Like His Father, Hunter Biden Got Forgetful about Details Pertaining to Beau’s Illness
Predictably, after Republican staffers asked the expected questions in Wednesday’s Hunter Biden deposition (and Democratic staffers caught their colleagues leaving out pertinent pages, twice), individual members of Congress launched their gotcha questions, with Matt Gaetz trying to base bribery allegations in the fact that Hunter paid a shared cell phone bill 14 years ago.
There was one interesting gotcha question, though — because it demonstrated how Biden men peg events to things that happened with Beau’s cancer, and as a result get fuzzy about the timeline.
To set up a question about a business deal with a hedgie named Jonathan Li, a staffer asked Hunter to read a passage from his book describing a trip to China where then-Vice President Biden briefly met Li. While reading, Hunter observed that he might have the date of the trip wrong.
Q You can read the next full paragraph.
A Okay. “In 2013 –” I think it was 2014, but I’m not sure, because — I think this is a mistake because I’d learned of Beau’s tumor just months before, it would be 2014, and I went on this trip, I believe, it was in 2014.
“In 2014, Dad asked –” it says, in 2013, but it should say 2014 — “Dad asked my then teenage daughter, Finnegan, to join him on Air Force Two to Japan and then onto Beijing, where he was meeting with President Xi Jinping. Dad often asked his grandkids to accompany him on overseas trips. It was his chance to catch up. I jumped on the plane from Japan to China to spend time with them both. While we were in Beijing, Dad met with one of Devon’s Chinese partners, Jonathan Li, in the lobby of the American delegation’s hotel, just long enough to say hello and shake hands. I was meeting with Li as a courtesy call while I was in the country; the business deal had been signed more than a week earlier. Li and I then headed off for a cup of coffee.”
That was in the first hour.
Two hours later, after Andy Biggs attempted to claim that Devon Archer had testified that Hunter had called his father with Mykola Zlochevsky (Archer testified that he didn’t witness any call), Biggs tried to make a major deal about Hunter’s earlier uncertainty about this date.
Mr. Biggs. Right.
So you also testified that the book — that the book was wrong, your book was wrong, it’s printed with the wrong date. You testified that —
Mr. Lowell. No, no. Actually, it was right.
The Witness. Oh, it was right?
Mr. Biggs. But that’s not what he testified to, Mr. Lowell.
Mr. Lowell. He said he wasn’t sure.
The Witness. I wasn’t sure. I thought because —
Mr. Biggs. No, no. Well, we’ll have the transcript to look back. I mean, you like to rely on the transcript.
Mr. Lowell. Well, luckily we’re still here, so let’s ask the question: When is the date that is in his book in which he’s talking about? It’s either 2013 or 2014.
Is that the one you’re talking about?
Mr. Biggs. Yeah.
Mr. Lowell. Let’s go back to the book.
The Witness. Yeah.
Mr. Lowell. Can we go back to that exhibit?
The Witness. But regardless is this: is that, I’m sorry I missed, in a 270-page book, a typo of — if it is such a typo. I have no idea.
Mr. Lowell. What is the 2013 date?
Mr. Biggs. Unbelievable.
The Witness. How is it unbelievable, Mr. Biggs? I really don’t understand.
Mr. Biggs. Well, I’m not surprised you don’t understand, so —
The Witness. Why are you not surprised? I really — is that —
Mr. Biggs. So here we go. Do you have the book?
Mr. Lowell. Yeah, we do.
Mr. Biggs. Okay. What’s the right year?
Mr. Lowell. “In 2013, Dad asked my then-teenage daughter, Finnegan, to join him on Air Force Two to Japan” —
The Witness. So this isn’t even — we’re not even talking about the same time.
This is the — this is the transcript. I thought that that 2013 — I was confused. I thought that it happened in —
Mr. Biggs. So you’re —
The Witness. — 2014. But —
Mr. Biggs. I don’t want to interrupt you, but I’m going to. You are confused — you were confused earlier today —
The Witness. About your —
Mr. Biggs. — when you testified?
The Witness. By your questioning. You’re telling me — you were just talking about a board meeting with Burisma in Dubai.
Mr. Biggs. Yeah, and then we moved on to this.
