On December 3, 2018, at least per emails in the MarcoPolo set at BidenLaptopEmails dot com, Hunter Biden accessed his Uber account by logging in using his phone, but logging in through what appears to be a Comcast connection in Newburyport, MA, where he was getting treatment from Dr. Keith Ablow.
I found this request as part of my effort to figure out which iCloud accounts were run by which devices during the period — roughly January 14 to February 15, 2019 — when his digital life was being taken over and packaged up as part of a huge political hit job to be used against his father the following year.
It was surprisingly common for Hunter Biden to access Uber by logging in using a browser from a Mac computer, not the phone app. I’m not an Uber user, but isn’t the point that the service relies on tracking you via your phone and its location data?
But when Hunter Biden logged into Uber using his phone, the normal way, he appears to have used his cell service. Again, the normal way.
But on December 3, 2018, Hunter Biden logged into Uber using some Comcast network — not his cell service — in Newburyport MA, in the town but not the exact location where Dr. Ablow’s practice was; this also appears to be a different location from where Hunter would stay in January, as well.
As I laid out in this post, there were several instances during the period where Hunter Biden appears to have been getting his digital life hacked where his communications didn’t connect, starting with an exchange in January 2019 that Keith Ablow facilitated, in Hunter’s first known email to the shrink. It was an exchange asking two doctors for assistance. Hunter asked at one point, “Guys are you getting my emails?,” and contrary to Ablow’s assurances, it appears they were not. If Hunter wasn’t accessing his cell service in this period, that might help to explain why he was sending messages that their recipients weren’t getting.
But this Comcast log-in to Uber is notable for several other reasons.
Around February 13, 2018, Hunter had added his rhbdc iCloud account — the account believed to be taken over a year later — to his Uber account; prior to that his account was exclusively registered to his rhb iCloud account — the account that would be exposed via an encrypted phone backup available through iTunes. For most of 2018, Hunter Biden’s Uber account was common to both of those iCloud accounts. Both emails would get a notice whenever he used the service.
On December 1, 2018, the password was changed, with notice to just the rhb account. There were a bunch of rides on December 3, paid by Venmo (Hunter’s Venmo had definitely been compromised earlier in 2018, but that’s for another post), the Uber receipts for which don’t appear to be in the MarcoPolo stash of emails. On December 3, the rhbdc account password was changed. There was one ride on the rhbdc Uber on December 3 in Newburyport, the same location where the password had been changed.
But from December 3, 2018 through at least February 8, at least per the emails that ended up in the MarcoPolo set, just his rhbdc iCloud account was getting notices from Uber. The first trip showing that Uber had been set back to the way it had been was on February 19, 2019. Then, in the very last days of this email set, following new devices being added to Hunter’s Uber account, three or even four receipts show up.
Some of the rides during this period are pretty interesting, too — such as a 50-minute, 15-mile drive (with no wait time) to go .1 mile around the corner on a key day of the account takeover.
And while it doesn’t show up in the emails, per Gus Dimitrelos — the forensics guy who did a long report for Washington Examiner — the iPhone XS that would be stored to iTunes (registered to the rhb iCloud) had an Uber account showing a modified date on November 22, 2018, a created date of January 22, 2019 — right in the thick of events, and an accessed date of February 3, 2019. I don’t believe those Uber events show up in the MarcoPolo set, even though the set includes emails from both the rhb and rhbdc iCloud accounts and so should reflect changes made on the rhb Uber account.
Among other things, by splitting these two Uber accounts, you might show “Hunter Biden” in two different places at one time. Imagine, for example, if the “other intelligence” the IRS used to justify obtaining the laptop from Mac Isaac was just one of two Uber accounts showing him to be in Delaware?
The possibility that a digital or even physical Hunter Biden was in two places at once in this period brings me to a story about Lyft.
In addition to Hunter’s failed attempt to email two doctors in early January 2019, this post describes a few other communication disconnects in this key period.
- He failed to respond to Ablow’s practice manager when she tried to respond to his droidhunter88 account on January 15
- On January 18, Ablow entirely rewrote a statement for Vanity Fair in such a way that Hunter’s attorney George Mesires — who appears to have passed it onto the magazine — would not have realized it
Metaphorically, at least, Hunter Biden was not publicly speaking for himself in this period.
But there’s one more potential communication disconnect from this period.
On January 24, 2019, an Ablow associate, Greg, had a meeting with Hunter Biden at which (per an email the associate wrote memorializing the meeting), it was decided that Greg would be Hunter’s “Chief of Staff.”
