Member Newsletter
Last week we discussed new, truly smoking-gun evidence confirming what has always been pretty obvious to anyone with their eyes open: the entirety of the “Hunter Biden scandal,” to the degree that it has anything to do with President Biden or Ukraine, is the product of a disinformation campaign run by Russian intelligence. What’s more, to whatever extent the younger Biden might be guilty of tax crimes or other wrongdoing tied to his multi-year drug binge, the fact that those issues came to light is highly, highly likely to be the work of Russian intelligence or those working on their behalf.
The first point is not even really disputed now. That comes down to the new federal charges against Alexander Smirnov, the once purportedly trusted FBI informant who the Hunter Biden special counsel’s office now says is part of an ongoing plot to spread “misinformation” and “lies” from “Russian intelligence officials,” not just about 2020 but to affect the 2024 election as well.
But a lot of this goes back to 2020 and what we must now call the fabled and notorious “Hunter Biden laptop.” In the final days of the 2020 campaign The New York Post published what were billed as blockbuster emails from the laptop. Almost the entire U.S. political media had by that point spent four years in a mix of second-guessing and navel gazing over their treatment of the hacked DNC emails in 2016. The laptop emerged from such a forest of red flags that the Post was the only U.S. publication that would touch the story. This was especially the case since the laptop was being hawked by none other than Rudy Giuliani who had helped get the President impeached a year earlier over the the Russian dirt safaris he’d been running in Ukraine and other parts of the former Soviet Union.
There were so many red flags tied to the laptop that other media organizations at first kept their distance and Twitter briefly blocked access to the story on the platform. Soon after the Post story ran, a group of 51 former intelligence officials released a public letter saying the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Beyond whatever the laptop contained, these initial reactions, including the letter, became a flashpoint of Trumpite grievance even down till today, purported “election interference” that prevented the election eve document dump from turning the election for Trump.
I was reminded of this as recently as last night when I saw a video of Donald Trump’s latest interview with Fox News in which Brent Baier confronts him pretty directly with the fact that he lost the 2020 election. Full stop. Trump starts filibustering and starts blurting out these code phrases that most people who aren’t in the MAGA world couldn’t even understand. (It’s actually a good piece of evidence for the Trump rage dementia discussion, but that’s a topic for a different post.) Part of that comes when he says “FBI Twitter … the 51 agents” and then, later, “including things like the 51 intelligence agents …” This is all a reference to the letter. It’s like literally the second brain bucket fragment Trump reaches for when he’s confronted with a Fox News interviewer just saying, more or less, “Dude, you lost. Take the L and move on.”
But now, with the Smirnov revelations, some of those “51 agents” are quite understandably on a bit of a vindication tour. Ken Dilanian has a piece on that here. As Dilanian makes clear, the issue has never been whether the emails on the purported laptop are real. The issue is how exactly these private emails and photos managed to enter the public domain three weeks before the 2020 election. After all, all the Russia-hacked DNC emails from 2016 were, so far as we know, authentic too. This is a distinction many miss and many others willfully elide. The argument of those former intelligence officials today is that whatever the truth ended up being their request for caution was merited and offered in good faith.
But as I’ve argued, I’m pretty sure they were right. And I’m pretty sure they think they were too. The latest Smirnov revelations only make that even more clear. At every stage of the Hunter Biden and Burisma/Biden/Ukraine bribes stories the fingerprints of Russian intelligence have been there. It simply defies credulity to believe that the younger Biden’s trove of emails coming to light weeks before the 2020 election somehow was the one legit link in the whole chain. That is especially the case because the purported legend or cover story has simply never passed the laugh test.
My strong sense based on all the available evidence is that the government has simply never really investigated that point. To the best of my knowledge the most specific information about this comes from a filing by Special Counsel Weiss’s office from January responding to Hunter Biden’s petition to throw out the charges against him. That filing notes that prosecutors verified at least some of the contents of the laptop by comparing them to contents of Hunter Biden’s Apple iCloud account, which they had subpoenaed. But about the physical device itself it simply says in passing: “Investigators also later came into possession of the defendant’s Apple MacBook Pro, which he had left at a computer store.” This suggests little more than a pro-forma investigation of the chain of custody of the laptop. Whistleblower Gary Shapley told House investigators that the FBI had also tied the computer’s device ID to that iCloud account, suggesting that that computer had at least backed up to Biden’s iCloud and lends credence to the belief that the physical device was Biden’s regardless of how it got to the repair shop.
As of now we still don’t know whether that was Hunter Biden’s laptop, how and whether it got the repair shop, and just how the FBI investigated its provenance, chain of custody and genuineness. It certainly would merit another look, given the special counsel’s rapid turnabout on Russia’s role influencing its own investigation since that January filing.