The Witness. Oh. We hadn’t even moved on to it yet, though. What’s —
Mr. Biggs. Yeah, we had.
The Witness. — the question?
Mr. Biggs. You said this morning — I want to make this as clear as I possibly can.
This morning, you testified, my understanding, that your book was in error. In fact, I wrote it down when you said that, that the date was in error —
The Witness. No —
Mr. Biggs. — in your published book. Is that — was that wrong?
The Witness. If we — we will, I’m sure, have the transcript in 24 hours. But to clarify, I will make absolutely clear, we were doing questioning here. We were asking other questions related to other dates. There have been many, many dates thrown around today. I think probably a thousand times someone has asked me about a date, time, this, this, and the other.
Mr. Biggs. This was —
The Witness. When I was reading this, it said in 2013, and I said, “Is that right?”
Mr. Biggs. Okay.
The Witness. “I’m not sure if that’s right. I thought the trip to China occurred in 2014.”
Mr. Biggs. All right.
The Witness. I’m still not certain of exactly the date that it happened. But it’s not a —
Mr. Biggs. You don’t view it as materiality. I get it.
The Witness. Whether it happened in 2013 or 2014?
Mr. Biggs. So I want to — I want to ask you —
The Witness. Do you view that as materiality?
Mr. Lowell. I’m sorry. Now we have to tell you that you’re over your hour, and I’ve given you 2 or 3 more minutes. And I’m just — according to Ms. Greene, rules matter.
Mr. Biggs. Thank you.
Mr. Lowell. We’re done.
They weren’t done, by the way. Biggs moved on to attempting to claim Hunter had vouched for Tony Bobulinski’s pictures of Blackberry messages, even though Abbe Lowell had specifically said they did not vouch for those messages. There was a lot of claiming that up was down from the members of Congress.
But the exchange about dates is instructive. Biggs thought he had scored a great big gotcha. He was (and probably will) attempt to use Hunter’s uncertainty about the date of the trip to China — uncertainty that stemmed from Hunter trying to map it onto Beau’s illness — to claim that Hunter’s certainty that he did not call his father on Zlochevsky’s behalf is unreliable because he couldn’t remember the date of the trip to China.
Biggs was attempting to use Hunter’s uncertainty about something that’s not material as a way to claim his certainty about something material cannot be trusted.
It looks pretty ridiculous on paper, doesn’t it?
But it sounds remarkably similar to what Robert Hur did with Hunter’s father — using Joe Biden’s uncertainty about the timing of Beau’s death to suggest Joe’s certainty that a reference to a 40-page handwritten memo could not be trusted, and that instead one must infer something more nefarious.
Of course, when Hur pulled this ploy, he concluded that Joe’s uncertainty about the date reflected not the stress of dealing with October 7 nor the muddiness created by pegging life events to grief, but that Joe is an old geezer who should not be President.
It turns out that both Biden men — 81-year old Joe and 54-year old Hunter — got similarly uncertain when they tied life events to Beau’s illness in a deposition.
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Thank you.
Hunter has my respect for his staying sober when the piling on gets to where anyone would see it as exceptionally stressful. The hope is he makes it through and stays sober into later years.
If asked about a visit to Seattle, a particular event which I largely remember, I could not say 2013 or 2014. We’re ten years later and big things happened from a decade ago to here, in my personal life. I believe that’s normal memory both of the Bidens displayed. What year was it that the elder Bush President died? Do you remember?
My family very much enjoys this game too. Whenever we are watching a crime story and a detective asks a question about where were you on the morning of such and such date. We all start throwing out questions to each other, ” Where we’re you on the morning of such and such date?” Answering in jest and not under the pressure of a court setting this is extremely difficult. Our brains don’t store memories linearly. It’s like telling our brains, who have stored all memories by the color of the book, to recover a book by its publishing date rather than the color of the binder.
Try doing this with your family. It is ridiculously hard to remember dates and times this way. Almost all of our answers require questions back, “Is that date a weekday, work week? What activities were the kids doing? Did something significant happen around that time?”
Most of the time we can’t figure out our alibis without looking at calendars and spending serious time retracing memorable events. I am sure there are people out there with perfect eidetic memories. But based on my experience, it is really really hard to remember dates and times without other reference milestones. Even then, with 6 people in the room we could argue for 30 minutes on whether or not grandma passed in June 2014 or 2013. All of us have a different reference point for her death and the year is not the way we get there. It’s based on a pregnancy that year and wedding the following. But again that’s with 6 people in the room brainstorming on where we were, when.
