Federal prosecutors have confirmed in a new court filing the authenticity of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop and that when investigators took possession of the device and searched it, they found its contents largely overlapped with records obtained from President Joe Biden’s son’s Apple iCloud account.
Hunter Biden has pleaded not guilty and is trying to get the gun charges thrown out, arguing that the case is a politically-driven “vindictive prosecution” and that special counsel David Weiss filed the charges due to Republican pressure.
Mr. Weiss’s team of prosecutors rejected Hunter Biden’s claim in the Jan. 16 filing, calling it a “conspiracy theory” that is unsupported by evidence.
“Stripped of its bluster, the defendant’s theory of vindictiveness is simply not credible,” prosecutors wrote in the filing. “Left with the inconvenient truth of trying to explain how this could happen during the Biden Administration, the defendant suggests that evil motives are lurking deep within the Department of Justice.”
“This theory is a fiction designed for a Hollywood script,” the prosecutors added.
But beyond the substance of the filing—namely rebutting the president’s son’s claims of a vindictive prosecution—the document also reveals new details surrounding the infamous Hunter Biden laptop that was at the heart of a censorship-by-proxy scandal ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Hunter Biden Laptop
Prior reporting indicates that computer shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, said that Hunter Biden dropped off three laptops at his Delaware-based shop in April 2019 and requested that data be recovered from them.Mr. Isaac has said that Hunter Biden never returned to pick up the only laptop that was salvageable, while claiming he turned the device over to the FBI in December 2019.
The recent court filing indicates that, while Hunter Biden was being investigated on suspicion of tax violations in a separate case from the gun charges, the IRS and the FBI obtained a search warrant in August 2019 for his Apple iCloud account.
In response to the warrant, Apple produced backups of data from Hunter Biden’s various electronic devices that he had backed up on the iCloud account.
“Investigators also later came into possession of the defendant’s Apple MacBook Pro, which he had left at a computer store,” the document reads, though it does not name the computer repair shop.
“A search warrant was also obtained for his laptop and the results of the search were largely duplicative of information investigators had already obtained from Apple,” the court document reads.
This is significant because neither Hunter Biden nor his lawyers have ever acknowledged that the laptop was his, only that Mr. Mac Isaac (along with former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani) accessed and spread digital data belonging to Hunter Biden in the final weeks of the 2020 election.
Hunter Biden has sued both Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Mac Isaac over the matter, claiming in separate lawsuits invasion of privacy, as well as hacking and manipulating unlawfully obtained personal data and disseminating it.
Both Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Mac Isaac have denied any wrongdoing.
Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, did not respond to a request for comment on the court filing, which appears to confirm the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop and of which he has avoided acknowledging that it belonged to him.
Some of the contents of the laptop included embarrassing photographs of Hunter Biden, including one apparently showing him passed out with a crack pipe.
The court filing also states that the FBI later obtained a warrant to search Hunter Biden’s electronic records for evidence of federal firearms violations and found incriminating evidence, including evidence that the president’s son was addicted to controlled substances while possessing a firearm.
New York Post’s Laptop Story Suppressed
Several weeks before the 2020 election, the New York Post published a story on the contents of the laptop, alleging Biden family influence peddling.The article was suppressed by companies like Twitter (now X), which claimed the story was based on hacked materials.
The New York Post’s story titled “Smoking-gun Email Reveals How Hunter Biden Introduced Ukrainian Businessman to VP Dad” was published on Oct. 14, 2020.
Twitter first prevented the sharing of the story for 24 hours before reversing the decision. However, the story did not circulate on the platform for weeks because of a policy requiring the original poster to delete and repost the original tweet.
Other efforts emerged to discredit the story, including a letter penned by former intelligence community members saying that the story bore the typical hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign possibly meant to sway the election.
Republicans have alleged that Twitter’s decision to block the spread of the article amounted to election meddling, with some polls indicating that if people had been aware of the laptop’s contents they wouldn’t have voted for President Biden.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has alleged a broader conspiracy to bury the story.
Former Twitter executives have said that putting an extended lock on The New York Post’s account over the Hunter Biden laptop report was a mistake.
