"Insisting that the Hunter Biden laptop is fake is a trap. So is insisting that it’s real."

A WaPo headline that made me laugh. I am a little desperate for laughs, but still. I laughed. This is a column by Thomas Rid, who wrote "Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare" and a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. Excerpt: 

[I]n the likely continued absence of certainty either way, the Biden leaks deserve the full potential-disinformation treatment. This means three concrete things. First, every individual little fact — every email, every text, every photo — must be independently verified when data is surfaced in such a suspicious way, not just one piece of information. Genuine photos, for example, could be there simply to add credibility to forged emails surfaced along with the photos — shielding a few forgeries with genuine content would be a time-tested active measures tactic. 

Second, the absence of a denial by the Biden campaign or Hunter himself should not be treated as a tacit admission of authenticity. Mixing facts with forgeries has another time-tested effect: It sets a trap for the victim. If Hunter or the Biden campaign started selectively denying pieces of the reporting ostensibly from the laptop, they would give oxygen to the operation, extend its life-cycle and get entangled in a losing battle about discussing what’s fact and what’s not....

This second point is a response to something I said yesterday: "If they're not real, Biden would strongly, clearly assert that the emails are fake. What reason could there be to fail to make a clear assertion? I think the answer is that he knows it's an assertion that can be proven false, leaving him plainly exposed as an outrageous liar."

Rid's third point is:  "[W]e must resist the temptation to jump to premature conclusions on 'a Russian plant' without good evidence — 'classic earmarks' are not nearly enough. The Mac Shop story, and even the files, could still be genuine, no matter how unusual the setup sounds.... If we continue to ascribe too much power and influence to shadowy foreign spies, downplay our own agency and blame our domestic political problems on outside interference, then we are not only behaving like the old-school Soviet active measures playbook wants us to behave — worse, we’re becoming a little more like Russia ourselves."