Joseph Ziegler Allegedly Chased Doctored Laptop Evidence
Following the news that Fox News has complied with one of Hunter Biden’s demands by taking down a six-part fictionalized series on Joe Biden’s son, Sarah Fitzpatrick, one of the journalists who first reported on Hunter Biden’s threats to sue Fox news yesterday, has a new scoop out.
A retired Secret Service agent implicated in the most clearcut laptop related fabrication, Robert Savage, is suing the NYPost, reporters who claimed that he had helped run cover-ups for Hunter Biden in LA, and the US affiliate of the Daily Mail. (NYP, Associated Newspapers)
A former Secret Service agent sued two news organizations for defamation Tuesday and accused them of publishing stories based on fabricated text messages that he says falsely linked him to Hunter Biden.
Robert Savage, a 25-year veteran of the U.S. Secret Service and the Special Agent in Charge of the agency’s Los Angeles Field Office from 2015-2017, filed the lawsuits in New York against the New York Post and two of its reporters, and the owner and publisher of the Daily Mail.
Savage alleged that the reporters and publications recklessly disregarded information that the text messages, which came from a laptop that purportedly belonged to Hunter Biden, were fabricated. Despite that, they published articles and tweets in 2021 and 2023 that suggested Savage communicated with and met and met with Biden in Los Angeles.
“Rob has not and has never met Hunter Biden, does not know Hunter Biden, has no connection with Hunter Biden, and has never corresponded with Hunter Biden,” Savage’s attorney, Mark Goidell, told NBC News.
The lawsuit itself is not the big part of the story: It’s that someone presenting as Joseph Ziegler questioned Savage about the incident.
In March 2022, Savage was visited at his home by an FBI agent and an IRS agent who said they wanted to ask him questions about his association with Hunter Biden and the laptop. Savage was also served with a grand jury subpoena from the U.S. Attorneys Office in Delaware, which later charged him with tax and gun charges.
NBC News obtained security footage of the interaction, copies of the business cards left by the agents and a copy of the subpoena.
The IRS agent identified himself as Joseph Ziegler, who testified as a whistleblower to a House committee investigating Hunter Biden in 2023. Ziegler alleged that the Department of Justice prosecutors limited his investigation of Hunter Biden, a charge that DOJ officiales denied. Ziegler’s attorney declined to comment.
Goidell said that the law enforcement agencies appear to have ended their investigations of the alleged text exchanges between Savage and Biden.
It has long been known that there was fabricated data on at least some versions of the hard drives created from the laptop. But it has been unclear whether those fabrications existed on the copy shared with the FBI.
If Joseph Ziegler really did visit Savage, it means one of two things: Either there is fabricated data on the FBI laptop and investigators have known that since 2022, or that Ziegler allowed himself to be tainted by the publicly released claims about the laptop, complete with fabricated data.
Remember, in August last year, when David Weiss’ purportedly sheep-dipped prosecutors told Abbe Lowell they were going to pursue felony charges against Hunter Biden, they confidently bragged that they had backstop for all the data on the laptop. They said that four months before they first obtained a warrant to access the laptop for evidence relating to gun crimes.
Their confidence turned out to be misplaced; in filings before Judge Noreika that persuaded her they had plenty of evidence against Hunter Biden, they relied on evidence that appears only to be available from the laptop.
And Savage’s lawsuit strongly suggests that prosecutors are sitting on evidence that they know the laptop is unreliable.
Update: This post has been updated, among other things, with links to the lawsuits.
“And Savage’s lawsuit strongly suggests that prosecutors are sitting on evidence that they know the laptop is unreliable.”
Thank you! Great parsing of this news item! Made my day that your timeline continues to get confirmed:
“If Joseph Ziegler really did visit Savage, it means one of two things: Either there is fabricated data on the laptop and investigators have known that since 2022, or that Ziegler allowed himself to be tainted by the publicly released laptop, complete with fabricated data.”
Wow, it looks like that huge ball of thread has started rolling. How do we contact Ms. Fitzpatrick about her typos and our quibbles? (“…Special Counsel David Weiss, the former U.S. Attorney from Delaware…”) /jk
Thank you too for your tweet and link to the Time Trump interview earlier today.
Thank you again for unpacking this all. Can’t wait to see you cited again in a brief!! So will Ziegler ever face justice? Does Lowell renew motions to get evidence of laptop and/or dismiss? This is more egg on face of Weiss. When does he ever face a reckoning?
Jazzed to face the music with Evidence…
https://youtu.be/qweSlfP6BtI
A sentence from the Fitzpatrick article makes it sound like Savage (like Hunter Biden) was charged with tax and gun offenses. A very indefinite antecedent.
That paragraph has been corrected but, as corrected, they subpoenaed Savage to testify that the story is false to a Delaware grand jury. I don’t see how this relates to a gun purchase or unpaid taxes.
I was puzzled by that too. It seemed super-pre-emptively retaliatory.
