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Hunter Biden laptop controversy

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For the controversy surrounding Joe Biden and Ukraine, see Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory.

The Hunter Biden laptop controversy involves a laptop computer containing thousands of authentic emails that was dropped off at a repair shop in the U.S state of Delaware by an unidentified person in 2019 and never collected. It was then brought into public light by the New York Post three weeks before the 2020 United States presidential election as an "October surprise".[1] The laptop was of unclear origin and contained emails obtained by Donald Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani[1] and other materials relating to Hunter Biden, some of which were later confirmed as authentic. The discovery of the laptop spurred speculation as to whether it supported what became the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory that falsely alleged then-Vice President Joe Biden acted corruptly in Ukraine to protect his son from a corruption investigation by Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published an article about a purported meeting between then-Vice President Joe Biden and Burisma advisor Vadym Pozharskyi. The article was based on an April 2015 email from Pozharskyi to Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, who served on the board of Burisma, thanking Hunter Biden for inviting him to meet his father in Washington, D.C.. The Post claimed the email showed Joe Biden was untruthful when he claimed he had "never spoken to [his] son about his overseas business dealings" and claimed to have evidence in support of the Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory regarding the reasons for the firing of Viktor Shokin. The Biden campaign denied Joe Biden had any meeting with Pozharskyi, and said that if they had ever met, it would have been a brief encounter.[2] Witnesses at the dinner where they allegedly met said Biden briefly passed by to see an old friend. The Post reported in its story that Pozharskyi declined to comment, nor did he comment to a Politico journalist who reported extensively on the story a year later.[3]

The Post reported that the email was found in a cache of data extracted from the external hard drive of the laptop computer that appeared to belong to Hunter Biden. The Post reported that the owner of the repair shop had made a copy of the hard drive before it was seized by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and that it was later provided to the Post by Donald Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. The day after its initial report, the Post reported on another email relating to a business venture Hunter Biden pursued with a Chinese company in May 2017, in which his father was mentioned by a prospective business partner as a potential equity holder, though Biden wrote in another email that his father was emphatically not interested in the deal. The Post and other conservative media outlets reported extensively on the laptop and other contents of the hard drive.

The veracity of the Post's reporting was strongly questioned by most mainstream media outlets, analysts and intelligence officials, due to the unknown chain of custody of the laptop and the provenance of its contents, and suspicion that it may have been part of a disinformation campaign by Russian intelligence or its proxies.[4][5][6] In response, Twitter and Facebook both temporarily implemented measures on their platforms to prevent sharing of the Post's article.

As of 2022, Vox reported that no evidence had emerged "that the laptop's leak was a Russian plot."[7] In March 2022, The New York Times reported it had authenticated some emails "from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop."[7][8] Also in March, The Washington Post reported that two security experts authenticated thousands of the 129,000 emails purportedly from Biden's laptop, though the vast majority of the laptop contents, including most of its emails, could not be authenticated. The experts also noted there were anomalies in the data that created the potential for tampering or forgery.[9] Among the emails that The Washington Post was able to authenticate was the Pozharskyi email that formed the basis of the New York Post's original article.[9]

New York Post reporting

The logo of the New York Post, which first published the story of the laptop

On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published articles containing purported emails of unknown authorship which suggested that Hunter Biden provided an "opportunity" to Vadym Pozharskyi, an advisor to the board of Burisma, to meet his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden.[10][11][12] Joe Biden stated in September 2019 that he had never spoken to his son about his foreign business dealings.[13] His presidential campaign denied such a meeting took place and stated the New York Post had never contacted them "about the critical elements of this story".[14] Michael Carpenter, Vice President Biden's foreign policy adviser in 2015, told The Washington Post that he had accompanied Biden during all of his meetings about Ukraine and that, "He never met with [Pozharskyi]." He added, "In fact, I had never heard of this guy until the New York Post story broke."[15] One of the purported emails showed Pozharskyi saying he would share information with Amos Hochstein, a State Department advisor close to Vice President Biden, though Hochstein stated, "The Republican Senate investigation subpoenaed all my records, including emails and calendars and found no mention of this man. I led the US energy efforts in Ukraine and never even heard of him before yesterday."[16] The New York Post published images and PDF copies of the alleged emails, but their authenticity and origin have not been determined.[17] According to an investigation by The New York Times, editors at the New York Post "pressed staff members to add their bylines to the story", and at least one refused, in addition to the original author, reportedly because of a lack of confidence in its credibility. Of the two writers eventually credited on the article, the second did not know her name was attached to it until after The Post published it.[18] In its opening sentence, the New York Post story misleadingly asserted "the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating" Burisma, despite the fact that Shokin had not pursued an investigation into Burisma's founder.[15] The opening sentence also misleadingly stated that Hunter Biden introduced his father to Pozharskyi, but the purported email from Pozharskyi only mentioned an invitation and "opportunity" for the men to meet.[19][20]

