Hunter Biden is still denying his four year old daughter his name, but now he’s admitting to something we knew all along: the laptop is his. He’s doing so as a legal maneuver that seems on its face extremely risky, as Kim Strassel explains in the WSJ:
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?
More on the potential legal fallout from Andy McCarthy here.
Over at Public, why the laptop is more important than just the salacious bits:
Many Americans still do not understand why this is an important story. They think the Hunter Biden laptop is simply about him smoking crack, having sex with prostitutes, sexually exploiting his employees, and selling access to his father, President Joe Biden, to Chinese and Ukrainian businessmen.
But Hunter Biden’s laptop may matter less for the crimes it revealed than for the potential crimes that may have ensued. No single fact summarizes the real issue better than this one: the FBI took the laptop from Mac Isaac and six months later warned Facebook and Twitter executives that “Russians would release disinformation” about Hunter Biden just before the 2020 election.
It is possible that the FBI agents who warned Twitter and Facebook executives of a coming Russian “hack and leak” operation relating to Hunter Biden did not know that other FBI agents had the laptop, and were strictly “compartmentalized.”
But it could also be that senior FBI officials, including the top agency officials, did, in fact, know that the laptop was real. Former top CIA media analyst Martin Gurri said, “I don’t think there’s any other possibility…. They knew about the laptop or must have known. And why did they say it was coming in October? They were seeding the ground to say, ‘You shouldn’t cover that.’ It was such a perversion of the truth.”
What makes the episode even more suspicious is that when the New York Post published wholly accurate information from Hunter Biden’s laptop on October 14, 2020, the FBI’s former counsel-turned-Twitter deputy counsel, Jim Baker, urged Twitter executives to censor The New York Post story.
Five days later, over 50 former intelligence community leaders claimed that laptop emails had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” but they didn’t. In fact, if there were “classic earmarks,” they were that the emails authentically belonged to Hunter Biden.
Proof of that comes from the fact that Twitter’s own internal Head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, and his team concluded the emails were authentic when they evaluated the New York Post article, in part based on the contract, with Hunter Biden’s signature, and the FBI subpoena to Mac Isaac
The apparently coordinated effort by existing FBI officials and former FBI and other intelligence community leaders to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop may represent election interference and the politicization of the FBI, an extremely dangerous situation that all Americans, no matter their politics, should fear.
Read the whole thing — and subscribe to Public, it’s really excellent.
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