Front Burner - The sordid saga of Hunter Biden’s laptop

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

You’ve probably heard about Hunter Biden’s laptop. The laptop and the trove of data on it belonging to U.S. President Joe Biden’s youngest son first surfaced publicly just weeks before the 2020 presidential election. At the time, it was largely discredited as foreign meddling and a disinformation campaign intended to sway the presidential race. Since then, several media outlets have verified that at least some of the data on the laptop is real. Meanwhile, the laptop has taken on a life of its own. Depending who you ask, it's either a distraction, or the key to unlocking untold stories of political corruption and shady dealings overseas. New York Magazine journalists Olivia Nuzzi and Andrew Rice spent six-months looking into the laptop: what’s on it, the cast of characters responsible for its public release, and the legal investigations that have followed. Today, Andrew Rice joins us to share what they found.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. So I'm sure over the last couple years, you have heard about Hunter Biden's laptop. You know, the trove of data belonging to U.S. President Joe Biden's youngest son. Not the beloved veteran son who died of cancer in 2015. The one who's battled addiction, had an affair with his brother's widow. The one who was at the center

of a pressure campaign Donald Trump employed upon Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to dig up dirt on Hunter's business dealings in Ukraine. This pressure campaign, as you also likely remember, led to Trump's first impeachment. But Hunter Biden's laptop has also taken on this lore of its own. It's been weaponized and politicized. The data has been discredited. So much so, I know from my own perspective, I became so perplexed about what actually happened here, I just gave up trying to understand it.

Which, in retrospect, might have actually been the point. That is until recently, when New York Magazine journalist Andrew Rice and Olivia Newtsey published the clearest explanation yet of what the heck the deal is with Hunter Biden's laptop. And Andrew is with me today to take us through what they found. Hey, Andrew, it is so great to have you on the podcast. Thank you for making the time. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk with you. Me too, me too. So I feel like we should just clarify before we go any further here. So I feel like we should just clarify before we go any further here.

This isn't actually a laptop we're talking about here, right? Like it is a bunch of data allegedly once from a laptop. That's right. I mean, so the shorthand that everyone on the right uses to refer to it and for the purposes of our story, Olivia and I, you know, adopted it as well. You know, it's called The Laptop. In fact, there's a book written called The Laptop from Hell, which was adapted in turn from the title came from a line that Donald Trump used in a presidential debate in 2020. Nobody. I Trump, I want to stay on the issue of race. We're talking about the issue. Take the laptop from him.

President Trump, we're talking about race right now, and I do want to stay. But even by that point in 2020, when all of this first emerged, there was no physical laptop and there hadn't been for some period of time. Allegedly, the laptop, the original laptop is in the hands of the FBI. No one's ever actually seen a picture of this thing. But what we have at this point are sort of external drives that reproduce, allegedly, again, what was on Hunter Biden's laptop when he dropped it off at, again, once again, allegedly, at a computer repair store in Wilmington, Delaware. And I add all those allegedly is not just for the purposes of being sort of legally, the legal niceties of it, but in fact, because almost every detail that I've described

up to this point has been disputed, has been questioned. The premises have been challenged by any number of different parties. And it's a story in which, you know, each one of the Russian dolls that you open contains a smaller, crazier Russian doll. Yes, that is such a great way to describe it. I'm hoping we can go through some of those Russian dolls in just a minute, starting with that computer repair shop. But just first broadly, so that we're all on the same page here, what's in this data, broad strokes? What kind of stuff are we talking about here? Well, we're really talking about, you know, and our story begins and Olivia and I wrote at the beginning of this that, you know, asking the reader in a way to imagine everything that's on one of their devices. Like if you lost your iPhone or iPad, you know, and everything that was on your iCloud account, you know, was backed up to this physical device. Think about all the kinds of stuff that's on there. There are photographs, Venmo receipts, bank statements, emails, text messages,

all sorts of, you know, things that would tell people about who you are and could piece together a picture of who you are as a person. Now, in Hunter Biden's case, this was aggravated by the fact that he was somebody who, first of all, it's safe to say, you know, fairly interesting personal life, sex life and struggles with addiction. So there were all kinds of rather explicit photographs that documented both his sexual encounters and his use of illegal drugs, including crack cocaine. But then also there's another component of this, which was maybe more substantively relevant to investigative authorities, which is, you know, his business dealings, what he was doing in Ukraine, the business dealings he was doing in China and other places. Okay, but let's go back now and start in Delaware. In 2019, in that computer shop that you mentioned, it's owned by a guy named John Paul MacIsaac,

who really feels like he is right out of central casting. And who is this guy? So John Paul MacIsaac is an individual, lives in Wilmington, Delaware, owned a store called The Mac Shop. The reason he'd become originally skilled in computer technology was that he suffers from a medical condition, albinism, which made his vision very, very poor.

