Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel Charges Michigan’s Fake Trump Electors

The whole time that DC journalists were focused on Fani Willis’s Georgia fake electors investigation and — more recently — Arizona, I was laughing because I knew prosecutors in Michigan were working away quietly.

Today, Attorney General Dana Nessel charged Trump’s 16 fake electors with 8 felonies apiece.

They include very senior Republicans, including former GOP Chair, Meshawn Maddock, and close Ronna McDaniel associate Kathy Berden.

As I noted in March, one thing horse race considerations always forgot is that very senior Republicans in at least three swing states risked charges themselves. They risked charges — and Trump attorney Kenneth Chesbro knew they did, because he wrote that down in a December memo.

Several States also had rules requiring electors to cast their votes inthe State capitol building, or rules governing the process for approving substitutes if any original proposed electors from the November ballot wereunavailable. As a result, Chesebro’s December 9, 2020, memo advised the Trump Campaign to abide by such rules, when possible, but also recognizedthat these slates could be “slightly problematic in Michigan,” “somewhat dicey in Georgia and Pennsylvania,” and “very problematic in Nevada.”18

In the case of Michigan’s electors, Michigan law requires electors sign their paperwork in the Capitol. Instead, Trump’s fake electors did that in the basement of their own party headquarters.

These defendants are alleged to have met covertly in the basement of the Michigan Republican Party headquarters on December 14th, and signed their names to multiple certificates stating they were the “duly elected and qualified electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America for the State of Michigan.” These false documents were then transmitted to the United States Senate and National Archives in a coordinated effort to award the state’s electoral votes to the candidate of their choosing, in place of the candidates actually elected by the people of Michigan.

As I said in March, no one can predict how the party will respond if Trump’s recklessness starts getting other senior Republicans charged.

We’re about to find out.

Update: Here’s the affidavit behind the charges.

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WaPo Is Suppressing Information that Might Debunk Devlin Barrett’s Latest Spin

Last week, I asked the WaPo if they would release the two reports — one from Johns Hopkins professor Matt Green and the other from InfoSec expert Jake Williams — that were the basis of this report on the “Hunter Biden” “laptop.”

I had asked once before, in May 2022.

But since I had originally asked, a bunch of things had happened to make those reports more newsworthy. Hunter Biden had countersued John Paul Mac Isaac (here’s the WaPo’s report). James Comer has stumbled over and over in his unabashed effort to manufacture a scandal (in which the WaPo has played along, still treating it as a credible investigation). Delaware US Attorney David Weiss’ office released a plea deal to which Hunter Biden is expected to plead guilty next week (here’s the WaPo report). IRS agents claiming to be whistleblowers, Gary Shapley and Whistleblower X, shared notes that raised questions about the FBI treatment of the device (but WaPo didn’t mention that in their report). Abbe Lowell claimed that Shapley misidentified Hunter Biden’s interlocutors in some key WhatsApp messages (something else WaPo didn’t mention even while repeating the substance of the contested WhatsApp texts). Denver Riggleman, who has been working as part of a Hunter Biden team to examine what has been released, has alleged some of the data has been manipulated (something WaPo hasn’t bothered to cover at all).

That all led me to start looking at the publicly released (but unreliable) emails at BidenLaptopEmails dot com, where I’ve discovered that during a period when Hunter Biden was getting Ketamine treatment and bookended by two communications from him that indicated he was not getting outside comms, someone:

  • Split Hunter’s Uber account, on which his two iCloud accounts had previously been joined
  • Accessed Hunter’s rhb iCloud account from a browser
  • Changed the password and related phone numbers to his rhb iCloud account
  • Installed and gave full access to his droidhunter gmail account a real app, called Hunter, that can send email on someone else’s behalf
  • Signed into that droidhunter account using a new device
  • Again changed emails and phone numbers associated with his rhb account
  • Asked for a full copy of his rhbdc iCloud account
  • Reset the password of that rhbdc iCloud account
  • Made droidhunter account the notification email for the rhbdc account
  • Downloaded all Hunter’s Apple Store purchases
  • Made changes to the Uber (and Waze) account associated with an XS phone that would be included in the “laptop”
  • Restored rhb as an alternate address to the account
  • Restored contacts from an unidentified prior change
  • Obtained — including at the droidhunter email account — a download link of the entire rhbdc iCloud account
  • Backed up the XS phone to the laptop
  • Gotten a trial app of a photo editor
  • Backed up an iPad to the laptop
  • Changed the iTunes password
  • Added the Dr. Fone account, allowing you to adopt a chosen second phone number for a phone, to a second of Hunter’s accounts
  • Signed into the droidhunter account from a burner phone
  • Restored the prior trusted phone number
  • Added software that could record calls
  • Started erasing and then locked a laptop — probably the one that would eventually end up in Mac Isaac’s store
  • Got a new Mac phone for the droidhunter account

