On March 16, The New York Times confirmed the authenticity of the controversial laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. For the past year, many media outlets have considered the story “fake news” until now.
Hunter Biden’s laptop became an issue in the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election.
After an unidentified person had dropped off the computer at a computer repair shop, a computer technician apparently found data on the laptop suggesting that Hunter Biden’s father, Joe Biden, had used his influence as Obama’s Vice President to pressure government officials in Ukraine to fire a prosecutor.
Hunter Biden served as a board member of the energy company the prosecutor was investigating.
Joe Biden admittedly pressured Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, telling them, “If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.”
Biden was referring to the termination of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. The “money” was a reference to a $1 billion loan guarantee the United States offered Ukraine in 2015.
Joe Biden has insisted that both the U.S. and the European Union wanted Shokin fired because of corruption concerns. He has repeatedly denied that the firing had anything to do with his son Hunter.
When confronted about the renewed interest in Hunter Biden’s laptop at a March 17 briefing, White House press secretary Jen Psaki directed the reporter to the Department of Justice, then quickly tried to move on to the next question. Psaki had previously characterized the laptop story as “Russian disinformation.”
The original investigative New York Post story, published on October 14, 2020, showed an email from a Ukrainian energy advisor to Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015. This occurred a year after the Vice President’s son accepted a high-paying job on the board of directors for Ukrainian oil giant Burisma.
The email from Burisma board advisor Vadym Pozharskyi revealed he had met Joe Biden through Hunter, and he thanked the then-VP’s son for inviting him to Washington, D.C. and arranging the meeting.
An earlier email found on Hunter’s computer from Pozharskyi in 2014 requested advice on how he could “use [his] influence” to help the company. This email contradicts Joe Biden’s claim that he had “never spoken to [his] son about his overseas business dealings.”
After an unidentified individual dropped off, then abandoned, a MacBook Pro laptop at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019, the shop owner was unable to contact the customer. The shop owner then contacted the FBI, which seized the laptop.
Investigators reportedly found a 12-minute video of Hunter Biden smoking crack during a sexual act with an unidentified woman and several other sexually explicit images on the hard drive.
The laptop apparently had a sticker on it from the Beau Biden Foundation. Beau Biden, Hunter’s brother, had been Delaware attorney general before dying of cancer in 2015.
Neither the White House nor the Department of Justice issued an immediate response to the confirmation of the story by the New York Times.