On October 15, the Post published another article regarding a business venture relating to CEFC China Energy that Hunter Biden was negotiating with potential investment partners in May 2017, when his father was a private citizen. The Post published a purported email it said came from the laptop, written by one of the prospective investors, on which Hunter Biden was copied. The email described the proposed equity shares of each of the investors in the venture, ending with a reference to "10 held by H for the big guy?" The Post reported the 'H' apparently referred to Hunter Biden, and one of his former business partners soon came forward to assert 'the big guy' referred to Joe Biden. The former business partner also tweeted a copy of the email that had been addressed to him. In a subsequent email, Biden said his "Chairman" gave him "an emphatic no," with a later email identifying the 'chairman' as his father. The Post also reported on an August 2017 venture Hunter Biden was seeking with Ye Jianming, the chairman of CEFC, but the paper did not associate Joe Biden with that deal. Neither of the two ventures came to fruition.[7][21]

On May 26, 2021, the New York Post published another article focused on purported emails, suggesting that Joe Biden had met with Vadym Pozharskyi at a dinner in Cafe Milano in Washington.[22] The Washington Post investigated the April 16, 2015 dinner.[22] According to dinner attendee Rick Leach, who like Hunter Biden was one of the leaders of the World Food Program USA fundraising organization, the discussions at the dinner were about food security, not "politics or business".[22] Leach said that Joe Biden briefly dropped by the dinner to meet Alex Karloutsos.[22] According to Leach, Joe Biden "didn't even sit down. He was not part of the dinner or part of the dinner discussion."[22] Karloutsos, a longtime friend of Joe Biden, had an influential role in the Greek Orthodox Church that Joe Biden long worked with.[22] Karloutsos corroborated Leach's account.[22] Also, according to The Washington Post, the tentative guest list for the dinner included the name "Vadym" with no surname listed.[22]

Laptop and hard drive

Rudy Giuliani provided the materials to the New York Post after they were allegedly found on a water damaged[23] MacBook Pro left at a Delaware computer repair shop owned by John Paul Mac Isaac.[24] Mac Isaac obtained the laptop in April 2019.[25] He asserted three years later that while he was copying individual files and folders from the laptop's hard drive to another device, he "saw some content that was disturbing and then also raised some red flags", including "criminality … related to foreign business dealings, to potential money laundering and, more importantly, national security issues and concerns."[25] This caused him "to do a deep dive into the laptop once it became my property."[25] Mac Isaac contacted Giuliani, who he said was his "lifeguard"—voicing credence to the conspiracy theory that the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign was behind the murder of campaign worker Seth Rich.[26] Steve Bannon informed the New York Post of the laptop,[27] and he and Giuliani delivered a copy of the supposed laptop hard drive to the publication.[28] Weeks before, Bannon had boasted on Dutch television that he had Hunter Biden's hard drive.[28] Giuliani was later quoted as saying he had given the copy to the New York Post because "either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out".[18] According to the New York Post story, a person—who Mac Isaac could not identify because he is legally blind[29]—left the computer at the repair shop to repair water damage, but once this was completed, the shop had no contact information for its owner, and nobody ever paid for it or came to pick it up.[30] Criticism has been focused on Mac Isaac over inconsistencies in his accounts of how the laptop came into his possession and how he passed it on to Giuliani and the FBI.[30][26] When interviewed by CBS News, Mac Isaac offered contradictory statements about his motivations.[31] Thomas Rid, a political scientist and disinformation expert at Johns Hopkins University, noted that the emails could have been forged or that forged material could have been mixed with genuine materials, a "common feature" of disinformation operations.[32] The Daily Beast reported that according to two "individuals with direct knowledge", multiple senior officials in the Trump administration and reelection campaign were aware of the laptop hard drive "several weeks" prior to the New York Post story.[33] Giuliani later confirmed to The Daily Beast that he had informed Trump about the material before the New York Post story.[34]

The New York Post reported it had been shown an image purporting to show a federal subpoena that resulted in the computer and an external hard drive being seized by the FBI in December 2019.[15] NBC News reported the FBI had acquired the devices via a grand jury subpoena, though it was unclear if this was the subpoena cited by the New York Post, and was investigating whether the contents were linked to a foreign intelligence operation.[35] The Associated Press confirmed the existence of the FBI investigation into possible foreign-intelligence activity.[36] Citing a "US official and a congressional source briefed on the matter", CNN reported the FBI was specifically investigating possible connections to ongoing Russian disinformation efforts against Biden.[16]