He was able to, however, read and see images on computer screens, work on highly magnified computer screens. highly magnified computer screens. And he said that computers really became a kind of window for him into the rest of the world for somebody who couldn't see very well, couldn't drive. And he basically was just living a normal life until one day, Hunter Biden, again, allegedly walked in his door. He was intoxicated. He had a little bit of a mobility issue. Speech was a little slurred. I asked him to look at three computers, one of which he dropped off and asked to have a recovery performed on it. It was a water damaged computer. So what you might do if you walked into a Mac store or any other computer store and said, okay, I want to get my data off of this. You know, this thing is broken, but I want to salvage what's on it. And he performed that

for Hunter Biden. The condition of the machine didn't allow me to do a, what's called a forensic copy. I had to literally just drag and drop folders. So I dragged the most important folder, dragged and dropped it to the server. Then I said, that's good enough for tonight. So I dragged the most important folder, dragged and dropped it to the server, and I said, that's good enough for tonight, and I left. I came back the next morning to discover that the machine had died during the process. I only was able to recover about a third of the data, so I had to kind of go through and look at what I recovered. That's when I realized that the person that's starring in a lot of this homemade porn is actually the guy that dropped off the laptop. OK, so during the data recovery process...

You know, put everything on external drive and Hunter Biden never came back. Now, the other relevant detail that I've left out so far of my description of John Paul McIsaac was he was also a Trump supporter, somebody who was very steeped in Internet conspiracy theories, Somebody who was very steeped in Internet conspiracy theories and somebody who was very much inclined to think that the Bidens and and other Democratic political figures were were involved in all kinds of nefarious activities, you know, up to and including murder and assassination. So he actually became started becoming very fearful for his safety. This is according to his own account. He started to think of himself, think, how can I protect myself? How can I get this information in the hands of people who might pursue it as a law enforcement matter and protect me from any potential wrongdoing that might come my way by virtue of the fact that this valuable trove of information has fallen into my lap. I needed this thing out of my shop. By then, I definitely saw some things that were a concern,

an obscenely large amount of money being traded hands. I knew that between that and the embarrassing content that was on the laptop, I needed to get this to the authorities, if anything, for my protection. But if anything else, that this was possible evidence in an investigation that needed to be attended to. My understanding is that he starts shopping this laptop around, right, in the fall of 2019. And the first place that he goes, I guess, through his father is the FBI.

And what kind of response does this guy get? So he, a couple things that I should mention. Number one is, you know, that there's a question of sort of who owns this data. Right. And so he he claims that after 90 days that the that the device and all the data on it became his under the terms of a sale bill of sale that he signed that Hunter Biden signed. Yeah, there's like some fine print or something, right? Rather surprisingly to me, actually, as a layperson, when we talked with Delaware privacy law experts, it turns out that he's probably right. That in fact, this device and everything on it really did become his property after that period expired. So he spent a long period of time before he contacted anybody actually kind of poking around, familiarizing himself with the contents. stories about Hunter Biden and Ukraine and a company called Burisma that figured largely in the Trump, first Trump impeachment. And he had started searching around, finding details,

documents, other things that might in some way be relevant to journalists and to Trump as he sought to defend himself in impeachment. Later on, when the Ukraine was topical in the news during the summer of 2019, that's when I was getting more concerned because I was seeing a lot of names and a lot of numbers that, again, I felt somebody would someday come looking for. So he he he had sort of culled the most relevant things, in his opinion, already from the drive and presented them to the FBI. First, the FBI kind of brushed him off.

And then a couple of agents showed up at his computer store in Wilmington, Delaware in December 2019, served him with a subpoena, took the device away and disappeared. And the device since then has not been seen. Now, that would have been the end of the story if not for the fact that John Paul MacIsaac, in part because he was concerned about his personal safety and the deep state and so on, not fully trusting the FBI, had made another copy. And from that copy, all these other copies have since been spawned. And so when he comes to the conclusion that he doesn't think the FBI is doing anything, or maybe that they're covering something up, what does he try to do? How does he try to get this information out in other ways? He knocks on a lot of front doors.

