A fortnight before Joe Biden was elected to the White House, a firecracker of a story landed on newsstands and failed to go off. Nearly a year and a half later, it has finally exploded.
A cache of emails detailing the business dealings of Biden’s wayward son Hunter, long ignored and dismissed as a possible Russian disinformation campaign, is finally being accepted as genuine, amid signs that they are part of a potential tax fraud and money laundering investigation.
“At the moment I think there are other issues that are far more pressing, like the invasion of Ukraine and inflation,” said Ben Schreckinger, author of The Bidens, which chronicles the family’s rise and the business dealings of Hunter and Biden’s brother Jim. “But it’s the sort of thing that could come roaring back if there is an indictment, especially if any of the details that come out related to the business dealings get closer to the president.”
Many conservatives are convinced that the original story was suppressed by most of the US media, with the aid of social media companies, to protect Biden’s presidential campaign.
While Donald Trump is still disputing the result of that election, and in the aftermath of a pandemic in which scientists and public health experts were cast as partisans, the saga of Hunter’s laptop has fed the narrative that political bias is everywhere, that no one can be trusted.
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An investigative piece in The New York Times last week treating the emails as authentic, which might once have served as evidence of reporters willing to follow the evidence regardless of where it led, was received instead as the final proof of the liberal media conspiracy. For if the emails were real, why had they been ignored for so long?
Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine and China had long been regarded as a liability for Biden and a focus for Republican Senate investigations, opposition researchers and the noisy inquiries of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
But in the run-up to the 2020 election, it appeared that Hunter had left the evidence they were looking for on a laptop that he dropped off at a computer repair shop in Delaware. The laptop had been seized by the FBI, but not before the computer repairman made a copy of the hard drive and gave it to Giuliani, who gave it, in turn, to the New York Post.
On it was a 2015 email from an executive at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, which had made Hunter an extremely well-paid member of its board, thanking him for an introduction to his father, who was then the vice-president, the Post reported.
A 2017 email from one of Hunter’s business partners detailed a “provisional agreement” for a venture with a Shanghai energy company reported to have ties to Chinese military intelligence, suggesting that ten per cent would be “held by H for the big guy?” One of the partners on the proposed deal, a businessman named Tony Bobulinski gave a statement confirming that H did indeed refer to Hunter, and the big guy, getting the ten per cent, would be his father. The Post said there was also a video of Hunter smoking a crack pipe and engaging in a sex act with an unknown woman, as well as “numerous other sexually explicit images”.
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The 2016 election had been upended by the FBI seizure of a laptop belonging to another political liability, Anthony Weiner, which caused the bureau to reopen its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails. “Biden’s secret emails”, screamed the Post’s front page, four years later. It was déjà vu. But then, nothing happened.
America’s leading newspapers were sceptical. The day after the New York Post’s frontpage, The Washington Post reported on warnings from US intelligence agencies to the White House that Giuliani, the supplier of these emails, had been the target of a covert operation by the Russians. NBC News reported that the emails were being examined by investigators to see if they were part of a “foreign intelligence operation”.
A few days later, more than 50 former US intelligence officials released a letter stating that the emails’ emergence bore “the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” and declaring themselves “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case”. Only a month earlier, the Republican-led Senate had released a report concluding that Russia used Wikileaks to disseminate internal Clinton campaign emails it had stolen in a hacking attack ahead of the 2016 election. Now Twitter went so far as to lock the New York Post account, saying its dissemination of the Hunter story broke its rules against the “distribution of hacked materials”.
The manner in which the story landed in the Post became a cause for suspicion too. The Wall Street Journal and Fox News were both said to have been offered the emails and declined them. At the Post, a seasoned political reporter had refused to put his name on the story, according to The New York Times, which noted that the lead byline went to a deputy editor who had never written a story for the paper, and who had posed for photographs with members of the Trump administration and his campaign adviser Roger Stone.
The Delaware laptop repair man, identified as John Paul Mac Isaac, told reporters he could not be sure who had dropped off the hard drive as he is legally blind. And how likely was it that Hunter, the subject of such intense scrutiny, would drop off compromising material at a repair shop and leave it there?
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Shreckinger, a correspondent for Politico who had begun covering the business dealings of Jim and Hunter the previous summer, found it easier to believe. The “weirdness” of how the emails emerged meant “scepticism was certainly justified”, he said. But “having spent more than a year at that point reporting on the family’s business dealings, understanding the regularity with which the people they were doing business with were getting indicted and getting investigated by the feds, a lot of the stuff that struck people as off struck me as plausible”.
Mac Isaac later released a video statement, recounting how his grandfather and father had served in the US military, fighting “against communism and the Soviets. That’s why it’s completely absurd that anyone would ever consider me to be a Russian agent.” He said three laptops had been dropped off, on the understanding that he would retrieve their contents and put them on a hard drive. The paper work, showing he would be paid $85, included a signature that looked like Hunter’s. “I was hired but never paid,” he said. Under the contract, if the owner did not pick up the computers for 90 days, they became his property.
Shreckinger said he obtained the emails from Trump supporters and contacted third parties mentioned in the messages, who confirmed their authenticity. He also noted that emails between Hunter and the management of a Washington building owned by the Swedish government, which were released by the Swedish finance ministry, matched those apparently found on the laptop.
The New York Times followed suit in a story it published earlier this month, saying that investigators in the Justice Department were examining emails that appeared to come from “a laptop abandoned by Hunter) Biden in a Delaware repair shop”. These had been “authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation”, the paper acknowledged, halfway down its story.
“Heart be still,” wrote the New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin. “It took the Gray Lady nearly seventeen months to grudgingly concede even a fraction of what New York Post readers learned in October 2020.”
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Many conservatives have long suspected a media cover-up to protect the Biden campaign.
Hunter, 52, has not directly denied that the laptop they came from was his. “I don’t have any idea,” he told CBS last year, adding that he could not remember dropping it off.
The emails with the manager of Sweden House, relating to an office he set up there in 2017 while working with the Chinese energy company, offer a glimpse of how Hunter’s lifestyle could become a liability, Shreckinger writes in his book. After the manager of Sweden House reprimanded him for allowing guests to enter after hours through a back entrance, without going through security, Hunter accuses her of racism, he writes. These visitors appeared to include a homeless woman Hunter nicknamed Bicycles, who supplied him with crack cocaine and had lived with him for several months the previous year, and Lunden Alexis Roberts, a graduate student at George Washington University who also worked as a stripper. Roberts would later sue him for paternity payments after a test established that he was the father of a child she gave birth to the following year.
But as for the insights the emails offer on his business dealings, with foreign executives attracted by Hunter’s proximity to his father, “there are questions but it’s not like there’s some kind of smoking gun,” Shreckinger said. James Gilliar, who wrote the email apparently proposing that a portion of equity in a deal be held “by H for the big guy”, has said that Joe Biden was not involved in any of the discussions and the venture generated no revenue.
“Clearly in the context of the culture of Washington DC, this is not the most abhorrent behaviour,” Shreckinger said. “This is, to a lot of people, business as usual,” he said, though he added that to the broader electorate, it might look more questionable.
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Jessica Tillipman, assistant dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School, said that adult children of government officials were not bound by government ethics rules. “It’s unsavoury,” she said. “I’m not saying there is nothing there. It’s just not illegal.”
But that inconvenient detail is highly unlikely to discourage the president’s conservative opponents. The Hunter Biden Laptop Saga may just be getting underway.
