February 6, 2025   9 mins

Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” is at the centre of the reckoning that Donald Trump is bringing to Washington. Almost the first action of the freshly sworn-in president was to sign an executive order stripping security clearances from the 51 former intelligence officials who, in October 2020, signed a letter claiming that emails from the laptop were a “Russian information operation”. Last week, he added a memorandum banning most of the former spooks from entering secure federal facilities. The Hunter Biden censors have, literally, left the building.

Uncritically reported by Politico at the time, their claims helped legitimate the Big Tech censorship of the New York Post — America’s oldest continuous daily newspaper, where I serve as a columnist — which broke the laptop story. The emails put the lie to Joe Biden’s claims that he knew “nothing” about his son Hunter’s overseas business dealings and apparent influence peddling, not least Hunter’s 2015 role in connecting his father, then Barack Obama’s vice president, with executives from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm on whose board Hunter served.

Thanks to the combined efforts of Twitter (now X), Facebook, the mainstream media, and the Deep State, all this was buried, and Biden eked out a win.

Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” is at the centre of the reckoning that Donald Trump is bringing to Washington. Almost the first action of the freshly sworn-in president was to sign an executive order stripping security clearances from the 51 former intelligence officials who, in October 2020, signed a letter claiming that emails from the laptop were a “Russian information operation”. Last week, he added a memorandum banning most of the former spooks from entering secure federal facilities. The Hunter Biden censors have, literally, left the building.

Uncritically reported by Politico at the time, their claims helped legitimate the Big Tech censorship of the New York Post — America’s oldest continuous daily newspaper, where I serve as a columnist — which broke the laptop story. The emails put the lie to Joe Biden’s claims that he knew “nothing” about his son Hunter’s overseas business dealings and apparent influence peddling, not least Hunter’s 2015 role in connecting his father, then Barack Obama’s vice president, with executives from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm on whose board Hunter served.

Thanks to the combined efforts of Twitter (now X), Facebook, the mainstream media, and the Deep State, all this was buried, and Biden eked out a win.

Four years later, a resurrected Trump piled on the punishments for the “spies who lied”, as the Post dubbed the 51 officials. “The signatories willfully weaponised the gravitas of the Intelligence Community to manipulate the political process and undermine our democratic institutions”, he wrote in his Day One executive order, followed by last week’s memorandum banning them from secure buildings.

Trump believes that the actions of the ex-spooks was a major reason why he lost the blisteringly close election of 2020, in which fewer than 45,000 votes in five states made the difference. Yet with Biden out of office, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the magnitude of the crisis that goes beyond a single election: the corruption of both America’s security apparatus and its establishment political class as embodied by the Biden family.

In hindsight, the letter signed by the 51 spies should be seen as a domestic CIA election-interference operation in cahoots with the Biden campaign. It was part of a coordinated Deep State effort to ensure that Donald Trump wouldn’t win a second term and that the sins of Joe Biden remained hidden from the American people.

Five former CIA directors or acting directors signed the letter: Mike Hayden, Leon Panetta, John Brennan, John McLaughlin, and Mike Morell. That last was the principal author, who hoped he would lead the CIA if Biden won the election. In all, 41 of the 51 signatures came from the CIA.

Morell told congressional investigators from the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 that the letter had been solicited by the Biden campaign adviser and future secretary of State, Antony Blinken, in a call to Morell, who quarterbacked it through the CIA classification review process in record time.

We now know, thanks to Andrew Makridis, then the CIA’s chief operating officer, testifying before the Judiciary committee last year, that the letter was cleared for publication by then-CIA director Gina Haspel, a protégé of Brennan’s, who also had her fingerprints on Operation Crossfire Hurricane. The operation was the foundation of Russiagate, which framed the 2016 Trump campaign for “collusion” with the Kremlin, when she was CIA station chief in London in 2016.

Morell told colleagues in an email that the letter was timed to appear on the eve of the final presidential debate to give Biden a “talking point to push back on Trump on this issue”. It worked like a charm, allowing Biden to deflect the bombshell revelations about his family’s international influence peddling.

“Look, there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant”, Biden coolly told the debate moderators. “Four, five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage”.

Trump kept harping on the laptop, with all its evidence of diamonds and millions of dollars that Hunter was paid by Chinese energy company CEFC, whose executives Biden had met in Washington. But Joe Biden denied it all: “My son has not made money in terms of this thing about — what are you talking about? — China”. He concluded his performance by looking down the barrel of the camera and addressing American voters at home: “You know his character. You know my character. You know my reputation is for honour and telling the truth. The character of the country is on the ballot.”