He tries to contact Jim Jordan, the conservative Republican congressman from Ohio. He tries to contact Lindsey Graham, Donald Trump's defender in the Senate. Neither of them, given the time of day, respond. Presumably these inquiries had ended up in the slush pile in their offices. He even tried to go through a portal on the drive should be passed on to someone that of sort of the foremost, you know, integrity. And that was Rudy Giuliani. Huh. OK. But he didn't he obviously didn't die because because you interviewed him for this piece. So how does it come to be that that copies of this laptop are being made and that it's actually kind of starting to proliferate? Right.

Well, I mean, I guess at some point he decided to, you know, he got tired of waiting for the assassins to come. And so then he decided to just contact Rudy himself. And he got in touch with Rudy Villa. This is one of the most improbable sounding elements of the story, but I found nothing to suggest otherwise that this is not true. Rudy through a web portal on his website, basically writing an initial email suggesting what he had found. And this had basically been picked up by somebody in Rudy Giuliani's office, forwarded on to an attorney for Rudy Giuliani. And Rudy Giuliani is currently facing a number of criminal inquiries, including inquiries into his activities in Ukraine. So his lawyer in those matters was a man named Robert Costello. Costello ended up with the drive.

Costello is an older fellow and didn't know a whole lot about computers, but he got his younger son, who did know a lot about computers, to come over to his house, boot the thing up. And he took one look at it and he said, you know, called up Rudy Giuliani and said, you know, Rudy, you're not going to believe what I have here. I got the hard drive legally, completely legally. I'll see you next time. entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To

listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Okay. So then what happens after that? Because we know from your reporting that it comes onto Giuliani's radar in the summer of 2020. And then, of course, 20 days before the November 2020 election, the New York Post publishes this front page story with the headline, Biden's secret emails. And so how does that come to be? Well, so Rudy and Bob Costello get all this material. And one thing that's interesting about the laptop, a person who will come into play in a few sentences in this story, Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon said to me that, know said to us that uh you know people everyone sort of sees their own obsessions and the laptop so rudy and and bob costello were initially focusing primarily on on ukraine because that's what rudy is most interested in

and he felt like that there was information on the laptop that substantiated his belief that the Bidens were involved in corrupt criminal dealings in Ukraine during the latter part of the Obama administration afterwards. The amount of crimes that Democrats committed in Ukraine are astounding. And when you say they wanted to get it into, you know, a broader circulation than just right-wing media. So they brought in Steve Bannon, somebody who's quite brilliant in his ability to take stories like this and package them in such a way that mainstream media outlets are unable to ignore them. So Bannon gets a hold of it he sees all these stories he sees his own obsessions in there he's most obsessed with china so he sees a whole big story about china in there and he he decides that you know that this is a unlocks the key to all kinds of different corruption they try to bring in some journalists into it to write about this thing. The first,

they talk with Fox News, they talked with the Daily Mail. Neither of them were particularly interested because the drive itself presented such huge problems with verification. And despite their ideological leanings, neither of those publications were willing to take the risk. So the third stop was the New York Post, which was a tabloid much more willing to take some risks. And this reporter, Emma Jo Morris, suddenly came to think, you know, this is a huge story. The New York Post has published damning emails found on an old computer once owned by the facts? Like, what does the New York Post report? And does it show irrefutable evidence of corruption? criminal investigation. The dimensions of that federal criminal investigation are not, or at least his current dimensions are not known, but they've been reported to involve things like lobbying, foreign lobbying violations, potential tax offenses, and so on. Now, he hasn't been charged with anything, so he's not even alleged to have committed any crimes.

There's very little on the drive that an impartial observer would look at and say, oh, this is a slam dunk piece of evidence that this person is engaged in criminal activity. What there is, is a lot of evidence that Hunter Biden, who lived in Washington for a long time, was pretty reckless in the ways in which he attempted to capitalize on his family connections and his father's power or proximity to powers as vice president. One other thing that's really relevant to mention, though, is there's really very, very, very little evidence whatsoever, despite much looking around for it, that Joe Biden either profited from or even had full knowledge of all of these business activities. I think it's fair to say that probably he, as a father and somebody who wasn't a dummy, he knew that his son was out there doing some fairly adventurous and or reckless things. But it seems as if the level of detail that he knew is disputed or is something that could be disputed.

