Call it an October surprise, or just another ordinary day in the year 2020. In case you missed the news last week, there is a battle raging in the media over whether the contents of an abandoned laptop at a Delaware computer repair shop are an explosive bombshell scandal for former Vice President Joe Biden, or part of an elaborate Russian disinformation campaign aimed at effecting the outcome of the 2020 presidential race. The views on this matter cut sharply along partisan lines, but the issue will likely come to a head Thursday night at the final Trump-Biden debate.
Worth noting is that the issue of Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings became a short-lived issue during the 2020 Democratic primary back in October of 2019. At the time, Hunter Biden did a TV interview with ABC News in which he stated that his father has had zero involvement with any of Hunter’s foreign business arrangements.
The latest ordeal started when the New York Post ran a story last week alleging wrongdoing on the part of the Bidens. The story was based on information contained in a laptop hard drive the Post obtained from Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney:
Hunter Biden discussed leveraging his connection to his father in a bid to boost his pay from a Ukrainian natural gas company, according to an email he sent around the time he joined the firm’s corporate board.
In a lengthy memo to his then-business partner, Devon Archer, who already sat on the Burisma board, Biden repeatedly mentioned “my guy” while apparently referring to then-Vice President Joe Biden.
Under President Barack Obama, the elder Biden was the point person for US policy toward Ukraine, and he held a press conference there with Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk on April 22, 2014.
Hunter Biden’s email to Archer is dated a little more than a week earlier.
The email, labeled from Robert Biden — Hunter’s first name — is among a trove of messages, documents, photos and videos purportedly recovered from a MacBook Pro laptop that a Delaware computer shop owner told The Post was brought in for repair in April 2019 and never picked up.
Needless to say, the allegations were met with skepticism from the Biden campaign, and other media outlets who began to discredit the story. Social media companies Facebook and Twitter also limited sharing of the story on their platforms.
Rep. Adam Schiff, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, called the story “Russian disinformation” and said the entire ordeal is being used to smear Biden and influence the election, according to Fox News:
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff on Friday described revelations from a slew of emails in a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden as being part of a smear coming “from the Kremlin” — amid claims the revelations are part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
“We know that this whole smear on Joe Biden comes from the Kremlin,” Schiff said on CNN. “That’s been clear for well over a year now that they’ve been pushing this false narrative about this vice president and his son.”
The California Democrat was responding to questions about the origins of emails, found on a laptop purported to belong to the son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden, and first reported by the New York Post.
In the hours after Schiff discounted the Post story, other media outlets began running articles which quoted former or retired intelligence officials also calling the veracity of the Post’s claims into question:
More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
The letter, signed on Monday, centers around a batch of documents released by the New York Post last week that purport to tie the Democratic nominee to his son Hunter’s business dealings. Under the banner headline “Biden Secret E-mails,” the Post reported it was given a copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive by President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who said he got it from a Mac shop owner in Delaware who also alerted the FBI.
While the letter’s signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case” and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin’s hand at work.
Since that time, other journalists have started looking deeper into the hard drive and laptop contents and have confirmed some parts of the original story. For example, an image of a receipt for the repair, alleging to be from Hunter Biden, has surfaced, allegedly from the repair shop owner:
Days after the New York Post published an explosive story about emails exchanged between Hunter Biden and a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm regarding a meeting with his father, Joe Biden, latest leaked documents show what appears to be Hunter Biden’s signature on a receipt from the laptop repair shop where he allegedly dropped off a laptop containing emails of his overseas business dealings.
A receipt from The Mac Shop in Wilmington, Delaware, has now surfaced and appears to show Hunter signature authorizing “data recovery” work to be carried out on three MacBook Pro laptops for $85.However, the signature has not yet been verified.
The description of the services reads “recover data to store server and contact customer when complete.” The receipt also mentions Hunter’s name in the “bill to” section.