Yes, it was.

Getting Biden to his false vindication during the debate took a months-long team effort. In one of the regular meetings the FBI conducted with social-media companies to sound the alarm about supposed disinformation in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, somebody warned of a “hack-and-leak operations” by “state actors” involving Hunter Biden and “likely” to take place in October, according to a sworn declaration by Yoel Roth, who headed Twitter’s trust and safety department at the relevant time. The warnings were so specific that when the Post’s scoop first appeared, Facebook and Twitter recognised it and immediately throttled its reach.

Twitter claimed the story violated its “hacked-materials” policy. Officials with the company claimed that they couldn’t permit the release of journalistic material not authorised by the subject — a stance that would have rendered impossible the Pentagon Papers, the Abu Ghraib disclosures, and every other legendary scoop celebrated in journalism seminars across the land.

In the event, the laptop hadn’t been hacked. Rather, Hunter Biden had abandoned the waterlogged device in April 2019 at a Delaware repair shop without paying for services, granting the owner what lawyers call “constructive ownership.” Moreover, Twitter executives knew even at the time that their hacked-materials excuse was so much bosh, as we now know thanks to Elon Musk’s disclosure of the #TwitterFiles. But that didn’t stop them from locking the Post’s account for two weeks, silencing the newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton.

“The FBI … knew the Post story was not Russian disinformation.”

Something similar unfolded at Facebook. “Right on schedule,” a Facebook employee said of the timing of the laptop story in an internal chat obtained by the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the weaponisation of government. “FBI tipped us all off last week that this Burisma story was likely to emerge,” an unidentified Microsoft employee wrote in another internal message.

The FBI, too, knew the Post story was not Russian disinformation. The agency had had possession of the laptop for 10 months, as prosecutors would tell a Delaware court during Hunter’s 2024 gun trial. The FBI’s forensic analysis, moreover, had concluded that the device belonged to Hunter, had not been tampered with, and was fit for use as evidence in court. CBS News reached the same conclusion after commissioning its own independent analysis of the laptop in 2022.

How did the FBI have possession of the laptop so much earlier? The Delaware store owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, became alarmed by content he found on the computer that he feared was a national-security risk. He handed the laptop to the FBI in December 2019. Nine months later, Mac Isaac handed Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, a copy of the hard drive, believing a batch of Ukrainian invoices would exonerate Trump during his first impeachment.

At the time, the Internal Revenue Service was investigating Hunter for tax violations related to his international dealings. But every time investigators Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler tried to follow a trail of evidence that led to Joe, they were obstructed by prosecutors in the office of the US attorney for Delaware, David Weiss, as Shapley and Ziegler would later tell Congress.

After they blew the whistle, Shapley and Ziegler were dismissed from their jobs. Still, their testimony derailed the suspicious sweetheart plea deal that the Biden Department of Justice had stitched up with Hunter’s lawyers, which would have amounted to probation on a couple of tax misdemeanours and immunity from future prosecution over other crimes.

The FBI knew something else, too. It had been spying on Giuliani in 2020 using a covert surveillance warrant on his iCloud. Agents thus had access to an email from Mac Isaac to Giuliani, from August 2020, disclosing information from the laptop that would damage Biden’s campaign. The FBI also would have had access to messages between me and Guiliani two months later, indicating that the New York Post was interested in the story.

To sum up all this in other words: The American security apparatus knew that the laptop was authentic; and that buried in the laptop’s treasury of bank statements, corporate documents, and homemade porn were emails that made the Democratic nominee for president look pretty bad. Nevertheless, intelligence officials at the highest levels pretended that the laptop was “disinformation” and prevailed upon Big Tech to censor the Post, with the mainstream media dutifully justifying the censorship in the name of protecting democracy.

Which brings us to Joe Biden’s grift. Depicted through the adventures of Hunter and his fast-talking uncle, Joe’s brother Jim Biden, the scale of the family’s corruption has slowly dripped into the public consciousness over the last four years. This is mainly thanks to congressional committees with subpoena power that sprang into action once Republicans retook control of the House in 2022.

But back in October 2020, the Post was on its own. In its first story, the paper revealed a 2015 email from an executive of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm, which was then paying Biden’s son $83,333 a month to serve on its board (his pay was cut in half after his father left the vice presidency). Vadym Pozharskyi, the executive, thanked Hunter for “the opportunity to meet your father” the previous evening in Washington.

