The last time Joe Biden met Donald Trump on a debate stage, he lied that his son Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation, “a Russian plant” and “a bunch of garbage.”
This was two days after Biden’s senior campaign adviser Antony Blinken induced Mike Morell, a former acting CIA director, to write the dishonest “Dirty 51” letter claiming the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian intelligence operation” and that “the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue.”
The Biden campaign was desperately scrambling for a way to respond to The Post’s laptop scoops about Joe meeting Hunter’s foreign clients when he was VP.
So Morell got 50 other former senior intelligence officials, mostly from the CIA, to sign the letter.
“Campaign will be thrilled,” he wrote in emails obtained by congressional investigators.
“We think Trump will attack Biden on the issue at this week’s debate and we want to give the VP a talking point to use in response.”
‘You know my character’
On that debate stage back in October 2020, after he had done lying about the laptop, Biden looked down the barrel of the camera and told the American people: “You know his character. You know my character. You know my reputation is for honor and telling the truth.”
We sure do.
At their debate later this month, Trump will get his first opportunity to confront Biden about his lies.
Now that the laptop has been entered into the official record as government Exhibit 16 in the Delaware District Court, verified by the FBI as belonging to his son, and used for key evidence that convicted Hunter of three felony gun charges this week, Biden should be forced to come clean about his corrupt involvement in his family’s global influence-peddling scheme.
To this day the liberal media, with egg on its face for naively toeing the party line, still can’t bring itself to confirm the laptop.
Even after the ruling, The New York Times doubted the laptop’s veracity by declaring its contents are “unproven.”
They falsely claim that the FBI’s only authentication effort to confirm that the laptop was Hunter’s was by matching the serial number with his iCloud account.
Hunter and his lawyers are still pretending that computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac or Rudy Giuliani or somebody else “tampered” with the contents of the laptop.
But as IRS whistleblower Supervisor Special Agent Gary Shapley told Congress, in the weeks after the FBI took possession of the laptop on Dec. 9, 2019, the bureau’s computer forensics experts performed a specific technical review of all the files on the computer.
Extensive forensics
Using metadata analysis they found that the laptop “was not manipulated in any way” and therefore was eligible to be used as evidence in court, according to Shapley.
The experts were able to determine precisely when each file on the laptop was created, and if anything had been added or subtracted from the data.
They verified that it had not been modified or “tampered with” in the six months since Hunter had abandoned it.
But that’s not all.
FBI agent Erica Jensen told the court last week that IRS and FBI investigators obtained a covert search warrant for Hunter’s Apple iCloud account on April 16, 2019, coincidentally just four days after Hunter had abandoned his laptop at Mac Isaac’s Wilmington repair store.
Apple provided them with iCloud backup files for Hunter’s iPad and three iPhones.
When “investigators also later came into possession of the defendant’s Apple MacBook Pro, which he had left at a computer store [it] was information investigators had already obtained from Apple,” said prosecutor Derek Hines.
In other words, we have established that the laptop wasn’t tampered with and that most of its content was corroborated by a mirror image in the iCloud files.
Only items that were excluded from backups like, say, text messages from an Android phone were not duplicated in the iCloud.
But there were also other electronic search warrants that further corroborate the contents of the laptop that haven’t yet been mentioned in court.
Apple is not the only company that stores user data.
Then there is another layer of verification in which investigators focused on individual messages and emails which were corroborated by witnesses such as Hunter’s stripper girlfriend Zoe Kestan, for instance, or his widowed sister-in-law-turned-lover Hallie Biden.
The Post performed similar verification of individual items on the laptop with sources who had duplicates on their own devices.
For instance, we were able to corroborate large portions of data involving Chinese deals, including WhatsApp messages, through troves of data provided by Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski.
Other former associates of Hunter’s have corroborated and augmented laptop material from the earlier Burisma years and provided context.
‘Fox guarding hen house’
The due diligence we performed on the contents of Hunter’s laptop is far superior to whatever rudimentary scrutiny was applied to the bogus Steele Dossier by The New York Times or any of the august media organs which won Pulitzers for their sloppy work.
The laptop is not a complete record of Joe’s corruption, but it contains evidence that he lied when he said he knew nothing about his son’s lucrative overseas business dealings, that he met with more than a dozen of Hunter’s foreign business partners, that Hunter paid some of his father’s bills and complained about having to be the bagman supporting the family for 30 years and giving half his salary to Joe.
It provides leads to witnesses and myriad other avenues of investigation if any journalist cares to look.
The House impeachment committees have filled in some of the gaps with subpoenaed bank records and witness interviews.
They will be presenting a damning interim report next month.
If IRS investigators had not been blocked by the DOJ and CIA from following the investigative trail to Joe we would know much more.
“Don’t ask questions about the Big Guy,” they were told.
But thanks to Shapley and his fellow IRS whistleblower Joe Ziegler, Hunter is not getting off scot-free, as then-Delaware US Attorney David Weiss had planned before he was named special counsel by AG Merrick Garland in a damage-control tactic known as “the fox guarding the hen house.”
The Delaware gun case which Weiss chose to run first, and could have run back in 2021, had no connection to Joe.
But Hunter’s upcoming tax trial in California, if it goes ahead, holds uncomfortable surprises for his father.