According to The Washington Post, Mac Isaac was alarmed that the laptop was not mentioned during Donald Trump's first impeachment trial in early 2020.[25]

Hunter Biden stated in an interview published April 2021 that he was not sure whether the laptop belonged to him; he said there "could be a laptop out there that was stolen from" him, or he could have been "hacked" by Russian intelligence.[37] PolitiFact wrote in June 2021: "Over time, there has been less doubt that the laptop did in fact belong to Hunter Biden", concluding that the laptop "was real in the sense that it exists, but it didn't prove much", as "Nothing from the laptop has revealed illegal or unethical behavior by Joe Biden as vice president with regard to his son's tenure as a director for Burisma..."[38] PolitiFact states that it is possible that "copies of a laptop" were obtained, instead of the actual laptop.[38] PolitiFact states that the Daily Mail published nude photos of Hunter Biden from the laptop, as well as other content focused on Hunter Biden's drug use and legal issues, but notes that Hunter Biden had already publicized his own drug issues.[38]

The laptop had been called the "laptop from hell."[39]

Ukraine material

Material similar to the alleged hard-drive contents was reportedly circulating in Ukraine during 2019. One individual interviewed by Time magazine stated that he had been approached in late May 2019, and a second person stated that he had been approached in mid-September. The seller, according to the second individual, wished to sell compromising information about Hunter Biden to Republican Party allies of Donald Trump for $5 million. "I walked away from it, because it smelled awful", he told Time. Igor Novikov, a former advisor to the Ukrainian president and a disinformation researcher, said that the market for kompromat (damaging material) had been very active in the past year in reaction to political events in the United States, with political operatives rushing to respond to Giuliani's call for damaging information on the Bidens. Novikov characterized the materials available on the market as "extremely hard to verify, yet very easy to fake". On October 19, Ukrainian legislator Andrii Derkach posted on social media that he had a second Hunter Biden laptop, stating, "The facts confirming international corruption are stored on a second laptop. These are not the last witnesses or the last laptop."[40] Derkach had worked with Giuliani in Ukraine and was later sanctioned by the United States Treasury Department for his involvement in Biden disinformation; the Treasury concluded Derkach had been an active Russian intelligence agent for over a decade.[41][42] Lev Parnas told Politico that Giuliani had been told about compromising material regarding Hunter Biden on May 30, 2019, during a visit with Vitaly Pruss, an associate of the corrupt oligarch (and founder of Burisma) Mykola Zlochevsky.[43]

Hunter Biden story pitch

Earlier in the month and before the Post's report, a White House lawyer and two others affiliated with Trump had already pitched a story about Hunter Biden's business dealings in China to The Wall Street Journal, which the Trump team saw as an ideal outlet for its combination of conservatism and industry credibility. While the Journal conducted due diligence, and without warning to the Trump team, Giuliani and the New York Post went ahead and published a version of the story based on documents and emails with "questionable provenance" that alleged, but did not prove, Joe Biden's involvement in his son's affairs. Bannon had anticipated the Journal story would appear on October 19, and Trump told reporters to expect a major story in the Journal. Internally, the insinuation that their journalism was affiliated with or on behalf of Trump irritated the Journal editors. Tony Bobulinski, a business partner of Hunter Biden who was interviewed for the Journal's report, was scared that the Journal would not run the piece and issued his own statement on October 21, which Breitbart News published unedited. At the next day's presidential debate, Trump made vague reference to the emails and hosted Bobulinski as his special guest. After the debate, the Journal published its brief story that Bobulinski and corporate records assessed by the Journal "show no role for Joe Biden".[44]

Aftermath and veracity concerns

The New York Times reported in May 2021 that federal investigators in Brooklyn began a criminal investigation late in the Trump administration into possible efforts by several current and former Ukrainian officials to spread unsubstantiated allegations about corruption by Joe Biden. Investigators were examining whether the Ukrainians used Giuliani as a channel for the allegations, though he was not a specific subject of the investigation, in contrast to a long-running investigation of Giuliani by the US attorney's office in Manhattan.[45]

The New York Times reported in March 2022 that they found emails "from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop."[7]