That meeting, we later discovered, was a dinner organised by Hunter in a private room at Café Milano in Washington on 16 April, 2015, at which his powerful father met some of his colleagues from Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan. Upon the story’s publication, Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates told the media: “They never had a meeting”. Months after the election, the White House admitted that Joe Biden did attend the Café Milano dinner.

It was just one of the dozens of meetings he had during his vice presidency with his son’s foreign partners, after which millions of dollars would flow into the family coffers. Hunter would also call his father and put him on speaker phone when he wanted to impress a prospective client or partner, according to Devon Archer, Hunter’s former business partner. Another email published by the Post described a plan to allocate 10 percent of a lucrative Chinese venture to “The Big Guy” — the code name Hunter’s partners used to refer to Joe Biden.

It would take another three years for James Comer, chairman of the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee, to identify 20 shell companies created by Hunter and his partners, into which more than $30 million flowed from Chinese and other foreign entities after Joe Biden became Obama’s vice president. Incremental payments were made from those companies to at least 10 Biden family members, including Joe Biden himself.

Comer released bank records revealing that “Joe Biden received $40,000 in laundered China money from the account of his brother, James [Jim] Biden, and his sister-in-law, Sara Biden, in the form of a personal check”. He uncovered another $200,000 check to Joe from Jim. Both checks were labeled “loan repayment,” and the White House maintained that Joe had kindly helped his brother when he was in need; Comer could find no proof to suggest otherwise.

Even so, evidence from the laptop suggests that Hunter had paid for upkeep and maintenance of Joe Biden’s Delaware estate, as well as the monthly bill for his father’s private cellphone. Hunter footed the bill for a lot of family expenses through the years and often griped in family discussions that he never got sufficient credit. In one message on the laptop, he complains that he has had to “pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years”.

For months after Joe was sworn in as president, Democrats and their media allies ignored the laptop. Some were still in denial right up until the moment last December, when Joe Biden broke his promise not to pardon Hunter.

“Joe Biden effectively pardoned Joe Biden.”

Days before Hunter was to be sentenced over a felony gun conviction in Delaware and felony tax fraud in California, Joe Biden gave his son an unprecedented “full and unconditional pardon” for any crime he might have committed stretching back 11 years to January 2014, the year of Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution, which brought the country under the influence of the vice president from Delaware and opened the door to Biden-family self-dealing.

The pardon timeline covered all the Ukraine grift, and most of the China grift, everything that would implicate Joe Biden in Hunter’s influence-peddling. That’s another way of saying that Joe Biden effectively pardoned Joe Biden.

Then, on 27 December, new photographs emerged from an activist lawsuit against the National Archives showing then-Vice President Biden introducing Hunter to Chinese President Xi Jinping and other Chinese Communist Party dignitaries in Beijing a decade earlier. To Chinese eyes, it was clear when Hunter followed his father off Air Force Two that this was American power come to do private business. A few days later, Hunter would receive a 10 percent stake in the Chinese equity firm BHR. Hunter’s business partner in the venture, Jonathan Li, is pictured in several Beijing photographs gladhanding Joe Biden.

But the scope of Biden’s pardons went far beyond Hunter. Preemptive unconditional pardons were also granted to his brothers Jim and Frank and their wives, and his sister Val and her husband. Jim, who was deeply involved Hunter’s China dealings and had been under investigation by the Department of Justice over various deals invoking Joe’s name. Frank, the youngest, spent years avoiding paying a court-ordered $1 million to the children of a Florida man killed in a high-speed hit-and-run. A few years later, at age 49, he was arrested for shoplifting in a Florida Blockbuster when he allegedly stuffed two DVDs down his pants.

As with Hunter, Joe pardoned his siblings for all nonviolent crimes they may have committed going back to January 2014, in what seems to many like an implicit admission of guilt for the period when Joe’s power and influence in the world garnered a fortune for his family.

For many Democrats on the day of the pardon, disappointment with Joe turned to bitter rancoor. Big Tech, the Deep State, and the corporate media conspired to suppress evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption, and then he made fools of them all. He refused to give up power when he should have, and when they discarded him too late, he snookered them with an unelectable nominee, Kamala Harris, whom he had selected as his veep to fulfil a pledge to hire a woman of colour.

“No one fucks with a Biden,” he is reportedly fond of saying. You could see in the old man’s sly, lopsided grin as he turned away from the camera one last time after his party’s election drubbing, that the muscle memory of a machine politician was in full working order. In his one last act of political bastardy, Joe Biden blew up the Democratic Party. Now, as Donald Trump lays waste to all their works in Washington, they only have themselves to blame.


Miranda Devine is a columnist for the New York Post.

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