the drive could be corroborated, Mac Isaac said in a statement: “I am relieved that finally, after 18 months of being persecuted and attacked for my actions, the rest of the country is starting to open their eyes.”
What the experts found
In their examinations, Green and Williams found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.
Maxey had alerted The Washington Post to this issue in advance, saying that others had accessed the data to examine its contents and make copies of files. But the lack of what experts call a “clean chain of custody” undermined Green’s and Williams’s ability to determine the authenticity of most of the drive’s contents.
“The drive is a mess,” Green said.
He compared the portable drive he received from The Post to a crime scene in which detectives arrive to find Big Mac wrappers carelessly left behind by police officers who were there before them, contaminating the evidence.
That assessment was echoed by Williams.
“From a forensics standpoint, it’s a disaster,” Williams said. (The Post is paying Williams for the professional services he provided. Green declined payment.)
But both Green and Williams agreed on the authenticity of the emails that carried cryptographic signatures, though there was variation in which emails Green and Williams were able to verify using their forensic tools. The most reliable cryptographic signatures, they said, came from leading technology companies such as Google, which alone accounted for more than 16,000 of the verified emails.
Neither expert reported finding evidence that individual emails or other files had been manipulated by hackers, but neither was able to rule out that possibility.
They also noted that while cryptographic signatures can verify that an email was sent from a particular account, they cannot verify who controlled that account when the email was sent. Hackers sometimes create fake email accounts or gain access to authentic ones as part of disinformation campaigns — a possibility that cannot be ruled out with regard to the email files on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Williams wrote in his technical report that timestamps on a sampling of documents and operating system indexes he examined were consistent with each other, suggesting the authenticity of at least some of the files that lacked cryptographic signatures. But he and Green agreed that sophisticated hackers could have altered the drive’s contents, including timestamps, in a way difficult and perhaps impossible to detect through forensic examination alone.
Analysis was made significantly more difficult, both experts said, because the data had been handled repeatedly in a manner that deleted logs and other files that forensic experts use to establish a file’s authenticity.
“No evidence of tampering was discovered, but as noted throughout, several key pieces of evidence useful in discovering tampering were not available,” Williams’ reports concluded.
Among the emails verified by forensic analysis were a batch of messages from Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company for which Hunter Biden was a board member. (Obtained by The Washington Post)
Some contents matched data from other sources
Out of the drive’s 217 gigabytes of data, there are 4.3 gigabytes of email files.
Green, working with two graduate students, verified 1,828 emails — less than 2 percent of the total — but struggled with others that had technical flaws they could not resolve. He said the most common problems resulted from alterations caused when the MacBook’s mail-handling software downloaded files with attachments in a way that made cryptographic verification of those messages difficult.
Williams verified a larger number of emails, nearly 22,000 in total — which included almost all of the ones Green had verified — after overcoming that problem by using software to correct alterations in the files. But he encountered obstacles with other emails that were only partially downloaded onto the drive, creating incomplete files that could not be verified cryptographically. Most of these files, he said, were probably just snippets of emails that would allow a user to preview the messages without downloading the full files.
The cryptographic verification techniques worked only on incoming emails, not ones that were sent from Hunter Biden’s accounts. Because the purpose of these signatures is to verify the identity of senders, only the records of an incoming email would contain signatures.
In addition to emails, the drive includes hundreds of thousands of other documents, including more than 36,000 images, more than 36,000 iMessage chat entries, more than 5,000 text files and more than 1,300 videos, according to tallies made by Williams, who, like Green, could not definitively verify any of them. In a small number of cases, The Post was able to establish the veracity of some of these files, such as bank documents, by obtaining copies from other sources.
Among the emails verified by Williams and Green were a batch of messages from Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company for which Hunter Biden was a board member. Most of these emails were reminders of board meetings, confirmation of travel, or notifications that his monthly payment had been sent.
Both Green and Williams said the Burisma emails they verified cryptographically were likely to be authentic, but they cautioned that if the company was hacked, it would be possible to fake cryptographic signatures — something much less likely to happen with Google.
One of the verified emails from Pozharskyi, which was the focus of one of the initial stories from the New York Post, was written on April 17, 2015. It thanked Hunter Biden “for inviting me to DC and giving me an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.”