That series of changes are not the only emails in the MarcoPolo set that should raise questions about whether Hunter Biden’s digital identity may have been compromised.

Two that are important to the topic of this post are, first, that a great many devices logged into Hunter Biden’s iCloud accounts in 2018 and 2019, yet many of them don’t appear to be tied to him getting his own new iPhone or computer, and only rarely are the existing devices shut down or passwords changed afterwards. The sheer number should have raised alarms that people had broken into Hunter Biden’s iCloud accounts when the IRS asked Apple for Hunter Biden’s subscriber information in November 2019, in advance of writing a subpoena for the laptop in custody of John Paul Mac Isaac. Additionally, there were a bunch of attempts to get into Hunter Biden’s Venmo account, and the account added two new Remembered Devices within 12 minutes of each other in August 2018, one in the LA foothills and the other in Las Vegas. That and other details (including texts and emails) might have raised questions about whether sex workers from the very same escort service on which the IRS had predicated this entire investigation took steps to compromise Hunter Biden’s devices.

But the timeline above provides some reason to believe that at the time the “laptop” was packaged up for delivery to John Paul Mac Isaac, Hunter Biden did not have complete — if any — control of his own communications.

I wouldn’t be able to prove whether Hunter Biden was hacked during this key period in 2019. It would require subpoena power and access to reliable data. But as it happens, Whistleblower X had subpoena power — and was already watching Hunter Biden closely — in precisely the period this happened.

For those of us who don’t have subpoena power, though, we have to rely on publicly available evidence, filtered through partisan gatekeepers alleged to have tampered with the device.

The two reports done for the WaPo are the only known assessments of the drive containing the “laptop” primarily using forensic — as opposed to a correlative — methodology. The correlative methodology, which shows all the communications on the drive confirm the others, unsurprisingly concludes that the “laptop” came from one of Hunter Biden’s several iCloud accounts.

The forensic methodology looked for digital verification — not just of email signatures, but also of the drive itself. Both Green and Williams raised questions about the treatment of and missing digital signatures on the drive, questions that seem to match what Riggleman’s team is seeing.

Indeed, the concerns that Green and Williams raised may explain something the FBI itself found. Shapley’s notes recorded that on March 31, 2020, someone wrote an email “about quality and completeness of imaged/recovered information from the hard drive” — an email that was being intentionally withheld from the agents (especially Whistleblower X) who might one day testify at trial.

This sounds like it might reflect the same concerns raised by anyone external examining the drive forensically. If it does, it would suggest that some of the irregularities everyone can see in drives released via Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon always existed, including in the one shared with the FBI and in any separate drive shared with Republicans in Congress.

Because of all the new questions raised about the “laptop,” and because of the centrality that the Republicans want it to have on the upcoming election, I thought it reasonable to ask the WaPo to do what even the Washington Examiner was willing to do: show their work. While the Examiner’s report from Gus Dimitrelos tellingly excludes many of the details I’ve laid out above and hides both some key later device accesses and types of apps — especially spyware — loaded onto Hunter Biden’s iCloud accounts, while the way the Examiner released it exacerbated the privacy violations on Hunter Biden himself, it nevertheless was useful for explaining how two iCloud accounts were loaded up onto one laptop and how the government was able to obtain WhatsApp texts that don’t show up on the unencrypted parts of the laptop.

After I made several requests, WaPo PR manager Savannah Stephens declined to release the reports, calling the two reports, “foundational reporting documents.”