In April 2022, The Washington Post reported that Mac Isaac said that he has seen claims about what the laptop contains that do not reflect what he saw on the laptop: "I do know that there have been multiple attempts over the past year-and-a-half to insert questionable material into the laptop as in, not physically, but passing off this misinformation or disinformation as coming from the laptop. ... And that is a major concern of mine because I have fought tooth and nail to protect the integrity of this drive and to jeopardize that is going to mean that everything that I sacrificed will be for nothing."[25]

Forensic analysis

In March 2022, The Washington Post published the findings of two forensic information analysts it had retained to examine 217 gigabytes of data provided to the paper on a hard drive by Republican activist Jack Maxey, who represented that its contents came from the laptop. One of the analysts characterized the data as a "disaster" from a forensics standpoint. The analysts found that people other than Biden had repeatedly accessed and copied data for nearly three years; they also found evidence others had written files to the drive both before and after the October 2020 New York Post reports. In September 2020, someone created six new folders on the drive, including with the names "Biden Burisma," "Salacious Pics Package" and "Hunter. Burisma Documents." One of the analysts found evidence someone may have accessed the drive contents from a West Coast location days after The New York Post published their stories about the laptop.

Using cryptographic signatures, the analysts were able to verify that from 1,828 to nearly 22,000 emails Biden had received came from the indicated email accounts of origin, suggesting they were authentic and had not been tampered with. The analysts said emails from Burisma, where Pozharskyi was an advisor, were likely authentic, but cautioned that if Burisma had been hacked, it would be possible for hackers to use stolen cryptographic signatures to forge emails that would pass as authentic. The New York Times reported in January 2020 that Russian military intelligence had hacked Burisma beginning in November 2019; a co-founder of the firm that discovered the hacking said Russians were stealing email credentials. Both analysts acknowledged that cryptographic signatures are not a perfect way to authenticate emails, as some email services do not implement the technology as rigorously as others. About 16,000 of the 22,000 emails carrying cryptographic signatures came via Google, which rigorously implements the technology. The analysts noted that cryptographic signatures can only verify that an email originated from a certain email account, but not who controlled that account; there are other means for hackers to commandeer email accounts of others.

One of the analysts found that timestamps on documents and in operating system indexes matched, though he noted hackers could forge timestamps in undetectable ways. The analysts also noted that the drive had been handled in such a way that logs and other files used by forensic analysts to examine system activity had been repeatedly deleted. Neither analyst found evidence emails or other files had been manipulated by hackers, nor could they rule out that possibility.[9][46]

Reactions

Intelligence officials

On October 19, a group of 51 former senior intelligence officials, who had served in the Trump administration and the three previous, released an open letter stating that the release of the alleged emails "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation," adding:

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement – just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.[47][48]

During an interview with Fox News on October 19, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, described as a "Trump loyalist",[49] said the laptop was "not part of some Russian disinformation campaign" and accused Adam Schiff of mischaracterizing the views of the intelligence community by describing the alleged emails as part of a smear campaign against Biden.[50] Schiff's spokesman accused Ratcliffe of "purposefully misrepresenting" the congressman's words.[51] Ratcliffe had previously made public assertions that contradicted professional intelligence assessments.[52][53][54] Several security officials criticized Ratcliffe for appearing to pre-judge its outcome.[55] The FBI has publicly stated they had "nothing to add" to Ratcliffe's remarks in response to a request for more information made by Sen. Ron Johnson.[56] The New York Times reported days after the Post story that no solid evidence had emerged that the laptop contained Russian disinformation.[57] An FBI probe seeking to determine whether the laptop was part of a foreign intelligence operation is still ongoing.[16][35]

Social media corporations

After the 2016 election, social media companies were criticized for allowing false political information to proliferate on their platforms, including from Russian intelligence, suggesting it may have assisted Trump's election.[58] Twitter and Facebook both implemented measures on their platforms to prevent sharing of the New York Post article. Twitter first deprecated the story (prevented its algorithm from highlighting it due to its popularity) but eventually banned links to the story from being posted.[14] It did so according to their Hacked Materials Policy and Facebook per a policy that "in many countries, including in the U.S., if we have signals that a piece of content is false, we temporarily reduce its distribution pending review by a third-party fact-checker."[59][60][61] The Hill reported on the Facebook action, "it is unclear what 'signals' triggered the limit on the New York Post article".[59] Twitter briefly locked President Donald Trump's presidential campaign Twitter account for sharing a controversial Hunter Biden video earlier on October 15. The account was unlocked later that day.[62] Between October 14 and 23, the original New York Post story received over 54 million Facebook views.[63]