Aside: I read through the transcript and I found Hunter’s response to Matt Gaetz pure gold.
Totally agree.
Starting from 2010 till 2017 I endured 4 deaths of my closest family and friends including my husband who died in a house fire visiting his parents, with a really traumatic bout of cancer in 2014.
My memories of those seven years are a total jumble and I still get dates wrong about my treatment and even thought for awhile last year my husband died in 2014 and my cancer was in 2013.
Not only do we not remember events by dates but in relation to other life events, trauma seriously confounds our memory.
There are three weeks where all I remember is the death of my grandmother. it was Nov 1981, but…. (She was 97.)
They also don’t understand how our brains store and retrieve memories. A part of our brain stores images, sounds and any other of our senses in one part. Another part stores the abstract information, names, dates, anything not organic in nature. When something is retrieved that involves both, they are linked forming a complete memory. Sometimes, like if under stress, the two don’t combine. With such a traumatic event, both men (if not the whole family) could have avoided reliving that period and repetition can strengthen the link. Repetition would also explain the fuzziness surrounding a dinner on a particular date.
Further to your point about trauma, depression interferes with a brain’s ability to form memories. My personal experience is that my generally good memory for people and events is really quite poor around the times I’ve been clinically depressed.
The death, especially an untimely death, of a close relative very often causes a reactive depression which has all the symptoms of depressive illness without the endogenous cause. Expecting clarity of recall from people who have been through a traumatic or depressive episode is unreasonable. Put another way, it is completely normal for people in such circumstances to have unreliable memories. (Yet another reason Hur’s commentary on Biden was bunk.)
Lowell: “according to Ms. Greene, rules matter.”
Yes…lol!
References an earlier moment, when Republicans tried to say Democrats could only use one staffer to ask questions, not two, per the rules for hearings. The Dems said, this is a combined hearing, two committees, so, two staffers. More BS kiddie moves to try and throw staffers off their stride.
The absolute worst was Gaetz, who himself broke a rule by not showing Lowell and Biden in advance (per their agreement) material which he wanted to present, and who was rude and insulting throughout.
In the middle of that exchange [which begins at pdf63/229]:
The total lack of empathy in Trump supporters really bothers me. It’s pervasive. And too common that when confronted with the Biden’s (Joe and Hunter) significant losses, they respond with vitriol and cruelty. At least in my experience.
I once worked with a man who lost his daughter. I had worked with his entire family for years. (5 or so) Roughly 3 months after losing his daughter, on his way to see me, he got lost. Literally was 20 min late because he could not find his way.
People truly do not understand the depth of grief and its consequences in regard to child, parent loss for a child, and sibling loss as a child. Child and parent loss being particularly devastating. It literally changes the brain. (When I share of past clients the details are changed so that the stories are not recognizable.)
At least the Trump supporters I have met have been so removed from empathy that they were unable to express anything but contempt. It truly speaks to the underlying narcissism which is characterized by an inability to be empathetic or in touch with vulnerable emotions.
Thank you PeaceRme.
Well said.
I’m paraphrasing Rob Reiner, but all you need is “Do unto others…”
Reiner may have been paraphrasing Hillel.
The erosion of normal human empathy is a foundational element of fascist movements.
Trump, like most autocrats, pushes this instinctively and by imitation. The rest of us need to understand how it works. Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen and Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny are the two indispensable books for this moment–both, by the way, compulsively readable.
Buy them now. Read them now. Reread them now.
Totally agree with book choices above.I truly think the research shows that these trump supporters lack empathy for all. No empathy for his wife. His children. His ex. They truly struggle to FEEL. This is a signature symptom for narcissism. Not all Trump supporters are narcissists, but they ARE more authoritarian, and truly struggle to feel their emotions. They feel FOR him like an adult child of a narcissist. Having some characteristics not all. They believe in using power and control on themselves and others. They think it is the right way and find being wrong painful. So painful they shift to blame. It’s mental illness that makes them susceptible to the cult. Including racism. All isms are part of the power and control paradigm. These isms help define who receives power and control.