Marcy, thank you for reaching out. We do not release foundational reporting documents. Our coverage at the time was transparent about how the study was conducted, including this report.

Even though it has two reports that could significantly impact fairly pressing debates — debates the WaPo itself treats as important — the WaPo refuses to release more on these expert reports on the laptop.

Instead of doing that, the WaPo is instead paying Devlin Barrett to do what he does best — write down as true what right wingers tell him to write, not what the public evidence actually shows.

In a story with Matt Viser (the same guy who repeated the content of contested WhatsApp texts without revealing that Abbe Lowell had contested them), Barrett wrote that the testimony of the men he calls “whistleblowers” “show Hunter Biden’s laptop had little role in the investigation into Hunter Biden.”

Barrett and Viser utterly misrepresent the debate over the laptop — dodging the question, in the lede, at least, of whether the laptop can help get to the truth — something once considered the purview of journalism and something WaPo’s own report on this drive had previously done.

For more than two years, Democrats and Republicans have hotly debated the importance of the “Hunter Biden laptop” — insisting that it was either key evidence of corruption or fool’s gold meant to con 2020 voters into abandoning then-candidate Joe Biden.

Both theories were largely wrong, according to two of the agents closest to the investigation of tax crimes allegedly committed by President Biden’s son.

[snip]

But the agents’ accounts also indicate that the laptop played at best a small role in the criminal investigation into potential tax and gun-purchasing violations. Far from a smoking gun, the laptop appears to have been mostly an afterthought to the reams of text messages, emails and other evidence that agents gathered from Hunter Biden’s cloud data. A lawyer for one of those agents said he nevertheless was frustrated by the Justice Department’s refusal to let them review the laptop’s contents.

I’m very interested in the project of this column, because not only is this not what Shapley and Whistleblower X’s testimony said, but it misrepresented and misunderstands how evidence works.

This is a tax investigation. It came from, per Whistleblower X, his examination of what is probably a Russian escort service. But it’s a tax investigation: it relies on financial data that comes directly from banks and other financial institutions, institutions that are — to the extent they aren’t tainted by identity theft or hacking, like people seem to have tried to do to Hunter Biden’s Venmo — inherently reliable.

As for emails and texts, the IRS agents’ testimony (taken in conjunction with the report that the Washington Examiner was ethical enough to release), shows that the IRS didn’t obtain what is probably Hunter Biden’s rhb iCloud account — from which the cited, contested WhatsApp messages were probably obtained a second time — until August 2020, after it got some of the same material on the laptop. That potential taint may be why someone told Barrett to downplay the import of the laptop.

While the laptop may not have played a key role in substantiating a tax case against Hunter Biden, it may well have tainted the evidence in the case. It may well be part of the reason why Hunter Biden is getting to plead to misdemeanor rather than felony tax charges — because as even Whistleblower X explained that he had been told, there are emails that raised concerns about whether this could be charged at all, suggesting this case couldn’t withstand discovery.

Plus, WaPo is being coy here: The laptop may have played little part in a tax investigation reliant on bank records. But it did play a central part in allegations, including WaPo’s own reporting, of foreign influence peddling involving (among others), Burisma, the hack of which became public between the time the IRS started using this laptop as evidence and the time they learned Rudy Giuliani had a role in it.

That part is all pitch, though — yet another instance where Devlin Barrett writes down what right wingers tell him to say and WaPo reports it as if it were true. It’s what WaPo pays him to do.

It’s the claims about the laptop — from an outlet sitting on two reports that raise questions about its reliability — that I find especially curious. Start with this paragraph, which conflates the steps FBI took in November 2019 to authenticate that the laptop was Hunter Biden’s — subscriber information from Apple, a purchase record in Delaware, two but maybe only two phone calls with Mac Isaac, and “other intelligence” — with what the AUSA on the case said about it almost a year later.

After being handed the device by a Wilmington, Del., computer shop owner in 2019, the FBI quickly concluded by examining computer data as well as Hunter Biden’s phone records that the laptop was genuinely his and did not seem to have been tampered with or manipulated.

