Hunter Biden laptop controversy


In October 2020, a controversy arose involving a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden. The owner of a Delaware computer shop, John Paul Mac Isaac, said that the laptop had been left by a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden. Mac Isaac also stated that he is legally blind and could not be sure whether the man was actually Hunter Biden. Three weeks before the 2020 United States presidential election, the New York Post published a front-page story that presented emails from the laptop, alleging they showed corruption by Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee and Hunter Biden's father. According to the Post, the story was based on information provided to Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney of incumbent president and candidate Donald Trump, by Mac Isaac. Forensic analysis later authenticated some of the emails from the laptop, including both emails used by the Post in their initial reporting.
Shortly after the Post story broke, social media companies blocked links to it, while other news outlets declined to publish the story due to concerns about provenance and suspicions of Russian disinformation. On October 19, 2020, an open letter signed by 51 former US intelligence officials warned that the laptop "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation." By May 2023, no evidence had publicly surfaced to support suspicions that the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation scheme.
In December 2019, under the authority of a subpoena issued by a Wilmington grand jury, the FBI seized the laptop from Mac Isaac. FBI investigators handling Hunter Biden's laptop quickly concluded in 2019 "that the laptop was genuinely his and did not seem to have been tampered with or manipulated". In June 2024, federal prosecutors utilized the laptop as evidence as part of a criminal case against Hunter Biden, alongside testimony from an FBI agent involved in authenticating and investigating the laptop.
The hard drive data had been shared with Trump advisor Steve Bannon before it became publicly known. Trump attempted to turn the story into an October surprise to hurt Joe Biden's campaign by falsely alleging that, while in office, Biden had acted corruptly regarding Ukraine to protect his son. A joint investigation by two Republican Senate committees released in September 2020 and a Republican House Oversight committee investigation released in April 2024 did not find wrongdoing by Joe Biden with regard to Ukraine and his son's business dealings there. PolitiFact wrote in June 2021 that the laptop did belong to Hunter Biden, but did not demonstrate wrongdoing by Joe Biden.
Starting in 2021, news outlets began to authenticate some of the contents of the laptop. In 2021, Politico verified two key emails used in the Post initial reporting by cross-referencing emails with other datasets and contacting their recipients. CBS News published a forensic analysis which examined a "clean" copy of the data obtained directly from Mac Isaac. It concluded that the "clean" data, including over 120,000 emails, originated with Hunter Biden and had not been altered, while other copies circulated by Republican operatives "could have been tampered with". Other outlets also verified portions of the data, while noting problems in fully authenticating the copies they had to work with.

Background

The media coverage of the laptop spurred speculation about the Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory, which falsely alleged that then vice president Joe Biden acted 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 based on an email from the laptop about a purported meeting between then vice president Joe Biden and the Burisma advisor Vadym Pozharskyi. 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. Witnesses at the dinner where they allegedly met said Joe Biden briefly passed by to see an old friend. The Post reported in its story that Pozharskyi declined to comment, and he did not comment to a Politico journalist who reported extensively on the story a year later.
The Post reported that the email was found in a cache of data extracted from the external hard drive of a laptop computer that belonged to Hunter Biden. The Post reported that the repair shop owner had made a copy of the external hard drive before it was seized by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and that the copy was later provided to the Post by Donald Trump's attorney, Rudy Giuliani. The subpoena to seize the laptop was issued by a grand jury on behalf of the US attorney's office in Wilmington, which was later reported to have been investigating Hunter Biden about lobbying and financial matters since at least 2018.
The veracity of the Post's reporting was strongly questioned by many mainstream media outlets and analysts due to the initially unclear origin and chain of custody of the laptop and the provenance of its contents. Due to prior Russian influence campaigns during the 2016 election, particularly the release of documents obtained by Russian cyber attacks targeting John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee, media outlets and intelligence officials also became suspicious of a possible disinformation campaign by Russian intelligence or its proxies. Analysts also suspected Russian involvement in the 2017 leaks of emails involving French president Emmanuel Macron two days before national elections, which contained fake emails mingled with genuine ones. Adding to concerns, Giuliani had met with Andrii Derkach, later confirmed to be a Russian agent, while conducting opposition research against Joe Biden in Ukraine in 2019.

''New York Post'' reporting

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. Joe Biden stated in September 2019 that he had never spoken to his son about his foreign business dealings. 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". Michael Carpenter, Vice President Biden's foreign policy adviser in 2015, told The Washington Post that he had accompanied Joe Biden during all of his meetings about Ukraine: "He never met with . In fact, I had never heard of this guy until the New York Post story broke." 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."
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. 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, even though Shokin had not pursued an investigation into Burisma's founder. 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.
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 addressed to him. In a subsequent email, Hunter 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.
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. The Washington Post investigated the April 16, 2015, dinner. 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". Leach said that Joe Biden briefly dropped by the dinner to meet Alex Karloutsos. According to Leach, Joe Biden "didn't even sit down. He was not part of the dinner or part of the dinner discussion." Karloutsos, a longtime friend of Joe Biden, had an influential role in the Greek Orthodox Church that Joe Biden long worked with. Karloutsos corroborated Leach's account. Also, according to The Washington Post, the tentative guest list for the dinner included the name "Vadym" with no surname listed.