The man who obtained a laptop computer that appeared to have belonged to Hunter Biden defended himself in a recently released video, challenging the narrative that the computer was hacked.
He said he’s proud to be an American and would have joined the military if he “could see well.”
“Instead, I spend my free time going to veterans reunions, and archiving and preserving true American heroes and their stories. Men who fought in the warmer parts of the cold war against the very people I’m accused of actually being,” he said.
“Another term that I’ve been labeled—which unfortunately is a death sentence in my industry—is ‘hacker.’ For the record, I am not, nor have I ever been, a hacker. Those guys make so much more money than I did. I was hired, and never paid, to perform a data transfer from a MacBook Pro to an external hard drive,” he continued.
“The signed paperwork clearly states the process and sets the expectations. There’s no magic or Hollywood; the process is no different than dragging and dropping from a USB drive. The only difference is that I had to perform some surgery on the Mac to get it to boot to the point where I could recover the data. To imply that I’m a hacker and that that information is hacked has had an irreversible impact on my business and my character.”
A slew of outlets claimed the laptop’s contents were hacked, or suggested they were hacked, despite no supporting evidence.
Twitter initially banned the posting of the initial New York Post article detailing the contents, citing its hacked materials policy. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Congress in October that the company didn’t know if the materials were from a hack. The story “showed the direct materials and screenshots of the materials and it’s unclear how they were obtained.” Dorsey said Twitter’s team made a mistake.