Yes. They are “narcissist-enablers”. There’s actually a term for this in the narc-aware community: “flying monkeys”.
This. It’s such a glaring issue it pervades every single thing they do. I saw some clickbait about how MAGA can’t understand why Democrats wouldn’t jump at the chance to give Joe Biden so-called “presidential immunity”. Because we’re not shameless Republicans, that’s why.
But about grief and loss, absolutely. I lost my mother in April, and I’m just now pulling out of the emotional swan dive…
I’m so sorry for your loss (and everyone else’s here) -my 84-year-old mother is currently on home hospice care and doctors give her 2 weeks to 2 months left: She was diagnosed with a rare lung cancer on Christmas Eve and I live 3000 miles away. I’ve flown back twice from LA and figure I’ll fly there again at least 2 more times….
My sense of what’s going on is that this is a bit more complicated than it looks. Empathy seems very weak in Trump, to be sure.
I would expect that most rank-and-file Republicans have a share of empathy like everybody else.
AND, they carry a sense that that very empathy makes them weak. They have probably received this message from multiple sources. They also see themselves losing the culture wars, which they understand to be “losing America”. (This is a misconception, by the way. We agree on way more stuff than we disagree on.)
So they lack of empathy with “more powerful”. And they feel they need to be at their most powerful, so you see them acting out what seems the most powerful behavior they have observed.
And by the way, this comment represents, in part, me trying to preserve my own sense of empathy.
They retain empathy for those like themselves, but MAGA/RW messaging is all about breaking down their normal empathy for those who might be categorized as “other.” Whether it’s immigrants “infesting” the border, therefore linguistically figured as insects, or Democrats described as “vermin,” the message is that political opponents are not human.
If they aren’t human, it’s easier not to feel for them as if they were. Listen to how Trump supporters talk about what “we” (they) “need” now: the very strongman they themselves might have rejected a decade ago. Especially if he’d looked like Barack Obama.
In the big picture, that’s what Trump’s birtherism was about — laying the groundwork to delegitimize by othering democratically-elected POTUS candidates in favor of a white supremacist strongman.
I’m reminded of the last time I saw my mother when she was in hospice care. I had rented a car and after leaving her drove to the airport, apparently bought gas and returned the car. The next day and every day since then I had zero recall of any of it. When my credit card bill came I had to look and see if I’d been charged for not filling up the gas tank on the car. I wasn’t so I guess it was a routine enough thing that I did it on autopilot.
thank you, peaceRme
your comments are invariably insightful.
It’s common for traumatic personal events ( family deaths are right up there ) to screw with your sense of time.
Many people track time based on whether something happened before or after a traumatic public event: JFK or MLK’s assassinations, toppling of the twin towers. Many more track events based on whether they happened before or after a personal trauma, especially death of a loved one. Trauma also makes people erase surrounding events, because they remind them of the traumatic one.
Remembering events I can do well. But keeping track of events in a mental timeline is hard for me. I must work to not misremember my youngest daughters birth year. And to have to do that under predatory questioning!? I complement Hunter for doing as well as he does. And if the news is accurate, giving some zingers back.
Dates are a purely artificial overlay on our sense of the past and are almost completely irrelevant to it. They are mostly used to help organize the near future. So it’s no wonder we have to work hard to match a date to an event in the past and usually can’t.
UGGG! Reading this transcript is truly infuriating,
interspersed with some lol moments of schadenfreude.
[Hunter and Lowell make a great team,
and the Dem members and staff are a great supporting cast]
I can only get through a few pages at a time before
I have to get up and do some physical activity
[but I’m not yet reduced to cleaning the house.]
No Republican has ever lost someone they care about.
For anyone who doesn’t get it already, I’m speaking to the sociopathy here… the ugliness is incredible.
This is sport for them. They revel trophy hunting with canned animals.
‘Discontinued Barbie.’ Love it!
Brutally unfair spinners – they can sleep at night.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-allegedly-paid-5-million-by-burisma-executive
And as to empathy, Rudy – he’s fallen into his bad times and is no longer young to recover. I can empathize while clearly seeing he did himself in.
Trump, clearing the square so he could wave a Bible, who can empathize with that? A crude pretender.