That last bit — “did not seem to have been tampered with or manipulated” — published by an outlet sitting on two reports that show the laptop was tampered with? It is a paraphrase from a meeting in October 2020, not a description of legal process served in November 2019. And therein lies a big part of the scandal.

In the actual quote, Wolf — painted as the bad guy here by the IRS agents — was saying that it “is not a priority” for the investigative team to see “if anything was added to the computer by a third party” even after learning that the lawyer for the President, whose demands for this investigation had raised influence problems from the start of the investigation, had some kind of tie to it.

This is as if Peter Strzok, rather than just failing to make sure people writing FISA applications had adverse information about the Steele dossier (which is what frothers think the IG Report showed), had instead said, “fuck it, I don’t care if it is tainted.” These notes show the Hunter Biden investigative team did what right wingers accuse the Crossfire Hurricane team of doing, blowing off the import of the involvement of a campaign in a key piece of evidence.

When the WaPo conflates those two items again later in the piece, they date the quote to May 2020.

Democrats suggested the data might have been doctored or possibly a Russian-backed disinformation campaign. The information provided by IRS agents to Congress seems to put both the accusations and counter-accusations to rest.

FBI agents were able to determine in early November 2019 that the device they had was registered to Hunter Biden, and phone records showed he had been in contact with the computer shop owner.

“We have no reason to believe there is anything fabricated nefariously on the computer and or hard drive. There are emails and other items that corroborate the items on the laptop,” Shapley wrote in notes that dated that determination to around May 2020.

Dating Lesley Wolf’s comment saying they had no reason to believe anything on the laptop was fabricated to May 2020 is either a deliberate error or a confession that two journalists proclaiming the laptop to lack any taint have no fucking clue what they’re reading.

Wolf said this, at a meeting the investigative team had on October 22, 2020, in the wake of the discovery that Rudy Giuliani had some tie to the laptop, as the team scrambled to memorialize how they had treated a key piece of evidence about which a bunch of questions would now be raised.

A Yes. So there are a couple significant parts of this. One was that, at this time, the laptop was a very big story, so we were just making sure that everything was being handled appropriately.

So we wanted to go through the timeline of what happened with the laptop and devices.

Because the laptop had become a huge story, “we were just making sure that everything was being handled appropriately,” Devlin Barrett’s star “whistleblower” explained.

And Shapley shows Wolf saying that they had no knowledge, in October 2020, of any fabrications on the laptop. But he records her saying that after “computer guy” said “they could do a csv list that shows when everything was created.”

That is, Wolf said this after “computer guy” described something they had not yet done ten months after obtaining the laptop, had not yet done two months after getting warrants relying on the laptop, that they would need to do to make sure the laptop had not been altered by third parties. Wolf said this after “computer guy” described that the FBI had not done very basic things to verify the integrity of the laptop they should have done ten months earlier, before relying on it.

Again, I’m not sure whether WaPo’s journalists are dishonest or just stupid. But this exchange is critical for another reason. Lesley Wolf’s assertion about the integrity of the laptop relied on correlation: by matching emails on the laptop with emails that could be obtained directly from the provider.

There are emails and other items hat corroborate the items on the laptop and hard dive.

This is the method that Washington Examiner’s expert used to proclaim the laptop authentic. It’s the method that a bunch of other right wing journalists have gotten experts to use to validate the laptop.

If you steal someone’s iCloud account, the way to prove that it is authentic is by proving that it is their iCloud account, which is what correlation does.

But “computer guy” was suggesting using a forensic method, ten months after the fact, to test the integrity of the laptop itself. DDOSecrets has done this test on the publicly released emails — and half of them have a last modified date of February 11, 2019, right towards the end of the timeline I show above.

Lesley Wolf made her comment on October 22, 2020. No one in Gary Shapley’s interview asked him what happened after that. Nor does Devlin Barrett seem curious to ask.

If “computer guy” subsequently did this test, there’s good reason to believe he would have found what DDOSecrets did: that while these emails match the ones in Hunter Biden’s accounts, they were all packaged up on February 11, 2019, at a time it’s not clear Hunter Biden had control of his own digital accounts.

If you use a forensic method to validate these files, you’re not going to get the same results as a correlative method. That’s why it would be very useful for the debate about the laptop for WaPo to share the two known expert reports done using forensic methods on the drive itself, rather than correlation.

