OPINION:
Last September, Hunter Biden’s laptop counterattack strategy targeted the two Trump-linked lawyers who teamed up to bring his disturbing MacBook Pro contents to the American people.
In U.S. District Court in New York, the president’s son is suing Rudy Giuliani and his former lawyer Robert Costello. He accuses them of tampering with his laptop’s digital streams of debauchery, family squabbles, and messages about million-dollar foreign paymasters. The distortions supposedly happened before the former New York mayor released the data to the New York Post in October 2020, shortly before Election Day, when Hunter’s father, former Vice President Joe Biden, faced President Donald Trump.
The Abbe Lowell-headed legal team has also sued John Paul Mac Isaac, the workaday computer repairman whose famous customer, Hunter, dropped off the laptop, never returned and changed American political history.
And then something happened on May 22. A federal prosecutor officially ended this Hunter hoax by declaring the laptop hard drive “real” based on FBI forensics and Hunter himself.
Back in 2020, with the election just weeks away, Democrats needed to shut down the New York Post’s award-quality scoop in a hurry to ensure that an uninterested liberal media remained uninterested. Thus, the Biden campaign, led by then-adviser and now Secretary of State Antony Blinken — engineered a great deception, House Republicans alleged based on witness testimony.
Fifty-one Obama intelligence loyalists, including his CIA and national intelligence directors, put their signatures to a phony letter asserting that the laptop was Kremlin disinformation. Candidate Biden joined the election interference by repeating the letter lie at his debate with Mr. Trump.
Off the hook, the liberal media had yet another fake Russia story to pursue. Never mind that the hard drive held a wealth of never-before-seen messages on how the then-vice president’s son hauled in millions of dollars from shady foreign nationals with whom dad met.
The twin allegations of a Russia hack and Giuliani-Costello tampering allegations collapsed, ironically thanks to the Justice Department under President Biden.
In Delaware, special counsel David Weiss has charged Hunter Biden with three felony gun violations. In this legal arena, Mr. Lowell also insisted outsiders poisoned the laptop.
As the case plodded along, on May 22, Mr. Weiss, in a U.S. District Court filing, asserted the original laptop data is authentic and pristine, and he plans to present it as evidence at trial.
“The defendant’s laptop is real,” said the filing from Mr. Weiss and his deputy, Derek Hines.
It’s not just that the FBI forensic team authenticated the hard drive in 2019 after Hunter left the computer with Mr. Mac Isaac, who eventually provided the data to the bureau and later to Mr. Costello, who shared it with Mr. Giuliani.
It’s that Hunter himself authenticates it. Laptop messages and photos match anecdotes from his memoir and his known locations on various days.
And, prosecutors say, “the defendant has had the laptop data in its raw, original form since September 2023, but has provided the government with no evidence of its manipulation or alteration. He has not provided any evidence or information that shows that his laptop contains false information, and the government’s evidence shows the opposite.”
Mr. Lowell relies on a hearsay story from a Russian about Kremlin security hacking a laptop in Kazakhstan in 2014. (Kazakhstan, by the way, is home to an oligarch who bought Hunter a $142,300 Fisker sports car, the cash wired to his shared LLC with Devon Archer. Mr. Archer wired the money to the dealership, and Hunter took ownership and then testified to a House committee that the car came from Mr. Archer, not the oligarch.)
Back to Mr. Weiss and Mr. Hines: “This is yet another example of the defendant asking people to believe Russian intelligence when it suits his interests but not to believe Russian intelligence when it doesn’t suit his interests. None of this hearsay on hearsay is evidence, and none of it demonstrates that the actual trial evidence was altered.”
To sum up, the two said: “What are the messages the defendant is claiming were somehow retroactively planted into his non-functional laptop, and what is the evidence of that? There is none. He has not shown any of the actual evidence in this case is unreliable or inauthentic because there is none.”
There are two electronic sources at issue: the laptop and Hunter’s Apple iCloud accounts.
Hunter claims the government-seized Apple messages were also distorted. (I would guess, in this case, by miraculous evil hackers able to get around Tim Cook’s firewalls.)
Again, Mr. Weiss and Mr. Hines: “The defendant has not offered any conspiracy theory, much less any evidence, regarding how or why Apple, Inc. produced manipulated data for his iPhone and iPad.”
(By the way, it was a 2017 iCloud message captured by IRS investigators that showed Hunter shaking down a Chinese Communist Party-linked businessman for millions of dollars. Hunter typed that unless the money was in the works soon, he and his dad, then the former vice president, would make the businessman’s life miserable.)
If I may extrapolate from these Weiss court filings, they show, from the Biden Justice Department and its forensic experts, that the October 2020 bogus letter signed by 51 Biden loyalists was the biggest election interference ever by senior government alumni.
Add it to the other major Democratic Party scam carried out by Hillary Clinton campaign operatives: the Russian-sourced dossier and the mega-conspiracy among the FBI, Democrats and the news media to sabotage candidate and President Trump based on a bunch of untrue rumors, some planted by Vladimir Putin’s men.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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