Assholes down the rabbit hole into the sinkhole. I wonder if they’ll run into the Kraken down there?
Well this is a good start.
I come here for the NatSec and was drawn in having suffered a dead laptop, and over 20 years ago (before Mac stores) had a lazy “specialist” who once tried to load up a software program to track my keystrokes. Luckily I had clue what he was attempting as I had been employed in a company where we had scoped telco lines and in extremely rare conditions, and only with corporate and customer legal (written) permission, to add the key logger. Obviously I walked out.
This is a personal device of a citizen and what happens with decisions going forward could affect anyone. Add in the hack (physical/virtual) with the spooks, kooks and congress, the timing and warrants, plain view bull on password protected file, sawdust hype – all just sniffing as if a soap opera – while the NatSec remains ignored by the press.
Just an incredible situation as a whole by the press and seemingly courts to blindly hand wave away the interference of politics.
Some great thoughts to ponder. The “usual suspects” in the press, and probably 99% of the courts, have absolutely no solid idea of what you are presenting. Yes, they can bring in their consultants/experts who come with natural biases but the lack of in-house common sense is showing.
That ignorance is why courts are *supposed* to defer to the expertise of the other branches, and particularly in the criminal context, to give great weight to the evidence of pre-qualified experts.
There’s theory, and then there’s practice, but when you have a Supreme Court throwing out the rules we all were supposed to play by, well, that’s a horse of a different color. Then things get *really* challenging for the rule of law.
Awesome, great to see this push back. With the Savage lawsuit and the Fox News taking down the mock trial.
The NY Post Savage lawsuit says his lawyers sent a letter of falsity to the defendant the day of publication of the NY Post article by Devine, 6/22/21.
The article uses Savage’s full name. The article states the book Laptop From Hell will come out in September.
The book ends up being published in late November. The content from the article appears largely verbatim in the book. Though in the book, the former Secret Service agent is listed by first name only, “for legal reasons.”
Taking down the mock trial is the easy step. When and how do they explain to their viewers/subscribers that it was BS from start to finish and will some of their big names have to explain to their audiences how wrong they’ve been?
They could possibly have excused themselves as victims of a foreign disinformation campaign except for the part where they continued to propound the nonsense after Smirnov was indicted.
i noticed the big names but no names of producers. I am pretty ignorant of teevee practices, but from what i understand, it’s the producers rather than the talking heads who manufacture the mischief.
“[I]t’s the producers rather than the talking heads who manufacture the mischief.”
That’s true enough, but it is the talking heads that the audiences tune in to hear. They don’t care who the producers are and don’t know their faces nor have ever listened to their voices.
Sounds like Joseph Ziegler’s man-crush on Hunter Biden caused Joseph not to be able to think str8.
Legally, what can Lowell do with this pretrial if anything?
File for a Brady violation.
Tom Brady? Because the other alternative is effectively dead.
So nothing lol
Especially considering how these judges are so by the book and not entertaining any of the complaints.
I wouldn’t say they’re by the book. Both have invented things that are not there, in Noreika’s case, based off stuff in the NYPost that she claimed was in the memoir.
The only Savage I recognize is a Librarian.
Ha! I wonder how the other Savage got wrapped up in the Biden story. Not related to me, as you know. But it would be interesting to learn the backstory.
It could be because he was already in the news. This story ran in the LA Times (paywall), yahoo provides a link.
news dot yahoo dot com/girardis-secret-wire-fraud-claims-134640512.html
Head over heels for librarians…
https://youtu.be/CsHiG-43Fzg
I dunno, Dan Savage has his moments…
‘Santorum’ alone is worth the price of admission.
Sorries to Bernie Taupin.
So goodbye to whistleblow wags
who bark and howl from the right
you can’t plant lies on a laptop
and make them sound just right
can’t claim you knew what you didn’t know
you’re lies are finally starting to show.
Oh, I hope they throw the whole book at you
and Rudy’s who you get for defense.
Kudos!
(and highly recommend Mr. Taupin’s new autobiography “Scattershot”)
That is good. Oh, so good.
Well done! If I may:
Opening stanza
When are you gonna come clean?
Now that your fiction’s unmade?
You went and you strayed from the straight and the narrow
And now you’re just hoping for shade
You know you can’t con them forever
The truth is, the truth will not hide
We’re not your patsies to be bought for a token
We’re not about to be letting…it ride
Thumbs up.
Thinking of the data wipe of Secret Service comms devices after January 6 and wondering now if Trump-y Secret Service personnel have done more than just delete inconvenient Jan 6-related messages.
Could be as simple as pure fabrication by someone unrelated to Secret Service, but a Trumper SS would know more about the information required to make messages look that much more authentic. Wonder just how deeply NARA has asked SS to look for missing messages?
It’s reassuring to find out that not all Secret Service agents are Trump supporters.