There’s one more hilarious thing about this Devlin Barrett creation. He, predictably, repeats his “whistleblower’s” complaints about not getting stuff pertaining to the laptop.

Shapley said a federal prosecutor on the case, Lesley Wolf, told him that the IRS agents couldn’t see the laptop. “At some point, they were going to give a redacted version, but we don’t even think we got a full — even a redacted version. We only got piecemeal items,” Shapley told the committee, voicing his frustration that he would have liked to see all the data.

Devlin Barrett — dishonest or stupid? — quotes Shapley’s testimony out of context. The full quotation makes it clear Shapley is referring, again, to a discussion that took place on October 22, 2020. More importantly, Shapley is not referring to the laptop!!

And when it came down to item number 33 on page 2, Special Agent [Whistleblower X] is saying like, well, I haven’t seen this information. And AUSA Lesley Wolf says, well, you haven’t seen it because, for a variety of reasons, they kept it from the agents. And she said that at some point they were going to give a redacted version, but we don’t even think we got a full — even a redacted version. We only got piecemeal items [my emphasis]

That particular quotation, identified clearly as item number 33, is the report about the laptop — which I’ll copy again here to make it so easy even Devlin Barrett might understand it:

To help a right winger allege corruption, Devlin Barrett quotes his complaint that his team was not given the actual forensic report about the laptop. Corruption, in this story, is withholding a forensic report that might tell people what they need to know about the laptop.

And yet that is precisely what WaPo itself refuses to do: release two reports that raise questions about the quality and completeness of the drive.

According to Devlin Barrett’s own standard — at least the standard he applies when he’s parroting right wingers — withholding such a report is a sign of corruption.

Even the plain language of Gary Shapley’s contemporaneous notes show that Devlin’s claim that, “information provided by IRS agents to Congress” “put[s] … the accusations” that “the data might have been doctored or possibly a Russian-backed disinformation campaign” … “to rest” is wildly false (dishonest or stupid?). It does the opposite: It shows that ten months after beginning to rely on the laptop, the FBI still had not done basic forensic checks of the data on it and the AUSA leading the investigation didn’t think doing so was a priority.

That should be the story. That’s the scandal.

And true to form, Devlin Barrett spins the exactly opposite tale.

The WaPo has in its possession some of the only available information that can help to explain what the FBI saw by March 2020, two independent equivalent reports to the one that Shapley implies it is corrupt to withhold.

And unlike the Washington Examiner, they won’t release it.

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“I can get any source on the planet.” The Pre-History of Gal Luft’s Pre-“Whistleblower” Indictment

In this post I noted that Gal Luft — the guy who got James Comer all hot and bothered about having a “whistleblower” confirming his conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden — was indicted on November 1, 2022, before the Republicans even won back the House. The timing alone debunks Luft’s and GOP claims that he was charged as retaliation for coming forward to Republicans.

But he might have been charged even before that.

That’s because the statutes of limitation for many of the substantive charges against him — save the alleged conspiracy to violate FARA — would have expired before he was indicted if he hadn’t fled the country when the person referred in his indictment as co-conspirator-1, Chi Ping Patrick Ho, was arrested in November 2017.

Here’s what the charges, duration, and five year Statute of Limitation looks like for the indictment against Luft.

It seems exceedingly likely that SDNY charged Luft on November 1, 2022 because that’s the day the Statute of Limitations would otherwise have expired on the headline charge: the conspiracy to get James Woolsey to act on behalf of CEFC by using Luft’s NGO as a cut-out.

But the five year Statutes of Limitations would have started expiring on the other substantive charges starting in November 2020.

DOJ could still indict Luft on those charges because — as they allude to in the indictment — once his alleged co-conspirator Patrick Ho was charged in November 2017, he fled the US and never returned.

Since the arrest of an associate (“CC-1”) on different U.S. charges in mid-November 2017, LUFT has remained outside the United States.

The known Luft docket doesn’t show any complaint prior to the indictment. But SDNY doesn’t always include prior charges in the prosecution docket (note, for example, that the Oleg Deripaska docket starts with a superseding indictment as document number 1, thereby hiding the timing and content of the prior indictment).

