An NBC News story about a fake dossier espousing Hunter Biden consipracy theories recently trended on Twitter.
I saw it in “trending” and clicked on it, How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge:
One month before a purported leak of files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, a fake “intelligence” document about him went viral on the right-wing internet, asserting an elaborate conspiracy theory involving former Vice President Joe Biden’s son and business in China.The document, a 64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump, appears to be the work of a fake “intelligence firm” called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents.The author of the document, a self-identified Swiss security analyst named Martin Aspen, is a fabricated identity, according to analysis by disinformation researchers, who also concluded that Aspen’s profile picture was created with an artificial intelligence face generator. The intelligence firm that Aspen lists as his previous employer said that no one by that name had ever worked for the company and that no one by that name lives in Switzerland, according to public records and social media searches.
My first reaction was that I had never heard of the 64-page document, which is strange since I follow these things and it supposedly went viral. I also picked up on the detail that this document was a month before the Hunter Biden documents from the laptop which is what we are all focused on.
Deeper down in the story, if you read that far, NBC News made clear that this dossier has nothing to do with the Hunter Biden laptop story, other than both could hurt Joe Biden:
The document and its spread have become part of a wider effort to smear Hunter Biden and weaken Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, which moved from the fringes of the internet to more mainstream conservative news outlets.An unverified leak of documents — including salacious pictures from what President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and a Delaware Apple repair store owner claimed to be Hunter Biden’s hard drive — were published in the New York Post on Oct. 14. Associates close to Trump, including Giuliani and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, have promised more blockbuster leaks and secrets, which have yet to materialize.The fake intelligence document, however, preceded the leak by months, and it helped lay the groundwork among right-wing media for what would become a failed October surprise: a viral pile-on of conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.
Others who perhaps don’t follow the story closely, or who only read the headline, could reasonably conclude that the documents in question were the laptop documents. And that clearly was NBC News’ purpose — distracting people by focusing on a document no one was talking about and which never, as far as I can tell, actually went viral, in order to create the misimpression that the Hunter Biden laptop and Tony Bobulinski stories were disinformation.
This is how dishonest NBC News is, debunking a non-story to distract from a real story of Biden family influence peddling.
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