I don’t know how the publications decided they had sufficient proof of Savage’s involvement. The complaint to the NYP points out several markers of fakeness: attribution of the messages (photo, single use phone number not apparently connected to him), inconsistencies with the dates and formatting which if present in the originals should have provoked questions, though like Abbe Lowell’s similar objections to the House Committee parading Hunter’s messages in their hearing, it raises questions about how many of these were added by the graphic design team afterwards.
Would a competent SS, even a Trumper one, frame Hunter in such an shambolic way? Even the Russians wouldn’t have made so many mistakes. Would a sane person implicate a USSS agent (albeit retired) in their plot? This points only one way: the Man for Four Seasons, Rudy Giuliani.
I trust that the USSS investigated this thoroughly to protect their good (!) name and that of their (former) agent.
“I trust that the USSS investigated this thoroughly to protect their good (!) name and that of their (former) agent.”
I don’t.
The NBC article says Weiss is no longer DE attorney. Is that true? I must have missed that news.
“The FBI, the IRS, and the office of Special Counsel David Weiss, the former U.S. Attorney from Delaware who is investigating, declined to comment. “
No.
Why do people think he is not still the USA? Granted he shouldn’t be, but still…
What’s the source of that wacky FBI flowchart which shows on the main page for this story?
A reader by the name of Thomas Fine.
So in an effort to find undeclared revenue and unpaid taxes the FBI and IRS tried to intimidate a former member of their tribe with unverified planted information. Then they pass the information on to the Republicans in Congress who expanded the lie. So much for trying to uncover the truth. If they really believe that planted data is authentic, they need to step up their forensic analysis.
The FBI should have been investigating who planted the information before they allowed Ziegler to testify before Congress.
Why do you believe that it was the IRS and FBI that would be planting this info? I’d be more certain it was folks related to Giuliani and Ukraine, heck, Manafort, over some sort of institutional attempt by IRS or FBI to “get” Hunter Biden. If one looks at who has benefited from the false info here, it is Trumpers and associated fascist whackos, Putin, the Chinese, etc, not the FBI, not the IRS.
I am saying that the FBI and IRS used the planted information. Without verification, the users of the information are no different from the planters. You must believe that the government has the capacity to verify the data’s authenticity.
Early on in the Hunter Biden saga, there was an article on-line from a cybersecurity forensics person, indicating that some or all of the “copies” of the hard drive or drives delivered to Mr. Magoo’s repair shop in CT, had files dating to after Hunter Biden ostensibly lost control of the machines. I can’t locate it now, but the point being that Lowell should intensely question the provenance of every file that reputedly was created by Hunter Biden and, hopefully, expose this as a Russian-engineered smear.
I believe it was the Washington Post article.
As for the computer data, Hunter is working with Denver Riggleman and his team on the forensics of the data. What Riggleman knows, so does Lowell and Hunter. And what they know is probably a lot more than Weiss knows.
TY
So is working with a one term former Congressman who now runs a distillery?
This might be the article I was thinking of…[WAPO paywall]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-biden-laptop-data-examined/
Gift article of WaPo story-
https://wapo.st/4a0ejLR
Seems to validate the letter in 2020 from Nat Def officials.
If Joseph Ziegler really did visit Savage, it means one of two things: Either there is fabricated data on the FBI laptop and investigators have known that since 2022, or that Ziegler allowed himself to be tainted by the publicly released claims about the laptop, complete with fabricated data.
Marcy Wheeler. This is my brain’s devotional to you. I have a big job of grave responsibility in the utilitarian sense because I am very very smart and extremely well educated. If people like me or the professor from Gilligan’s Island getting together with other scientists, doctors, philosophers, lawyers were to think of somebody smarter than them, they’ll think of different people, somebody from advanced freshman physics class or the author of a book or something. If you imagine that, from all of those individuals, now you have a second group of even smarter people. Then imagine a convention of that second group of people. Some people reading this might imagine themselves getting into that second convention. Maybe not. Who cares. It’s not important, except very very smart people always measure themselves against each other. G factor is hitting the bell at the fair.
Gauss would tell you to go away if you didn’t understand Euler’s formula just by looking at it. It’s all a big pissing context like the other day the normally smartest guy at my neighborhood sports bar did an English vocabulary challenge against me basically to prove he was the smartest guy in the bar, like he has been for whatever years, he thinks, but I know Anglo Saxon, and I have a scientific vocabulary of around five thousand words or so, so it’s all ego and vanity. I want you all to know this, so you will think I am very smart, because it’s been a center of what I thought people loved about me since I was a kid. However, in all truth, as someone who once got into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, that second group would all be thinking of Marcy Wheeler if they knew her as the person smarter than them. People can have very great publishing and CV accomplishments and there are ten thousand geniuses just in your county, and almost any person is a genius who gives themselves positive feedback with a thing long enough. That a human mind can sustain the analytical complexity for the inferences and deductions justifying this claim astonishes me, and it is so worthwhile for everyone trying to figure out what’s happening in our country that you could get high on your own supply doing this work and become great at it.