But if DOJ wanted to preserve those other charges until such time as they indicted on the last-expiring one, they might have obtained one or several serial complaints charging them, in case Luft ever happened to fly into the US unexpectedly, which would otherwise have cause those Statutes of Limitation to expire. If that’s right, then SDNY may have started charging Luft as early as November 2020, with more controversial charges involving Iran and Libya the following year.

With that in mind, I want to look at what the Patrick Ho prosecution — Luft’s alleged co-conspirator in counts 1 and 2, as well as Hunter Biden’s associate and legal client through the beginning of Ho’s own prosecution in 2018 — says about the investigation into Luft.

Based on search warrant return dates, DOJ appears to have obtained probable cause against Ho by June 20, 2016 — possibly based off a FISA warrant noticed during the prosecution. Before his arrest, DOJ continued to obtain Ho’s cloud communications at least through March 6, 2017 — meaning they were collecting communications Ho had with Luft during the period he was cultivating the Woolsey deal, and would have been collecting emails with Hunter Biden, except — unless I fucked up the search — none of the noticed email accounts show up in the MarcoPolo set.

While it’s clear CEFC did use charity to try to cultivate Hunter Biden, it’s not entirely clear what role Ho’s NGO played in that process (or whether Hunter had direct involvement with it). It’s worth noting on this point, charges against the Chadian whom Ho was convicted of trying to bribe were dropped. And Woolsey is not known to have been charged, in part because the Chinese payments to him were too well laundered through (allegedly) entities like Luft’s own NGO — likely the same reason why Tony Podesta wasn’t charged for involvement in Paul Manafort’s Ukrainian influence peddling.

Ho was first charged by complaint on November 16, 2017, then arrested as he landed in JFK two days later. On his arrest, the FBI took possession of six USB drives, at least two phones, and an iPad, all of which they presumably searched.

In the wake of Ho’s arrest, DOJ took other overt steps, which they cited in a detention filing to describe how much more they learned after Ho’s arrest. Those steps including interviewing witnesses, executing search warrants — including for Ho’s Virginia NGO, and subpoenaing documents from third parties.

The government first publicly mentioned the arms and Iran conduct subsequently charged against Luft in an October 2018 motion in limine. Because Ho seemed to be preparing to claim his involvement in Chad and Uganda — the two countries he was charged with attempting to bribe — involved charity, a defense that would have skirted aspects of the charged crime, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the government argued they should be able to introduce evidence that Ho was pushing CEFC business, not just charity.

On October 2014, the defendant sent his assistant an email stating, “I am going to BJ [i.e., Beijing] this Friday to see [the Chairman of CEFC NGO and CEFC China] on Sat afternoon. The documents I want to send him before hand in separate items are: . . . 7. Iranian connection (brief).”4 On the same date, the defendant sent his assistant another email, attaching a document, which stated, in pertinent part:

7) Iranian Connection . . . Iran has money in a Bank in china which is under sanction. Iran wishes to purchase precious metal with this money. The precious metal is available through a Bank in HK which cannot accept money from the Bank in China which holds the money but is under sanction. The Iranian agent is looking for a Chinese company acting as a middle man in such transactions and will pay commission. (details to be presented orally) The Iranian connection has strong urge to establish trading relationship with us in oil and products . . . .

The following year, in June 2015, the defendant received an email that stated, in pertinent part: “The Iranian team will arrive in BJ . . . . See the attached.” The attachment referenced in the email was a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Presentation to Potential Partners Iran Petroleum Investments.” The next day, the defendant forwarded the email to his assistant, stating, “For writing report to [the Chairman of CEFC NGO and CEFC China].”

