This seems like a good thread to deal with the origins of disinformation surrounding Hunter Biden.
The "Hunter-China stuff" did not come from Russia - but maybe from a not much better source: a Chinese tycoon and Steve Bannon.
Exclusive: Leaked Messages Reveal the Origins of the Most Vile Hunter Biden Smear
Fugitive Chinese tycoon and Steve Bannon ally Guo Wengui pushed out explicit material—and lies—on the eve of the 2020 election.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... -giuliani/
Late in the 2020 presidential campaign, trailing in the polls, Donald Trump and his allies worked to make a campaign issue out of a trove of files on a laptop that his opponent’s son, Hunter Biden, had apparently abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. The effort to publicize compromising emails, images, and videos from the device involved prominent Trump confidants including Rudy Giuliani and Steven Bannon.
But it also featured an unexpected player: Guo Wengui, a fugitive Chinese tycoon who was working with Bannon to build a small empire of Chinese-language media outlets, nonprofits, and other ventures.
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.)
Guo stage-managed an October 2020 effort to disseminate videos and pictures showing Hunter Biden engaged in sex acts and using drugs. After Giuliani, then President Trump’s personal lawyer, gave him material from Hunter Biden’s laptop, Guo issued detailed instructions to two WhatsApp groups that included dozens of Guo’s supporters. Guo directed these supporters to package, post, and promote hundreds of explicit images and other material about Biden on websites Guo controlled, people involved in the effort said.
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.”
[snip]
Guo, facing Chinese efforts to have him extradited, hired Bannon in 2018. The conservative strategist, who was ousted from a job as a top White House aide in 2017, helped Guo set up nonprofit organizations and media companies, including a website called GNews and GTV, a mostly Chinese-language video streaming site. Guo used this network to advance bizarre, false conspiracy theories about Covid and other topics. (He claimed last year that China is manipulating Covid vaccines in a plot to kill Jews, because “the CCP wants to gain control of all aspects of the world, and the Jews are in their way.”) By the fall of 2020, Guo’s network, though nominally aimed at overthrowing China’s government, was also aggressively supporting Trump’s reelection bid.
[snip]
While he orchestrated the publication of the Hunter Biden material, Guo encouraged supporters to make a false, vile claim. He instructed them to say the laptop included videos that showed Hunter Biden having sex with underage Chinese girls, according to messages he sent and people who communicated with him. Guo also asserted, baselessly, that the Chinese government had created or obtained the compromising videos and images and used them to blackmail the Bidens. Wang Dinggang repeated both of those claims in his September 25 broadcasts. They were later parroted on GNews. No evidence whatsoever supports these allegations. “It was a lie. In all the pictures, we didn’t see any Asians, so how could the CCP have taken all the pictures?” one of the people involved in distributing the material said.
These lies dovetailed with the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that many prominent Democrats are pedophiles and that Trump was working to stop them. And they were echoed by Giuliani, who falsely asserted on Newsmax on October 20, 2020, that Biden’s laptop contained “numerous pictures of underage girls.” These bogus claims took off online, with far-right sites amplifying them. QAnon devotees in the fall of 2020 also pushed the claim that Joe Biden himself was a pedophile, a smear that Giuliani also appeared to bolster on Twitter in the final days of the 2020 campaign.
[snip][end]
