The trove of data, nicknamed “the laptop from hell”, is causing serious questions for the Biden family, which has repeatedly denied wrongdoing by the president. While the emergence of the laptop was initially branded “Russian disinformation” by senior Democrats, coming as it did in the last days of the 2020 election campaign, the authenticity of the emails has not been denied and the constant trickle of data means the questions are not going away.
Suspicion fell on Joe Biden after the reference to “10 held by H for the big guy?” in an email proposing equity shares in a Chinese joint venture on May 13 2017. It has led to allegations that this meant Hunter was to hold the share for his father, although the deal never came to pass.
The White House continues to maintain that Joe Biden had “never spoken” with his second son about “overseas business dealings”, which is not quite a denial of claims that he could have been a silent partner.
As for the claims of Russian dirty tricks, John Paul Mac Isaac, the computer repair shop owner behind the data being made public, has written a book to be published in November giving his side of the story.
In his book,
American Injustice, he says he made repeated attempts to return the laptop and then hand it over to the authorities. He said he was angered that, after he gave all the material to the FBI, it did not feature in the first impeachment of President Trump over his pressure on President Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. Mac Isaac says that spurred him to hand a copy of the data to Robert Costello, a lawyer for Rudy Giuliani, who in turn was acting as Trump’s lawyer.
He said he did not trust law enforcement in the Bidens’ home state of Delaware so asked his father, a retired Air Force colonel, to take a copy to the FBI in New Mexico. The FBI refused to accept it and sent him away, Mac Isaac says, making contact again a month later. It led to the FBI coming to Mac Isaac’s shop in December 2019 and taking everything connected to the laptop, he says, adding that he secretly gave a copy to a friend in case anything happened to him.
“When the impeachment happened, I still had my fingers crossed that the FBI was going to admit the laptop as evidence, so the White House had it for defence,” he says. “My heart sank when the impeachment trial concluded, and there was no sign of that laptop anywhere, because I had definitely seen stuff on that laptop that would have justified a phone call to Zelensky, saying what happened during the former administration, because there was a lot of money exchanging hands.”
Mac Isaac says the non-appearance of the laptop during the first impeachment, which concluded in February 2020 with Trump being found not guilty in a Senate vote, led him to contact several Republican senators, again via his father. He says none were interested and has not named them.
Finally he says he sent a copy in August 2020 to Giuliani’s lawyer, leading to the first story appearing in the
New York Post on October 14, 2020. The first time he heard anything from the Bidens since the external hard drive was dropped off in April 2019 was on October 13, 2020, he says, when “Hunter’s lawyer calls me to see if I was still in possession of the laptop”. He says he did what the FBI told him to do if anyone contacted him — stall, say it is in an offsite location and tell the FBI.
Since the publication he says that death threats forced him to close his shop and move away from Delaware.
His suspicions about the authorities closing ranks to protect the Bidens were fuelled when Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, appeared before Congress on October 28, 2020 to testify about election disinformation.
Zuckerberg told the Senate hearing that he was not warned specifically about the
New York Post laptop story but that the FBI “alerted us to be on heightened alert around a risk of hack and leak operations, around a released trove of information”.
Mac Isaac calls the appearance of “collusion” between federal authorities and media “obscene”. “It’s like they had the whole year that they were in possession of it, that they were waiting for something to happen, and then I decided to do something. And then they immediately warn.”
Hunter Biden made about $11 million in six years from 2013 to 2018 but spent so freely that by early 2019 he was turning to his father to pay off debts of more
t.co