Hunter Biden indicated to Congress that he never visited the Delaware repair shop where his laptop was left, adding a bizarre twist to the computer’s sordid history.
Mr. Biden, in closed-door testimony, said he didn’t remember dropping off the laptop at the Mac Shop and cast doubt on the idea. He said he would have taken the computer either to the Apple Store three blocks from his office in Georgetown or to the store at the Christiana Mall in Newark, Delaware, if it needed repair.
“I was going to drop off a laptop, I would have gone to the Apple Store,” Mr. Biden told lawmakers.
Although he admitted to some damning details about his father dropping in on business meetings, confirming some elements of the Republicans’ impeachment inquiry against President Biden, Hunter Biden was curiously insistent about casting doubt on the laptop.
“Have you seen that laptop?” Mr. Biden demanded of Rep. Harriet Hageman, the Wyoming Republican who asked about the computer during the Feb. 28 congressional interview. “Does anyone know the existence of an actual laptop?”
The striking performance behind closed doors left lawmakers miffed at what Mr. Biden was trying to do.
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“No serious person doubts the existence of the Hunter Biden laptop, and nobody disputes that the material on it is authentic,” Ms. Hageman said.
Mr. Biden was testifying as part of the House’s impeachment inquiry into his father. The theory behind the investigation is that Mr. Biden used his father’s name and position to procure business deals with foreign firms often intertwined with foreign governments. Republicans are investigating how much President Biden knew of, assisted and potentially profited from his son’s dealings.
The laptop lies at the center of public accusations about Hunter Biden, who stands charged with federal tax evasion and gun crimes and is being questioned over what congressional investigators say is a penchant for using his father’s name to make money.
The public version of events is that Mr. Biden dropped off the laptop at the Mac Shop in Wilmington, Delaware, run by John Paul Mac Isaac. After concluding that Mr. Biden had abandoned the laptop, Mr. Mac Isaac shared its data with the FBI in late 2019.
He also kept a copy of the data and shared it with Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was working with President Trump. The former New York mayor shared a copy of that hard drive with the New York Post, which ran an explosive story about some of the contents of the laptop.
The Biden campaign arranged for former national security officials to write an open letter decrying the reporting as Russian disinformation.
In response, social media giants limited the story’s reach. As the Democratic presidential nominee, Mr. Biden cited the report in a debate with Mr. Trump to dismiss the whole matter.
‘I don’t remember ever doing that’
Now Hunter Biden is casting doubt on the whole thing.
When challenged by Rep. Matt Gaetz, Florida Republican, Mr. Biden said he had several laptops but doubted he ever turned one over to the Wilmington repair shop.
“The highest-grossing and largest Apple Store in America is at the Christiana Mall. If I was going to drop off a laptop — I don’t ever remember doing that, but if I was going to drop off a laptop, I would have gone to the Apple Store, which was seven minutes from my parents’ home there,” he said.
Mr. Gaetz came back at him: “Do you recall ever leaving a laptop at a repair shop?”
“I do not,” Mr. Biden replied.
It’s tough to square Mr. Biden’s assertion with what federal prosecutors and investigators have said.
In court documents, special counsel Robert Weiss, who is prosecuting the cases against Mr. Biden, flatly states that the president’s son is the one who left the laptop at the store.
His confidence is based on the legwork of FBI and IRS agents, who ran down the chain of events that led to the laptop ending up with Mr. Mac Isaac, his decision to turn it over to the FBI and agents’ verification that it was real.
According to notes from an Oct. 22, 2020, meeting turned over to Congress by IRS Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley, investigators used financial records to prove that Mr. Biden was in Wilmington and near the repair shop the day the computer was turned over.
They also have phone records showing Mr. Biden called the shop and it called him, and they have a receipt from the store signed by Mr. Biden.
Of course, they had the laptop and an external hard drive, which they took possession of in December 2019.
Agents knew the laptop was authentic because the materials contained were “largely duplicative” of information they had obtained through a search warrant for Mr. Biden’s iCloud account, Mr. Weiss said.
Fabricated messages
Mr. Biden has waffled in the past about his laptop.
In 2021, while promoting his memoir, he told CBS News that he had “no idea” what happened with the laptop.
“I really don’t know what the answer is, that’s the truthful answer,” he said. He said if it was, it could have been “stolen from me” or hacked or the product of “Russian intelligence.”
He seemed to acknowledge that the data was his in a letter last year asking prosecutors to investigate those involved in leaking the laptop’s contents.
“This failed dirty political trick directly resulted in the exposure, exploitation, and manipulation of Mr. Biden’s private and personal information,” his attorney Abbe Lowell wrote.
He said: “Mr. Mac Isaac’s intentional, reckless, and unlawful conduct allowed for hundreds of gigabytes of Mr. Biden’s personal data, without any discretion, to be circulated around the Internet.”
Mr. Biden indicated in a lawsuit he filed against Mr. Giuliani and Robert Costello last year that the laptop was genuine.
“Plaintiff owns data that is stored on a copy of a hard drive or other device(s) that Defendants own and operate and claim to have obtained of Plaintiff’s computer,” Mr. Lowell said in the complaint.
Several news organizations and other outfits have obtained what they say is a copy of the laptop contents, fueling stories about Mr. Biden, his activities and potential political problems for his father.
Mr. Biden said at least some of what has been reported from the laptop is false.
Mr. Lowell, in court documents, said the laptop data “had been altered and tampered with” before Mr. Mac Isaac provided it to Mr. Giuliani’s people.
Mr. Biden repeated those claims in his congressional testimony. He said some news outlets have reported conversations that were “fabricated,” including one with a Secret Service agent with whom he never met nor conversed.
“There are many different things in there that are either — that are either fabricated, hacked, stolen or manipulated 100%,” he said.
Whether that’s true for the data shared with news media, Agent Shapley’s notes make clear that federal investigators were comfortable concluding that the laptop data they obtained from Mr. Mac Isaac was good.
“We have no reason to believe there is anything fabricated nefariously on the computer and or hard drive. There are emails and other items that corroborate the items on the laptop and hard drive,” the notes read.
Mr. Lowell did not respond to a request for comment.
Observers were left to guess why Mr. Biden was drawing a line on the laptop in the face of so much evidence.
“I think they just want to throw up dust to confuse people,” said Jason Foster, founder of Empower Oversight, which is representing Agent Shapley, “What’s clear is that the FBI did authenticate and confirm that the laptop that they gathered from that store owner did match his Apple ID.”
Ms. Hageman emerged from Mr. Biden’s testimony saying the case against him remains strong.
“While Hunter Biden will try to convince everyone of his qualifications, he had only one qualification — his last name and his access to his father, ‘the big guy,’” she told The Washington Times in a statement.
“It is a fact that there are over twenty shell companies set up by the Biden crime family and that money from those companies eventually made its way to Joe Biden. It is a fact that Joe Biden met with business clients of Hunter Biden. It is a fact that Joe Biden spoke on the phone to clients of Hunter Biden,” she said.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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