...The finish-line strategy of the Trump campaign has landed, convolutedly, on the narrative that Hunter Biden is an inconvenient son. ...

Joe Biden’s response to all of this has been to love his son.

Freely, unconditionally. “I’m proud of him. I’m proud of my son,” Biden retorted in the first debate, after the president brought up Hunter’s drug use — which both Bidens have admitted and spoken about. “No one said anything he did was wrong in Ukraine,” he said in the second.

In the miasma of one New York Post article about Hunter, alleged text messages presented as part of the incendiary package instead came across as the tender missives of a worried dad. “Good morning my beautiful son,” Joe allegedly wrote Hunter while the latter was checked into a rehab facility. “I miss you and love you.” According to the alleged texts — whose provenance and authenticity have not been verified by the Bidens or by other news organizations — Hunter worried he would be a drag on his father’s campaign. “Only focus is recovery,” Biden reassured him.

WASHINGTON — The Russian government is likely to try to influence the 2020 presidential election, not through the release of stolen emails and other documents but through faked videos, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said on Tuesday.

The United States has become adept at quickly identifying the perpetrators of so-called hacking and dumping operations that result in the release of potentially damaging material, increasing the risk for Moscow that Washington will respond, said Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who leads the committee.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, emails and documents were stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign and then released publicly, influencing the presidential race.

“The Russians may feel if they are too overt about it, the risk of blowback is simply too great,” Mr. Schiff said at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But there are other ways to have potentially even bigger impact than hacking and dumping.”

Mr. Schiff said he was particularly worried about the effect of falsified videos, known as deep fakes. Such videos could be easily introduced into social media, where they will spread rapidly.

A supposed “gotcha” is really a sad, humanizing portrait of a family working through a difficult time.

Last week, the New York Post began publishing reports on a series of photos, emails, and documents allegedly taken from a laptop hard drive that belonged to Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. As it became increasingly clear that the Post was using hacked, unverified information that may have been manipulated by a foreign entity for the purposes of influencing the upcoming presidential election, social media companies started to ban or otherwise attempt to reduce the spread of the Post’s initial story. But the tabloid continued printing information from the hard drive, a copy of which it says it received from disgraced Donald Trump associate and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Given that Giuliani and Steve Bannon were the Post’s two sources of information about the hard drive, the provenance of the Rupert Murdoch­–owned paper’s information is more than a little suspect. Giuliani, for one, has said that there’s a 50-50 chance he worked with a Russian spy to dig up embarrassing material about the Biden family. And the computer repair shop owner who allegedly obtained the hard drive and turned it over to Giuliani’s lawyer doesn’t exactly seem like a trustworthy fellow either. So it is with a massive grain of salt that we consider the contents of the hard drive itself. One of the stories contains an alleged text exchange between Hunter and Joe Biden from two months before Joe announced his presidential campaign. It began with a text Joe sent around 7 a.m. to Hunter, who was residing in a rehab facility. “Good morning my beautiful son,” the text reads. “I miss you and love you. Dad.”

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As a foil to the way Trump conducts his personal relationships, the Biden texts are bracingly tender. The current president appears to favor his children in proportion to their loyalty and political utility. He has made multiple public comments on the sexual desirability of one daughter’s body, and he’s allegedly ridiculed the other’s. Trump rushes to disassociate himself from those who reveal any semblance of vulnerability. Even when his wife and son had COVID-19—when it would have been politically advantageous for him to mention his love for them—his public statements were limited to his own condition. He expressed no concern on their behalf.

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Joe Biden’s palpable love for his son is a reminder of what it could feel like to have a love-capable person leading the country again—a person with the capacity for gentleness as well as rage, someone who does not derive his life’s sole satisfaction from self-aggrandizement and contempt. In a time of concurrent national crises, with hundreds of thousands of Americans grieving friends and family members lost to an ongoing pandemic, it could be nice to have someone at the top who knows the value of voicing and acting on compassion. Joe has suffered a great deal of grief—decades before Beau’s death, he lost his first wife and infant daughter in a 1972 car crash—and his well-known ability to comfort those in mourning has been called his “superpower.” The alleged texts Joe sent, in addition to his public defense of Hunter, flesh out another, related facet of his family life: his role as a father who showers his son with effusive expressions of love.

The New York Post’s front-page article about Hunter Biden on Wednesday was written mostly by a staff reporter who refused to put his name on it, two Post employees said.

Bruce Golding, a reporter at the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid since 2007, did not allow his byline to be used because he had concerns over the article’s credibility, the two Post employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

Coming late in a heated presidential campaign, the article suggested that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had used his position to enrich his son Hunter when he was vice president. The Post based the story on photos and documents the paper said it had taken from the hard drive of a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden.

Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents, said five people with knowledge of the tabloid’s inner workings. Staff members also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing, the people said.

The article named two sources: Stephen K. Bannon, the former adviser to President Trump now facing federal fraud charges, who was said to have made the paper aware of the hard drive last month; and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, who was said to have given the paper “a copy” of the hard drive on Oct. 11.

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. said that the presence of antibodies in President Donald Trump’s blood could be the result of him taking the company’s experimental Covid-19 treatment last week.

Sean Conley, the president’s physician, said in a memo summarizing the president’s health on Wednesday that detectable levels of SARS CoV-2 antibodies had been found in a sample drawn Monday. Conley said antibodies weren’t detected on Thursday.

Regeneron spokeswoman Alexandra Bowie said in an email that given the volume of antibodies delivered in the company’s cocktail therapy, and the timing of the tests, “it is likely that the second test is detecting REGN-COV2 antibodies.”