Hunter Biden laptop controversy
[5][4][3] The media coverage of the laptop spurred speculation about the Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory, which falsely[27] 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 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.
[1][12] 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.
[43][44] 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.
[45][46] 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.
[1] Mac Isaac eventually brought the laptop to the attention of the FBI, who seized it in December 2019, under the authority of a subpoena issued by a Wilmington grand jury that had been investigating Hunter Biden for financial matters since 2018.
[1][13] 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".
[59] The Daily Beast reported that according to two "individuals with direct knowledge", multiple senior officials in the Trump administration and re-election campaign were aware of the laptop hard drive "several weeks" prior to the New York Post story.
[61] 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.
[63] 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 Joe Biden.
[42] In 2022, Mark Zuckerberg stated that an FBI warning about a possible Russian disinformation campaign prompted Facebook to remove content purporting to convey facts concerning the laptop story.
[70] Earlier in October, before the Post's report, White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, former deputy White House counsel Stefan Passantino, former Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski, and close Donald Trump Jr. associate Arthur Schwartz 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 due to its combination of conservatism and industry credibility.
Following this development, some Republicans and conservative commentators sought to cite materials found on the laptop to suggest improper activity by the Bidens, relating to classified information and possible corruption.
In one case, an email from the laptop that Hunter Biden apparently sent to his business partner as they prepared to work for Burisma in April 2014 came under the scrutiny of Fox News, and senators Ron Johnson and Ted Cruz.
[77] 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.
[79][80][81] In November 2022, CBS News published the results of a forensic analysis they commissioned of a copy of the laptop data Mac Isaac initially handed to federal investigators in 2019.
"[82] In December 2020, Mac Isaac sued Twitter for defamation over their handling of the New York Post story, claiming that their decision to remove the article under their "hacked materials" policy falsely tarred him as a hacker.
[87][88] In September 2023, Hunter Biden filed a civil lawsuit against Giuliani, his companies and attorney Robert Costello, alleging that they had spent years "hacking into, tampering with, manipulating, copying, disseminating, and generally obsessing over data that they were given that was taken or stolen from" his personal devices and caused "total annihilation" of his digital privacy.
[92] In June 2024, special counsel Weiss introduced the laptop, related files, and an invoice from Mac Isaac's repair shop as evidence in Biden's trial in Delaware, in which he was found guilty of purchasing a firearm while a recent drug user.
[93] Defense attorneys for Biden argued that they had "numerous reasons to believe the data had been altered and compromised before investigators obtained the electronic material", which Weiss described as "a conspiracy theory with no supporting evidence".
"[123] On October 14, Trump tweeted about Facebook and Twitter's actions, including a threat to repeal the safe harbor provisions of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, under which they operate.
[118] 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".
Biden administration attorneys responded by saying that the plaintiffs related to the lawsuit lacked standing and that social media companies pursued content moderation policies on their own without "coercive" influence from the US government.
He did not see the New York Post story as Russian disinformation but "a more normal example of late-dropping opposition research, filtered through a partisan lens and a tabloid sensibility, 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.
[140][141][142] In June 2024, the Supreme Court rejected claims that the government unlawfully coerced social media companies into removing posts related to the laptop in Murthy v. Missouri.
Justice Barrett stated that there was a lack of evidence to demonstrate that content moderation decisions could be traced back to actions taken by the FBI or the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
"[150] 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.
Ryan Lizza of Politico wrote: "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.