There are people for whom Michael Douglas as Gordon Gecko giving the “Greed is good” film speech fail to see it as parody.
“ They revel trophy hunting with canned animals.”
That’s because the meanies killed all the wild ones…
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At page 70, Raskin brings up the subject of Biden’s struggle with addiction, and says:
BIDEN [emphasis added]:
My republican husband lost his mother a few years ago & acted as if nothing happened & never speaks of her. But his OCD has seriously kicked in since that time which makes me think maybe that’s why republicans can be so kinky. What they stuff down comes out as weirdness.
Cognitive dissonance manifests in many ways…but it ALWAYS manifests
Always brings up the question as to whether those that have no empathy are drawn to a party such as the Republicans (Nazis), or joining such a party will destroy any innate empathy.
As if the Gaetz Crime Family originally from North Dakota has any credibility at all. Don and Matt Gaetz, even North Dakotans had enough of them. Don Gaetz is Papa Cockroach.
Two gaining prior comments, Greene and Gaetz. They went on tour together, so while making no effort to find a YouTube of it, I think of George Burns and Gracie Allen, who had talent.
Well, are you not the cute new “legal expert”? Do you even have a license? I guess this is what suffices under the reign of Rayne. Tell me, how many cases have YOU actually tried to a jury?
Which comment are you responding to? Maybe it was moderated away?
That of “Error Prone”.
Well, the old bmaz is back. I was hoping for some more educated comments rather than personal attacks.
(Please delete this comment if I’m just feeding it.)
You are. I have been fully “educated” for decades. But, hey, thanks.
hey bmaz
so. I’d been coming here but never left a comment. The first time I did? I almost threw up w/fear of being told I was stupid (history). You replied to me w/kindness that made me cry. You said like you needed people like me (PARAPHRASING, going by my feeling memory) and it made me feel so good. I had an instant connection w/you that I cherished. I followed you on Twitter. I hung on your words…the funny time when your hand held vacuum arrived and you were so excited about it…
I, I am worried about you. I know these people have known you for a long time but there is a bitterness tht is overwhelming and really shocking.
I think it might be easier for someone who only knows you a little to ask, is there maybe a medical problem?
I, I just felt it important to tell you this and that I’m sad. thanks.
bmaz welcomed me in much the same way. And it had a similar effect; I had long been wary of commenting, but his valuing my contribution made me feel included.
I am sad too.
Don’t be sad. I have had dedication and joy with this forum before being stabbed in the back. Two out of three ain’t bad.
It is a requirement that litigators and defense attorneys be pugnacious. This oftentimes overflows into superciliousness and high self-regard. Additionally, oftentimes people with these latter characteristics are neither of these roles, and are just performative dweebs. I am not necessarily casting aspersions at any particular persons.
Your last line is…a terminological inexactitude.
In 1998, 4 months pregnant with my 3rd child, I entered the livingroom of my 34-year-old sister who had been killed a few days before in a car crash. She was my last living family member — my mom dying 17 months earlier at age 54, and my father, 17 years earlier, at age 44. ‘Orphaned’ at age 32, my feet were grounded, yet tingling, and head was spinning. I was in a perpetual fog of lightheadedness.
Having never visited her new Pearl Harbor home, the ceaseless clutter of boxes upon boxes, some opened, some not — of newly-arrived commemorative Princess Diana memorabilia — caused my eyes to be drawn to the sparse, less-cluttered coffee table. Most prominent were its centerpieces — two over-sized coffee-table-books. One was a newly-released Princess Diana tribute published a few months after her life-ending, tragic car crash; the second, a People-magazine-type retrospective book about Celebrity’s lives (James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, etc.) entitled “Died too Young.”
An irony too astounding for words. An anchor in time.
Yesterday, as Siri was reading the frustrating Hunter Biden deposition to me, I was doing some much-needed, long-neglected, yoga inversions. After a 2nd time falling to the floor due to being startled — shocked by hearing Rep. Matt Gaetz use the term ‘bribe’ to describe Hunter covering a later-reimbursed expense for his out-of-town father — I, at first, thought I might be hearing incorrectly due to unrecognized light-headedness. Rewinding a few phrases back to replay, I realized I was hearing correctly. I was simply being given another generous anchor to explain the world I was experiencing in my earbuds with feet in the air, tingling, and head below heart.
