Hunter Biden Claims His Laptop
And asks his dad’s government to target his critics.
Kimberley A. Strassel, WSJ
Feb. 2, 2023 6:18 pm ET
Hunter Biden did some reckless things, is unhappy people found out, and so is now doing something equally reckless. Oh, and by the way, that laptop really is his.
That’s the news out of a batch of letters sent this week by Hunter’s attorneys. They are demanding federal and state prosecutors and the Internal Revenue Service launch investigations into those involved with distributing the contents of “Mr. Biden’s files” from his infamous laptop. The Washington Post amusingly framed this as a Hunter-gets-“aggressive”-with-his-critics story, relegating the real news to the 20th paragraph: “In filing the complaint, however, Biden’s lawyers seem to be conceding that some of the data that has been made public is his private information.”
Oh? The complaints are in fact an extraordinary admission that Hunter—and his father, President Joe Biden—have misled the country for years. When the New York Post on Oct. 14, 2020 (three weeks before the election) published emails that it said came from a Hunter laptop dropped off at a Delaware repair shop, the information was immediately branded Russian disinformation by the media, a claque of “former intelligence officials” and the Biden campaign. This provided a rationale for social-media companies to shut down the story despite this column’s reporting that Hunter’s own business partner—Tony Bobulinski—confirmed the authenticity of key documents on the laptop.
This week’s letters show that Hunter also knew the laptop’s contents were real—yet he continued to mislead. In an April 2021 CBS News interview, Hunter was asked point-blank: “Was that your laptop?” He said he didn’t know. Pressed further he said: “There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me. It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was Russian intelligence. It could be that it was stolen from me.”
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Like son, like father. In the run-up to final presidential debate on Oct. 22, 2020, a Biden campaign official declared: “If we see tonight from Donald Trump these attacks on Vice President Biden’s family, I think we need to be very, very clear that what he’s doing here is amplifying Russian misinformation.” When Mr. Trump in that debate did bring up “the laptop from hell,” Joe Biden said it was a “bunch of garbage” and cited the “50 former national intelligence folks who said that what . . . he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan.” Mr. Biden said that more than once. His spokeswoman Jen Psaki again called the laptop story Russian disinformation in late 2021.
There are two possibilities here: Hunter misled the Biden team or his father misled the nation. Either way, it was the current occupant of the White House who fed the country “garbage.”
Now Hunter’s attorneys have sent letters to the Justice Department and Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings asking for criminal probes, including into John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the computer repair shop who gave the laptop to the feds and a copy of its contents to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. The letters complain that, “Mr. Mac Isaac’s intentional, reckless, and unlawful conduct allowed for hundreds of gigabytes of Mr. Biden’s personal data” to be circulated on the internet. That would be from Hunter’s very real laptop. The letters also demand investigations into a half-dozen political figures who accessed the laptop’s information. A separate letter requests that the IRS investigate the nonprofit status of Marco Polo, a group that published the laptop’s contents.
This is about as ill-considered as every other Hunter move—from trading on his family name to engaging in suspicious art sales. The letters may be his idea of going on offense now that House Republicans are investigating his business dealings; he may imagine it will influence U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s ongoing investigation into the same. What it actually does is land—yet again—the Biden White House in an ethically fraught sinkhole. Because this comes down to Hunter asking employees and buddies of his dad to pursue a vendetta on his pampered behalf. Classic.
How’s it going to look if, at the demand of the president’s son, the Justice Department unleashes the full force of the federal government on the people who exposed Hunter’s problematic foreign dealings, including documents that raise questions about Joe Biden’s knowledge of those affairs? Or if Ms. Jennings—a self-proclaimed lifelong friend of the Bidens who once worked under Hunter’s brother, Beau—snaps to command? Or if the IRS—with all its baggage—moves to strip the status of a conservative nonprofit at Hunter’s insistence?
The mainstream media only last year roused itself to acknowledge that the laptop was real. These letters constitute further omelet on the faces of those who spent so long denying. Let’s see if the liberal press can now bother to point out the unseemly ethics of the president’s progeny demanding that federal and state law enforcement jail his critics. The Big Guy just can’t shake his Hunter problem.
Write to kim@wsj.com.
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