The repair shop owner is reportedly an admitted supporter of President Trump, another point worth noting. According to Slate, his story has changed a few times in explaining the timeline of events:
The owner of the shop was later revealed to be John Paul MacIsaac of Wilmington. He is an avid Trump supporter and has been repeatedly changing his story about what exactly occurred. He initially said that he wasn’t able to identify who dropped off the laptop because he is “legally blind.” MacIsaac then said that the customer had identified himself as Hunter Biden. The shop does have two cameras, but MacIsaac claims that the footage from that day was automatically deleted before he realized how important it was.
He’s given conflicting accounts of how he came into contact with the FBI and says he initially made a copy of the hard drive for personal protection, citing the conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton’s associates had killed a DNC staffer for leaking information. MacIsaac has generally been cagey with the press about his dealings with Giuliani and what he found on the hard drive.
There are other parts of a paper trail, including a subpoena dated from December of 2019 for the repair shop owner in relation to his contact with the FBI when he turned over the laptop:
Other documents that have emerged include FBI paper work that reveals the bureau’s interactions with the shop’s owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, who reported the laptop’s contents to authorities.
The document shows that Isaac received a subpoena to testify before the U.S. District Court in Delaware on Dec. 9, 2019. One page appears to show the serial number for a MacBook Pro laptop and a hard drive that were seized by the agency.
This is where the story takes a new twist. According to more reports, such as this from Business Insider, the FBI is currently investigating whether the laptop hard drive and contents are part of a Russian disinformation campaign:
The FBI is investigating whether alleged emails of communications between Hunter Biden and a senior executive at the Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma Holdings were part of a foreign intelligence operation, NBC News reported.
The emails first surfaced in a dubious and widely discredited story from the New York Post this week purporting to feature “smoking-gun” emails showing the Burisma executive discussing with Hunter the prospect of meeting his father, Joe Biden, when Biden was vice president in 2015.
However, according to other articles, such as this from Newsweek, government officials including Jon Ratcliffe, Directory of National Intelligence, said that intelligence agencies have not determined the laptop hard drive to be part of a Russian disinformation campaign:
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe rejected claims that a Russian disinformation campaign is behind investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop, saying the details of the case are held by the FBI, not U.S. intelligence agencies.
Ratcliffe told Fox Business Monday that last year’s impeachment trial revealed it was the Obama administration who were first concerned with the former vice president’s son’s alleged ties to shady Chinese and Ukrainian contracts. Ratcliffe dismissed House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s remarks Sunday that any information about Biden’s laptop or Ukraine ties are just a Kremlin “smear” campaign. Instead, Ratcliffe said he’s urging the FBI to reveal any details of the Hunter Biden investigation which have been known since at least last November.
The Trump administration intelligence chief said he’s tired of “people using the intelligence community to leverage some political narrative.”
Ratcliffe was appointed by President Trump, which is important to note in relation to a highly politicized story just days out from an election.
Recent reports have confirmed that the FBI is currently in possession of the laptop but would not confirm what kind, if any, investigation is ongoing in relation to the laptop contents other than to say that officials do not believe the laptop is part of a Russian disinformation campaign:
The FBI is in possession of the laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden which contained emails revealing his foreign business dealings, including contacts in Ukraine and China, two senior administration officials told Fox News Tuesday.
The FBI declined to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation into the laptop or the emails, as is standard practice.
Further, Fox News has learned that the FBI and Justice Department officials concur with an assessment from Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe that the laptop is not part of a Russian disinformation campaign targeting Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
All of this is to say, expect the issue to arise at the presidential debate on Thursday. The questions may not be raised by the moderator, but it will surely be raised by President Trump.
The Biden campaign hasn’t responded much to the allegations since doing so would conceivably give them some legitimacy. The Biden campaign has not categorically denied the veracity of the email contents or laptop contents, but generally refuses to answer questions or engage on the matter.
The New York Post has doubled-down on the original story and has continued to release other articles based on other information on the alleged hard drive.
This is a rapidly-changing story, but at this point couldn’t go without mention as a bubbling issue around the campaign.
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