This anchor was delivered with no less irony.
Just as headstands and other inversions should be only a very small portion of a robust, feet-or-tailbone-grounded yoga practice, the world I was visiting through 229 double-spaced typed pages, but absolutely not choosing to stay in permanently, was one in which
Up is Down, and DOWN is UP.
Like Harpie, be good to yourself. Don’t stay there long.
Maybe don’t do your yoga practice with earbuds? Just a suggestion, tje. I greatly value your comments and don’t want you to crack your skull. Yoga has kept me sane for 37 years; I couldn’t imagine life without it. From one yoga person to another, stay safe.
Roberta Kaplan: When were you married to Marla?
World’s Best Memory: Um. (Long pause.) I could get that for you later.
Marla? You mean that woman I raped?
Rep. Eric Swalwell had an exchange with Hunter Biden. Brilliant in my book.
Eric Swalwell Expertly Roasts Donald Trump In Inquiry Exchange With Hunter Biden
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/eric-swalwell-donald-trump-hunter-biden_n_65e1b2a7e4b013678e14da72
Au contraire, I did not enjoy Swalwell’s snark. He comes across to me as a smart-ass, not substantive.
Things are really getting heated by the end of the third hour of the deposition. [p112]
I read the whole transcript. Matt Gaetz did not get his “gotcha” moments. He did get slapped down a few times.
Republicans tried to get erroneous statements in as if they were questions. And caught at it.
Hunter unequivocally denied that his father had anything to do with his businesses or bribery or fraud. Republicans had nothing to prove any innuendo or claim.
The whole tone of Gaetz’s questions was just mean, and (if a transcript can give such an impression) fratboy sneering.
To quote my sensei, Baguzubanī, “What a maroon!”
sksksksks took me a minute to get a handle on why your sensei’s lesson sounded so familiar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSZ1h-bydS4
IF Gaetz is a maroon, he is a damn MALICE-filled, slimy one.
[Continuing directly]:
WHERE do these “documents” come from?
WHO provides them to GAETZ, et al?
Are “STAFFERS” involved?
Does Joel VALDEZ still work for GAETZ?
https://www.emptywheel.net/2021/01/28/tunnels-and-trump-the-missing-details-in-the-oath-keeper-conspiracy/#comment-880434
Does Vish BURRA work for either of the committees?
https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/11/28/abbe-lowell-calls-james-comers-bluff/#comment-1026277
WHO are [Redacted]?
Here’s a post where Marcy wrote about Burra:
Hunter Biden Gets a Step Closer to Vindicating Twitter’s Takedown Decision https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/12/01/hunter-biden-gets-a-step-closer-to-vindicating-twitters-takedown-decision/
Yowch! This segment, whew!
Lol. “whew”!!
Next page:
Gaetz is an idiot IMO. How this relates to an impeachment of a President is beyond me. But it did, however, allow some push back from Hunter.
“Mr. Gaetz. Did you ever drop a laptop off at a repair shop?
The Witness. I dropped a laptop off at the Apple repair shop that was literally three blocks from my office in Washington, D.C. If I was ever going to repair one, I would have walked up the street and dropped it there.
Mr. Gaetz. Did you ever drop off a laptop in Delaware?
The Witness. The Apple store in Georgetown.
Mr. Gaetz. Yeah. My question is about Delaware. Did you ever drop off a laptop in Delaware?
The Witness. The largest Apple store in America is the — the highest grossing and largest Apple store in America is at the Christiana Mall. If I was going to drop off a laptop — I don’t ever remember doing that, but if I was going to drop off a laptop, I would have gone to the Apple store, which was minutes from my parents’ home there.
Mr. Gaetz. Do you recall ever leaving a laptop at a repair shop?
The Witness. I do not.”
And immediately after that exchange, GAETZ introduces another document. This is how Lowell describes it:
GAETZ reads the alleged text and asks Biden if he sent it.
Biden responds:
And right after Biden answers the above question, Gaetz says it sounds like Biden does remember sending the message
[harpie: WHAT?!?]
They continue on about this alleged 2019 text message:
The alleged text says NOTHING about any “corrupt activites”.