And also, there's no real suggestion, no credible suggestion that Joe Biden profited from any of this. So the question is, what is the greater relevance of all of this material? If it doesn't show criminality, what does it show? Okay, and then there's this whole other thing going on, which, you know, I think is part of the reason why I found myself so perplexed by this story when it was rolling out in the first place, which is that like the response to the laptop becoming public from Hunter Biden wasn't like, hey, look, like you're reading too much into this. There's no evidence here of criminality. It was, this is just Russian disinformation. Over the past few days, President Trump has highlighted a report by the New York Post about Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son. There are major questions about

the origins and the accuracy of that story. And today we learn more about concerns expressed by the president's most senior advisors expressed by the president's most senior advisors, that the president's personal attorney was peddling Russian disinformation. You know, you have to understand, think about the circumstances under which this emerged. It emerged, you know, in mid-October, within a couple of weeks of the 2020 election you know the lesson rightly or wrongly the lesson taken from 2016 was that uh this sort of late breaking information uh or misinformation could be you know influential on the election and that and that journalists and tech platforms especially need to be vigilant about this sort of stuff so when when this immediately came out, there was a group of more than 50 intelligence agency leaders who signed an open letter saying this has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.

In a presidential debate that happened soon afterwards, Joe Biden, in response to Trump calling at the laptop from hell, said, you know, this has been discredited by our former intelligence agency leaders. This is this is Russian disinformation. It's been totally, thoroughly discredited. By who? The media? By everybody. Well, by the media, by our allies, by the World Bank. By media. By everybody. Well, by the media, by our allies, by the World Bank. And it was actually the Twitter and Facebook went so far as like, you should be on high alert. We have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump. So just

be vigilant. Fewer people saw it than would have otherwise. So basically, Twitter banned users or or froze the accounts of users who tweeted about this laptop, you know, basically suggesting that they were spreading foreign disinformation, which is, if you think about it, a really extraordinary step for a tech platform to take about something that doesn't really know the facts of. Yeah. As it turns out, you know, it wasn't Russian disinformation or at least solely Russian disinformation. vast majority of the material on the laptop is real. But there's really been no reckoning either within the tech companies or within the media about how this was handled.

to suppress the story and write it off as fake, you know, before really examining the details, you know, because of the concerns about the credibility of the people who are coming forward with it. Yeah, yeah. You know, I saw in your piece that you actually started to phone up a bunch of those security types that signed that open letter, like James Clapper types. And they were just like, well, you know, it's fine. We raised a yellow flag. It's okay. Yeah. And I mean, you know, again, in their defense, they were, you know, they're operating in real time. And Rudy Giuliani comes forward and says, hey, I've got a, I found a bunch of, I found a bunch of emails, you know, that are damaging to the Democratic political candidate, you know, Democratic Democratic presidential candidate. Rather, you know, you do start to say, like, well, I've heard this song before if you live through 2016.

So it's understandable that they had that reaction. But nonetheless, I think, you know, it's a moment for possibly reflection within, you know, within the quote unquote media and big tech organizations to think about like, well, how do we evaluate what things we think are misinformation? What, you know, and how do we decide, you know, what's outside the bounds of polite discourse? Is that one of the reasons you wanted to take on this investigation? I mean, it strikes me as such an important thing to take a hard look at. such an important thing to take a hard look at. I mean, I think that it was certainly part of it. I mean, you know, it wasn't until March of this year that, you know, the New York Times wrote a story about Hunter Biden's legal issues and mentioned in the sort of deep, deep down in the story that many of these emails had been authenticated by people familiar with them. And, you know, I think that was a moment when I said, oh, well, hold on a second. Maybe it's

time to reevaluate this. You know, wait a second. This thing was real. Like, what does that really mean? If it turns out that that's real, what else is on it that's real? You have a lot of people investing a lot of political capital in it and believing that it contains the keys to solving this great mystery. And whether or not there really is a mystery or whether or not those people are wrongly or rightly motivated, it's still worthwhile as a journalist to go and look at the roots of this and how did this come to be? What is this thing? What is this object? How did it become part of a central part of the political discourse in the 47% of the country that voted for Donald Trump? All right, Andrew, thank you so much for this. It was great. Thanks so much for giving me a chance to talk to you.

All right. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.