Commentators from varied political backgrounds criticized the actions taken by Facebook and Twitter, arguing that they could have amplified disinformation thanks to the Streisand effect.[14] Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey noted, "Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great", adding that "blocking URL sharing via tweet or [direct message]" without explaining the context was "unacceptable".[64]

President Donald Trump tweeted criticism on October 14 in response to Facebook and Twitter's actions, directing complaints at the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that includes Section 230.[65]

Congressional Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee called on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to testify before the committee in response to their platforms' actions. Senators Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Josh Hawley announced that the committee would vote on subpoenaing Dorsey to appear on October 23.[60] Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell described the restrictions made by Facebook and Twitter as "absolutely reprehensible" and stated that the companies were acting as "speech police".[66]

Dorsey stated that "Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix," adding "Our goal is to attempt to add context, and now we have capabilities to do that."[67] In March 2021, Dorsey told Congress, "It was literally just a process error. This was not against them [the Post] in any particular way."[68] Facebook also said that it was restricting spread pending input from third-party fact-checkers. Associated Press noted that the story had, as of October 17, 2020, "not been confirmed by other publications".[67]

The New York Times reported in September 2021 that a Federal Election Commission inquiry into a complaint about Twitter’s censorship of the article had dismissed the complaint, saying the social media company had legitimate commercial reasons for their actions, and that it could not be determined that Twitter had acted on purely political grounds.[69]

Ross Douthat has pointed out similarities between social media reactions to the Biden-laptop-and-emails situation and the Steele dossier. He doesn't see the New York Post story as Russian disinformation, but "a more normal example of late-dropping opposition research... weaving genuine facts into contestable conclusions. It was, in other words, analogous to all kinds of contested anti-Trump stories that various media outlets have run with across the last four crazy years — from the publicity around the Steele dossier's wilder rumors to the tales of Michael Cohen's supposed Prague rendezvous to the claims that Russians hacked Vermont's power grid or even C-SPAN." He therefore criticized the widely different reactions of social media companies where they, in a "don't let 2016 happen again" reaction, totally shut down coverage of the laptop, but did not do the same to protect the public when the dossier was published.[70]

Ben Smith, who felt that social media should have treated the laptop and dossier stories in the same way, described how he published the dossier for BuzzFeed News in 2017 when he saw that media gatekeepers were "keeping [the dossier] from their audience". He saw the media's refusal to cover the laptop as a "revenge of the gatekeepers".[44]

Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign

The Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign press secretary Jamal Brown stated that Twitter's action with regard to the New York Post story indicated that the allegations in the story were false.[71] They specifically denied that Joe Biden ever had a formal meeting with Pozharskyi, and said that if they had ever met, it would have been a brief encounter.[72]

Congress

On January 21, 2021, the day after Biden's inauguration, Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia filed articles of impeachment against Biden that cited the claims.[73] No fellow members of Congress co-sponsored the articles.

Other press outlets

Fellow press outlets The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal stated that they could not independently verify the data provided by the New York Post.[18] NBC News requested a copy of the hard drive from Giuliani, who told them that he would not provide one; they said Giuliani offered them copies of a small number of emails but would not give them the full set.[74]

David Folkenflik of NPR observed that the New York Post story asserted as facts things it presumed to be true. He also noted that the credited lead author of the story, deputy political editor Emma-Jo Morris, had virtually no previous bylines in reporting, and her most significant prior employment was a nearly four-year position as a producer on Sean Hannity's Fox News program. Hannity, a close Trump advisor, has repeatedly suggested wrongdoing by Biden in Ukraine.[17]

Vanity Fair observed the story had exposed an ongoing journalistic "cold war" within Rupert Murdoch's media empire, which includes The New York Post, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal. In particular, it described an internal rift over coverage by the Journal which published an opinion article by conservative columnist Kimberley Strassel inflating the claims, only to have the news section publish an article which "swept the legs out from under their Opinion colleague's argument" four hours later. Ryan Lizza, reporter for Politico, was quoted as saying "reporters at the WSJ, Fox News, and NYP have all come to the same conclusion about these documents but they are being drowned out by bad faith activists on the opinion side at these Murdoch companies who favor Trump's re-election."[75]

In her resignation letter from The New York Times, journalist Bari Weiss, who later founded the Substack newsletter named Common Sense, said: "When we're not able to say that Hunter Biden's laptop is a story worth pursuing, the world has gone mad."[76]

In March 2022, The Wall Street Journal editorial board criticized the media for ignoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, saying "The media excuse that it ignored the laptop because of 'uncertainty about its provenance' is hogwash. We all know that if a similar story had emerged about the Trump family, even with no credible source, the mainstream media would have run it nonstop."[77]

See also

References

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