The following year, in June 2016, the defendant emailed another individual, blindcopying his assistant, and stated, in pertinent part, “Will get [two executives of CEFC China] to meet with [oil executive at company with operations in Iran] in BJ, and [another individual] also on another occasion if he comes. You can start organizing these. . . . Other matters ftf [i.e., face to face].” [paragraph 78]

[snip]

The defendant also sought to and did broker arms transactions unrelated to the Chad and Uganda schemes charged in this case. For example:

In March 2015, an individual sent the defendant an email, stating, “I have the list and end user agreement. Pls advise next step.” On the same day, the defendant replied, in pertinent part, “Find a way to pass them onto me and we can execute that right away[].” The individual replied, “Attached. [W]e have the funding and processing mechanisms in place. If it works nice there will be much more. Also for S. Sudan.” The attachment to this email was a document entitled “End User Certificate,” certifying that the user of the goods in question would be the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Libya. The goods listed on the document included numerous arms. [paragraph 48]

The following month, the defendant sent an email that stated in pertinent part: “It so turns out Qatar also needs urgently a list of toys from us. But for the same reason we had for Libya, we cannot sell directly to them. Is there a way you could act as an intermediary in both cases?” The person whom the defendant emailed replied: “Qatar good chance bc there is no embargo. Libya is another case bc going against an embargo is tricky.” The defendant responded: “Qatar needs new toys quite urgently. Their chief is coming to China and we hope to give them a piece of good news. Please confirm soonest.” [paragraph 48]

As linked above, several of the documents described in this motion describing “other uncharged conduct” are documents listed in Luft’s own indictment. Given that he fled upon Ho’s arrest, he seems to have recognized the threat to himself at that point, in 2017. If not, the public docketing of these documents should have made that clear.

The government repeated these references to communications with Luft — among other places — in their sentencing memorandum for Ho, submitted on March 18, 2019, just days before the meeting with Luft in Belgium.

So Luft was on notice about this part of the criminal investigation into him when he arranged that meeting and pitched dirt on Hunter Biden. The meeting was literally days after Ho was sentenced on March 25, 2019.

SDNY didn’t charge Ho with either of the conspiracies in which he is named as Luft’s co-conspirator, even though their understanding of the arms control conspiracy was well-advanced by the time of his trial in November 2018. He remained imprisoned in the US until June 8, 2020, well over a year after the interview with Luft, after which Ho was deported to Hong Kong. Admittedly, that was the height of the pandemic and Ho was already 70, and so would have been difficult to keep jailed.

But the timing of Luft’s meeting with the SDNY and FBI — literally days after Ho’s sentencing — suggests that SDNY took that opportunity to advance the several overt prongs of the investigations against him, regardless of what dangle — true or not — about Hunter Biden Luft offered. They had already, publicly, made clear they believed it was criminal conduct.

Luft was on notice about that before the Brussels meeting and, as alleged in the indictment, he lied about the arms control scheme and discussions with Iran.

It probably would have been easier to extradite him from the US Embassy in Brussels than it would from Cyprus, so clearly SDNY wasn’t ready to arrest him yet.

There’s no False Statements charge in the indictment pertaining to Woolsey, however, so it’s unclear whether the FBI asked Luft about that.

Trump’s Criminal Division head, Brian Benczkowski, took credit for the Ho sentencing (and may have had to approve the meeting with Luft). So it seems likely even Bill Barr’s DOJ were fine with those two prongs of the Luft prosecution.

The Woolsey allegation, of course is a different matter.

So, too, might another one be.

Count 7 of his indictment charges Luft with violating sanctions against Iran. It starts, as such charges do, with an explanation of the IEEPA authorizing such sanctions, generally. It spends six paragraphs describing the sanctions regime against Iran. It spends eight paragraphs describing the charged conduct involving Iran. Then, before the two paragraphs charging Luft for evading Iran sections, his indictment includes this paragraph:

80. Several months later, on or about October 10, 2016, CC-2 emailed GAL LUFT, the defendant, that CC-2 had a Chinese client who needed Russian oil, which LUFT confirmed he could help provide: “I just got off the phone with Russia. They have this.” Forwarding this email to CC-1, LUFT wrote: “If [CC-2] really has this client we need to grab it. This is exactly what we need. . . . I can get any source on the planet.”

That’s not related to the current charges (though if Luft continued to pursue business with Russia, particularly after 2017 and 2022 sanctions, those might amount to IEEPA sanctions violations as well). But it suggests DOJ’s interest into Luft may extend beyond China.

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Hunter Biden’s Uber Connection and the K Street Collision

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.