When the email first emerged in the New York Post about three weeks before the 2020 election, the Biden campaign and Hunter Biden’s lawyer both denied that Pozharskyi had ever met with Joe Biden. Asked recently about the email, the White House pointed to the previous denials, which The Post has examined in detail.
Some other emails on the drive that have been the foundation for previous news reports could not be verified because the messages lacked verifiable cryptographic signatures. One such email was widely described as referring to Joe Biden as “the big guy” and suggesting the elder Biden would receive a cut of a business deal. One of the recipients of that email has vouched publicly for its authenticity but President Biden has denied being involved in any business arrangements.
New folders created on drive given to The Post
The Post spent months reviewing the data on the portable drive in its entirety and seeking forensic verification of its contents. It made two new copies of the portable drive provided by Maxey so the experts could analyze them.
Green examined the drive first and, based on his initial findings, urged The Post to seek a second review to verify more of its contents. The Post then hired Williams, who has conducted forensic analyses for Fortune 100 financial services companies and also did similar work during his time at the NSA. He is now on the faculty of the information security research group IANS.
Many questions about the drive remained impossible to answer definitively. That includes what happened during a nearly year-long period of apparent inactivity from September 2019 — about five months after Hunter Biden reportedly dropped off the laptop at the repair shop — until August 2020, when the presidential campaign involving his father was entering its final months.
Soon after that period of inactivity — and months after the laptop itself had been taken into FBI custody — three new folders were created on the drive. Dated Sept. 1 and 2, 2020, they bore the names “Desktop Documents,” “Biden Burisma” and “Hunter. Burisma Documents.”
Williams also found records on the drive that indicated someone may have accessed the drive from a West Coast location in October 2020, little more than a week after the first New York Post stories on Hunter Biden’s laptop appeared.
Over the next few days, somebody created three additional folders on the drive, titled, “Mail,” “Salacious Pics Package” and “Big Guy File” — an apparent reference to Joe Biden.
Attempts to verify the emails relied mainly on a technology called DKIM, which stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail. DKIM is a cryptographic technology used by Google and some other email services to verify the identities of senders.
Williams also used a second cryptographic technology called ARC, for Authenticated Received Chain. It was created to make cryptographic verification possible even when email moves through multiple services.
Williams said ARC, though slightly less reliable than DKIM, was a worthy alternative for emails for which DKIM verification was not possible. Overall, his list of emails included 16,425 verified by DKIM and 5,521 verified by ARC.
There are limits to cryptographic verification of emails, both experts said. Not all email services provide cryptographic signatures, and among those that did, not all did so with the care of Google, which is regarded within the technology industry as having strong security protocols. Green and Williams said the only realistic way to fake Google’s DKIM signatures would be to hack the company’s own secure servers and steal private cryptographic keys — something they considered unlikely even for nation-state-level hackers using the most advanced techniques.
Gorbachev mourned as rare world leader but some still bitter
BERLIN (AP) — Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union and for many the man who restored democracy to then-communist-ruled European nations, was saluted Wednesday as a rare leader who changed the world and for a time brought hope for peace among the superpowers.
But the man who died Tuesday at 91 was also reviled by many countrymen who blamed him for the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union and its diminution as a superpower. The Russian nation that emerged from its Soviet past shrank in size as 15 new nations were created.
The loss of pride and power also eventually led to the rise of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has tried for the past quarter-century to restore Russia to its former glory and beyond.
U.S. President Joe Biden praised Gorbachev for being open to democratic changes. Gorbachev won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Cold War.
“After decades of brutal political repression, he embraced democratic reforms. He believed in glasnost and perestroika – openness and restructuring – not as mere slogans, but as the path forward for the people of the Soviet Union after so many years of isolation and deprivation,” Biden said.
Biden added that “these were the acts of a rare leader – one with the imagination to see that a different future was possible and the courage to risk his entire career to achieve it. The result was a safer world and greater freedom for millions of people.”
Although Gorbachev was widely feted abroad, he was a pariah at home. Putin acknowledged that Gorbachev had “a deep impact on the course of world history.”
“He led the country during difficult and dramatic changes, amid large-scale foreign policy, economic and social challenges,” Putin said in a short telegram sending his condolences to Gorbachev’s family.
Gorbachev “realized that reforms were necessary and tried to offer his solutions to the acute problems,” Putin said.
