JUNK-IES:

But let's look at who was posting those pics in the first place. The third tweet cited in Taibbi's screenshot, the Internet Archive shows, came from an account that features a logo and slogan indicating the user is a member of New Federal State of China. The NFSC is an organization set up in 2020 by Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese mogul, who has aggressively promoted false claims about Covid vaccines and the 2020 election. 

Other social media accounts used by a person with the same user name--a Chinese phrase that means "fitness training"--along with the same avatar, indicate the user is a member of a group of Guo supporters based on Long Island. A person who previously worked with Guo's organization told me this is a man who uses the name Wenyang and regularly works to help Guo put material online. The source did not know the man's real name, but that is normal for Guo backers, who often collaborate online and use nicknames. Wenyang did not respond to messages I sent to his account.

I have previously reported on various messages and recordings detailing what Guo and Bannon and their backers were up to in 2020. One thing this material shows is that in October 2020, Bannon--working with Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump's personal lawyer--arranged for Guo and his followers to spread salacious videos and pictures from Hunter Biden's laptop.

Giuliani has said he got the laptop material from the owner of a Delaware repair shop where Hunter reportedly abandoned it in 2019. Giuliani, after considering various ways to use the material, eventually worked with other Trump backers to seek mainstream media coverage of Hunter's business ventures. Bannon, who was informally advising the Trump campaign, also helped to distribute the sex stuff.

It was natural for Bannon to tap Guo, who has paid Bannon to help him launch Chinese-language media companies. Bannon was even living on Guo's yacht in the summer of 2020 when Bannon was arrested for allegedly defrauding a nonprofit. In October of that year, Bannon instructed employees of his War Room podcast to send Guo backers copies of material from the computer. Vish Burra, then a War Room employee, told me that Bannon put him in charge of that part. "It's your job to get out all the sex pictures," Burra said Bannon told him.

Starting on October 22, 2020, Guo then personally managed minute details of the distribution of pictures and videos. In audio messages he sent to groups of supporters using WhatsApp, which I obtained, he set up a process in which key backers would post Hunter Biden pictures on his streaming website, GTV--a sort of Chinese-language YouTube knockoff--and others would then amplify them. He decreed that much of the material would first be posted by followers living abroad, to help prevent any lawsuits seeking to block the effort.

"Look at the video copied from Hunter's computer," Guo said in a WhatsApp messages to underlings on October 27. (He spoke in Chinese. The messages have been translated.) In another message, referring to various Hunter videos, Guo ordered: "Post one right now, one every hour from now on...I want everyone to fully promote it."

Publicly, Guo was a harsh critic of the Chinese Communist Party. His attacks on China's leaders have helped him amass a devoted following in the international Chinese diaspora. Thousands of such supporters have arrayed themselves into groups, which Guo calls "farms," that are sort of like fan clubs. Organized on the social media app Discord, they follow his directives and promote various claims he makes. Guo's order to promote the Hunter pics went to the heads of a few dozen of those groups, who then tapped additional supporters to further propagate them.

The picture of Hunter in front of the mirror is one of many similar images contained in a Dropbox file called "Salacious Pics Package_EDITED," which was included in the correspondence from October 2020 that I obtained. (Burra told me he had created this file and sent it Guo's team. Despite the file's name, Burra said he did not edit the material in it.) A Guo assistant sent the file to a group of Guo's followers on October 24. Wenyang, it appears, got the picture soon afterward and tweeted it the same day. Other Guo backers also shared it. Two other tweets in the batch the Biden team flagged--one from a prominent Guo backer--included the same image.

Wenyang, that is, seems to have been a small player --Guo's backers call themselves "ants"--in a large, highly coordinated, international effort to post embarrassing images of Hunter Biden in the hopes it would damage his father's campaign.

And it's worse than that. From the start, Guo and his supporters accompanied the pictures of Hunter Biden with repugnant lies. According to multiple people involved in distributing the material, Guo ordered them to claim that the laptop material included images of Hunter Biden having sex with underage Chinese girls. There is no evidence supporting this allegation against Hunter. Guo also told subordinates to assert that the Chinese government had obtained the material and used it to blackmail both Hunter and Joe Biden. That, too, was made up, people involved said. 

Jack Maxey, at the time a War Room employee who helped Bannon distribute the material to Guo, said that he left a few months later, in part due to his disgust over this effort. He has since attacked Bannon for working with Guo. Maxey is a vocal promotor of laptop material related to Hunter's business entanglements. But he argues that cause was damaged by Guo's involvement. "They injected stuff that was not real," 

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