Thread by @mattsheffield

This interview Rudy Giuliani did with a conservative Daily Caller reporter about his alleged Hunter Biden story is so shady. Let me count the ways. 1) He says the Mac repair store owner kept "forged copies" of the computer hard drive

2) He gets visibly agitated when the reporter, Christian Datoc, asks him about metadata. "This is pettifogging nonsense" Giuliani replies. He then accuses Datoc of acting like one of those evil libruls:

3) Giuliani then very clearly demonstrates that he does not know that making an imaged copy of a disk would not modify its files. He claims the metadata in NY Post stories is screwy because of image copying, not because the Post generated the images it presented

"The FBI has the original" he says, referring to the alleged disk. Giuliani seems to have no idea that an image copy would have the exact same metadata and filesystem structure as the original. This is an embarrassing error. Datoc tries to correct him but Rudy gets angry.

4) Giuliani says the chain of custody of the alleged Hunter Biden data is irrelevant: "Usually the way it works when you have a massive crime revealed like this, you cover then crime, then you figure out how did the investigator get it."

That is not how digital forensics works. You must investigate provenance and also the data because if the chain of custody has problems or is unknown, then validation may be impossible.

5) Rudy then says he's certain that Hunter is the owner of the drive because Hunter's attorney called John Paul Mac Isaac (the repair guy) and demanded the drive back. But he provides no evidence of this supposed call. A real lawyer would file a written request.

Maybe Hunter Biden's lawyer is a half-assed incompetent but this does not fit standard attorney m.o. You need written documentation of demand when someone has impounded your client's property.

After saying HB's attorney called to demand the drive back, Giuliani then claims that he has an email proving this. He does not show it to Datoc. I have not found anywhere where Rudy claims to have posted this email. Where is it?

6) There is no discussion of email or text message metadata. Datoc may not have been aware that all text messages and emails can be tested for authenticity if you can get the raw source of each. Rudy's sole evidence of authentication is the content itself.

Why has Giuliani or the Post not provided the raw source of these messages? It is the dog that didn't bark, as Sherlock Holmes has said. Giuliani claims he is withholding the whole shebang to bait Biden into lying.

It probably is the case that there are other allegations that Giuliani will make but there is no excuse for him not to release the complete documentation for the published messages. If the source exists and is legit, it will prove him right. Why won't he release?

Three scenarios seem possible here: 1) A guy who doesn't understand what disk images are is trying to withhold text headers and DKIM/SPF data to lay a trap. 2) He's grossly incompetent and so is everyone affiliated with Rupert Murdoch. 3) There are no headers

The first one seems unlikely. The second could be possible, although why would Murdoch, the owner of Storyful, be so incredibly dumb? The third seems plausible.