File photo of US President Joe Biden with his son Hunter Biden. AP
New Delhi: After a couple of years of denial and deflection, US President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden admitted that the laptop with proofs of influence-peddling for Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma belonged to him.
Hunter’s lawyer on Wednesday sent a letter to Delaware Attorney General admitting the laptop belonged to Hunter and requesting an investigation on the people behind what he called breaching privacy and making the private data public.
The Laptop was given at a Delaware repair shop in 2019 owned by Mac Isaac. Isaac, after trying to unsuccessfully notifying Hunter for months that the laptop was fixed and ready to be picked up, came across the incriminating content on its hard drive, turned it in to the FBI. But before that he made a copy of the data and given it to Robert Costello, the lawyer to Rudy Giuliani, who was the then President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.
Hunter’s lawyer has accused these people of illegally using private property, the laptop, and its misapplication.
However, Costello has said that the laptop was considered legally abandoned as it was picked up within 90 days.
Mac Isaac has a “signed work order that gives [him] authorisation to examine the hard drive and the property is deemed legally abandoned after 90 days. It is the property of John Paul Mac Isaac”, Costello was quoted as saying by The New York Post.
The people, the letter asks to be investigated have dismissed it as a desperate attempt to take away focus away from the crime just before the Congress is supposed to open an inquiry into the case.
The House Oversight Committee will commence hearings next week.
Garrett Ziegler, former Trump White House aide, said, “desperate attempt by the Biden family to get the spotlight away from their crimes.”
Hunter Biden laptop saga
In October 2020, The New York Post reported the emails recovered from Biden’s laptop that laid bare how the then Vice President’s son roped in his father’s influence, who was at the time head of Obama administration policy on Eastern Europe.
The email exchange revealed that a Burisma official thanking Hunter for arranging a meeting with his father. Months later a Ukrainian investigator probing corruption at Burisma was fired. Joe Biden later publically, in a rather boisterous fashion, said that he warned Ukrainians of withholding critical aid until the investigator was fire.
Since the story broke in October 2020, Hunter initially denied that it was his laptop and later in 2021 moved on to deflection by saying that it may belong to him or he may be a target of Russian propaganda.
“There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me,” Hunter told CBS during a 2021 interview.
“It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was the — that it was Russian intelligence. It could be that it was stolen from me.”
US intelligence officials at the time termed the revelation a part of Russian propaganda before the 2020 US elections, which eventually saw Joe Biden win and become the president.
However, later investigations by publications like New York Times and Washington Post confirmed the revelations.
At the time even Twitter had restricted the story. Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk recently handed over the internal correspondence from the company to independent journalists, who have since been publishing the behind the scenes conversations that led to censorship in a tweet series called Twitter Files.
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