The email memorialization had a list of things Greg was going to do, including communication with two of Hunter’s kids and his lawyer.
And his father’s assistant.
Among the things on the list — right next to sky diving and flying lessons ASAP — was a note to talk to Katie Dodge: “ski’s and gear – need phone number and address to ship to.”
Katie Dodge was Hunter Biden’s long-time personal assistant, who already was doing the administrative things on this list, though not the flying lessons and sky diving. Dodge was doing those administrative things for income less than half of what Greg proposed he should be paid, to do what Dodge was already doing (again, less the flying lessons and sky diving).
On January 29, 2019, five days after this meeting at which Greg made himself Chief of Staff in charge of contacting Dodge about skis and boots — per SMS texts published by Dimitrelos — Dodge wrote Hunter and asked him about paying for his storage facility. At least per the published SMS texts, this was the first she had spoken to Hunter via SMS text since October 2018.
After an exchange about the storage facility, Hunter asked whether she could get his skis and boots and send them to him, “here,” by context, in MA.
Can you get my ski bag- and ski boots – from storage. Fed-ex can pick them up and deliver here or there’s another company that does that and I can get them if someone puts skis and boots where they can pick up.
She seemed surprised by the request, and asked if they had previously been at K Street. She agreed to go get the skis — but noted that would require paying the overdue storage bill — and asked where she should be overnighting them.
Also what resort do they need to go to? What are the dates?
Hunter had no idea where he’s going to be using these skis that he asked her to overnight to MA.
I have neither.
She appears to have sent them, because on February 8, 2019, she asked,
Did you receive your skis?
This SMS conversation — focused largely on paying bills — went on for almost two more weeks. Then, on February 20 (the day after Hunter’s Uber account was restored to the way it had been before December 3), in response to a question about a particular financial change he said he wanted to make, which they had already discussed on February 15, Dodge asked if he had made the call to make that happen.
He seems to have missed that instruction entirely — because of “limited access to communications on all forms.”
No didn’t ! I’ve got limited access to communications on all forms
Then — in what seems like a muddled voice-to-text transmission — he asked her about the skis that she appears to have retrieved from storage by February 8, as if he doesn’t know that.
Ivan you get the skis done I’ll send you a dress tomorrow
She already sent the skis somewhere, but he was offering to send her the address in MA “tomorrow,” so on February 21.
I’m interested in the skis and Dodge’s efforts to retrieve them from storage in the DC area and her follow-up about them on February 8 because one of the things in unallocated space that someone tried to delete — again, per Dimitrelos’s reports — were the February 7, 2019 texts and collision report from a Lyft driver who apologized to “Mr. Biden” for the collision they had had the previous evening, February 6, at roughly this ridiculous part of K Street in Washington DC.
Hunter Biden’s long-time assistant wrote him on February 8, asking if he got the skis she made significant efforts to send him from the DC area to MA a week earlier, with absolutely no awareness that Hunter — or someone presenting as Hunter Biden — was on K Street, side-swiping or getting side-swiped by a Lyft driver.
Now, certainly, it was possible that Hunter Biden drove from MA to DC to be present for a car accident on February 6, 2019. Maybe the trip — by whomever — served to pick up those skis.
But neither he nor his personal assistant seems to have had any clue that that had happened.
Update: After several tries, I’ve taken out errors regarding when the Uber for the XS was set up. Thanks to zscoreUSA for the persistence.
Related posts
The Laptop Everyone Knows as Hunter Biden’s Appears to Have Been Deleted Starting February 15, 2019: This post describes a number of the events that occurred in the key time period, and has a timeline that will have to suffice until I tidy up an updated one.
Gary Shapley and Hunter Biden’s Colleague Named “Z”: One thing that happened in the key period in 2019 is that Hunter Biden’s contacts were restored — which creates the possibility that the publicly released contacts reflect alterations.
Hunter Biden’s Matryoshka Cell Phone: How the IRS and Frothers Got Hunter’s Encrypted iPhone Content: The “laptop” as we know it appears to be the entire iCloud of one Hunter Biden account and a phone containing another iCloud account saved — during the period of compromise — to his iTunes account.
Keith Ablow’s Unallocated Space in Hunter Biden’s Memory: When Hunter Biden went to Newburyport, MA to get Ketamine treatment from Fox News personality Keith Ablow in early 2019, he had a series of communications failures that prevented him from speaking to others directly.