Reactions from Russian officials and lawmakers were mixed. They applauded Gorbachev for his part in ending the Cold War but censured him for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Oleg Morozov, a member of the main Kremlin party, United Russia, said Gorbachev should have “repented” for mistakes that went against Russia’s interests.
“He was a willing or an unwilling co-author of the unfair world order that our soldiers are now fighting on the battlefield,” Morozov said, in a reference to Russia’s current war in Ukraine.
Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland’s pro-democracy Solidarity movement in the 1980s and the country’s president from 1990-1995, had a more nuanced view of Gorbachev. He said he “admired, even liked him, but did not understand (him).”
“He believed to the last that communism could be reformed, but I, on the contrary, did not believe it was possible,” Walesa told the Wirtualna Polska media.
Walesa added: “He knew that the Soviet Union could not last much longer and he was doing everything he could to prevent the world from bringing Russia to account for communism. And he was successful there.”
World leaders paid tribute to a man some described as a great and brave leader.
In Germany, where Gorbachev is considered one of the fathers of the country’s reunification in 1990 and is popularly referred to as “Gorbi,” former Chancellor Angela Merkel saluted him as “a unique world politician.”
“Gorbachev wrote world history. He exemplified how a single statesman can change the world for the better,” she said, recalling how she had feared that Russian tanks might roll into East Germany, where she lived, as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
Current German Chancellor Olaf Scholz praised Gorbachev for paving the way for his country’s reunification, though he also pointed out that Gorbachev died at a time when many of his achievements have been destroyed.
“We know that he died at a time when not only democracy in Russia has failed — there is no other way to describe the current situation there — but also Russia and Russian President Putin are drawing new trenches in Europe and have started a horrible war against a neighboring country, Ukraine,” Scholz said.
Outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that “in a time of Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, (Gorbachev’s) tireless commitment to opening up Soviet society remains an example to us all.”
French President Emmanuel Macron described Gorbachev as “a man of peace whose choices opened up a path of liberty for Russians. His commitment to peace in Europe changed our shared history.”
Others in Europe challenged the positive recollections of Gorbachev.
Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s top diplomat who is also the son of Vytautas Landsbergis, who led Lithuania’s independence movement in the early 1990s, tweeted that “Lithuanians will not glorify Gorbachev.”
Memories are still fresh in the Baltic country of Jan. 13, 1991, when hundreds of Lithuanians headed to the television tower in Vilnius to oppose Soviet troops deployed to crush the country’s bid to restore its independence. In the clashes that followed, 14 civilians were killed and more than 140 others were injured. Moscow recognized Lithuania’s independence in August that year.
“We will never forget the simple fact that his army murdered civilians to prolong his regime’s occupation of our country. His soldiers fired on our unarmed protesters and crushed them under his tanks. That is how we will remember him,” Landsbergis wrote.
But another Baltic leader, Latvian President Egils Levits, noted that Gorbachev’s policies enabled the eventual independence of the three Baltic countries.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called Gorbachev “a one-of-a kind statesman who changed the course of history” and “did more than any other individual to bring about the peaceful end of the Cold War.”
“The world has lost a towering global leader, committed multilateralist, and tireless advocate for peace,” the U.N. chief said.
Gorbachev’s contemporaries pointed to the end of the Cold War as one of his achievements.
“Mikhail Gorbachev played a critical role in the peaceful end to the Cold War. At home, he was a figure of historical importance, but not in the way he intended,” said Robert M. Gates, who headed the CIA from 1991 to 1993 and later became U.S. defense secretary.
Calling Gorbachev “a brave leader and great statesman,” Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said the last Soviet leader “opened the gates of the Soviet Union for the great wave of Jewish immigration to Israel in the 1990s.”
In Asia, Gorbachev was remembered as a leader with the courage to bring change.
China recognized Gorbachev’s role in healing relations between Moscow and Beijing. Gorbachev had been an inspiration to reformist thinkers in China during the late 1980s, and his visit to Beijing in 1989 marked a watershed in relations between the sides.
“Mr. Gorbachev made positive contributions to the normalization of relations between China and the Soviet Union. We mourn his passing and extend our sympathies to his family,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said.
However, China’s Communist Party leaders also regard Gorbachev’s liberal approach as a fatal display of weakness and his moves toward peaceful coexistence with the West as a form of surrender.