The alleged text uses the phrase “screwed up so bad”.
It looks like GAETZ has a history with
[misrepresenting?] XRVision.
I’ll continue this below.
Based on your additional eye-opening posts below, harpie, I’m betting Lowell knew exactly who and what XRvision was, and found that reference worth highlighting in his pseudo-objection to the document.
harpie, I decided not to read the transcript, thinking I wouldn’t miss much. We had a shocking death in the family a month ago just as I embarked for the first time on the process of buying a home, so I figured I didn’t have time.
You’ve shown how wrong I was with each of these nuggets. “Boring”? NO. None of this is boring. Enraging, thrilling (the answers), potentially a script for an off-Broadway play…
As ever, thank you, harpie.
I am SO sorry for your loss, Ginevra.
Sending Hugs to you.
My best friend died of cancer a little over 10 years ago. We talked about everything and were each other’s emotional support, her death was very traumatic for me. Yet I cannot remember what kind of cancer stole her life. The GQP are insufferable idiots.
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I can easily remember a new debit card number after a few days, but I have a mental block about years. For example, my ex was born in 1962 and my fiancé was born in 1983, but I always mess up and get my ex’s birth year as 1963 and my fiancé’s as 1982. I can’t remember the year my dad died—only his age. So I always have to figure it out by working backwards from my age because he was 17 when I was born. I can never remember the exact years of surgical procedures or when I started or left jobs. I sometimes forget the year my oldest child was born because I have nothing to anchor it to (my other kids were two years apart, so if I remember one, I know the other). I don’t think it’s at all unusual not to remember specific years, especially as we accumulate life experience, because there’s just more and more to remember. It’s a lot easier to remember events than dates.
Memory’s weird at times. I can remember the year my Dad was born but not the year of his death. But I can remember that he was a week shy of his 83rd birthday when he died, so I can work the year out from that.
I’ll admit that I am cursed with the Y chromosome. It apparently manifests itself with the inability to recall the exact date that we went to see a movie or what day of the week a pizza was delivered. I also am seemingly unable to distinguish between 20 shades of mauve (whatever that is) or properly interpret other humans (mainly XX) emotions.
Not sure why they continue to produce us!
Matt Gaetz’s antifa-detecting facial recognition story is complete nonsense
The company [XRVision] says the photo showed neo-Nazis and a QAnon figure https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/7/22218601/matt-gaetz-antifa-capitol-hill-riot-xrvision-facial-recognition-washington-times-story-false [] Adi Robertson Jan 7, 2021, 1:05 PM EST
In a speech during the process of certifying President-elect Joe Biden, [> https[colon] //www [dot] youtube.com/watch?v=jQ0ok4iJ25s&t=7859s]
Gaetz claimed there was “some pretty compelling evidence from a facial recognition company” that some Capitol rioters were actually “members of the violent terrorist group antifa.” […]
Gaetz attributed this claim to a short Washington Times article published yesterday. That article, in turn, cited a “retired military officer.” The officer asserted that a company called XRVision “used its software to do facial recognition of protesters and matched two Philadelphia antifa members to two men inside the Senate.” The Times said it had been given a copy of the photo match, but it didn’t publish the picture. […]
I wonder if Gaetz or one of his family members benefits from promotion of a facial recognition system. As if facial recognition systems have been proven uniformly accurate or without built-in biases.
https://instr.iastate.libguides.com/techjustice/facialrec
CTO of XRVision, Jaacov Applebaum denied the claims, and the Times’ article was retracted.
For some reason I’m thinking of the names FLYNN and RAIKLIN.
What cart? What horse? What barn door?
If the Times retracts a story three years later, does a tree rise back up audibly in the forest?
That’s the Washington Times that published the story GAETZ quoted in his 1/7/21 speech.
From the same article:
That link, links the story to TODAY:
Claims Antifa Embedded in Capitol Riots Come From a Deeply Unreliable Facial Recognition Company XRVision also has a track record of spreading conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden https://onezero.medium.com/claims-antifa-embedded-in-capitol-riots-come-from-a-deeply-unreliable-facial-recognition-company-459603c0d073 1/7/21
I don’t have access to this entire story, but I’ll try to find some more info on the history and relationship between this questionable company and Hunter Biden conspiracy theories.