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Keith Ablow’s Unallocated Space in Hunter Biden’s Memory

In the third part of Gus Dimitrelos’ report* on the laptop attributed to Hunter Biden, he examines what he could find in the unallocated space of the laptop — the place where deleted files go on computers until they eventually get written over. He does it, in laymen’s terms, to prove that there was someone at the keyboard of the laptop, deleting individual files by hand, which he claims (falsely) is proof that, “Robert Hunter Biden is in control of the MacBook Laptop.”

He shows remarkably little interest in what got deleted.

At least two of the files deleted from the laptop pertain to the therapist from whom the President’s son was getting Ketamine treatment during the period his digital life appears to have been taken over, Keith Ablow, and in whose office the DEA discovered different laptop owned by Hunter Biden in 2020.

According to two people familiar with the matter, a different Hunter Biden laptop landed in the custody of the DEA in February when they executed a search warrant on the Massachusetts office of a psychiatrist accused of professional misconduct. The psychiatrist has not been charged with a crime.

Hunter Biden was not a target of the search or the investigation, and his lawyer ultimately got his laptop back. It’s not clear why his computer was left in the doctor’s office.

Who is Keith Ablow?

One enduring mystery about the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” affair is why the son of a top Democrat ended up doing Ketamine therapy with a Fox personality just weeks short of allegations that the shrink had sexually harassed patients, an accusation that would lead to his suspension.

Ablow’s career on Fox extended back years by the time in 2018 when Hunter Biden got involved with him. He made obnoxious comments both about the Obamas and marriage equality and a ludicrous pitch in favor of Newt Gingrich. There’s no reason a Democrat should ever have trusted him.

And then, shortly after the time when Hunter Biden’s digital world appears to have been taken over by his droidhunter Gmail, several lawsuits accusing Ablow of sexual harassment went public.

The women allege that Dr. Keith Ablow, an author who was a contributor to Fox News network until 2017, abused his position while treating them for acute depression, leaving them unable to trust authority figures and plagued with feelings of shame and self-recrimination.

“He began to hit me when we engaged in sexual activities,” wrote one plaintiff, a New York woman, in a sworn affidavit filed with her lawsuit. “He would have me on my knees and begin to beat me with his hands on my breasts,” she wrote, “occasionally saying, ‘I own you,’ or ‘You are my slave.’”

The malpractice lawsuits, two of them filed on Thursday in Essex Superior Court and a third filed last year, paint a picture of a therapist who encouraged women to trust and rely on him, then coaxed them into humiliating sexual activities, often during treatment sessions for which they were charged. When the New York woman had trouble paying her therapy bills, she said, Ablow advised her to work as an escort or stripper because the work was lucrative.

The three lawsuits were settled. But as a result Ablow’s medical license was suspended. As noted above, for some reason the DEA searched his office a year later, where they found yet another Hunter Biden laptop left behind.

Update: Here’s a picture of Ablow speaking at a Trump rally in MA on March 4, 2017.

 

Deleting Ablow

In fact, the accusations against Ablow were one of two things that Dimitrelos found in the unallocated space of what would have been the laptop.

On February 25, 2019, Hunter Biden texted someone else a link to the BoGlo report on the accusations, which had been published four days earlier. “My psychiatrist,” Hunter Biden explained in a follow-up text. “I can’t catch a break,” he said in the third. If authentic, these texts appear to capture Hunter’s immediate response to the abuse allegations, and the four-day delay in his discovery of them.

That someone would delete those is interesting enough.

But I’m far more interested in the other file Dimitrelos found. It was a December 10, 2018 invoice, sent by iChat. It reflected the following psychotherapy sessions with Hunter, which were identified as “New Incident”:

  • November 10, 2018: 90 minutes
  • November 11, 2018: 90 minutes
  • November 12, 2018: 30 minutes
  • November 14, 2018: 60 minutes
  • November 14, 2018: 60 minutes
  • November 15, 2018: 60 minutes
  • November 16, 2018: 60 minutes

It was a three page invoice, but Dimitrelos only shows the first page, so there could be more sessions in the weeks between November 16 and December 10, 2018. All sessions were paid by credit card within days.

But even just that single page shows that Hunter was spending time with Ablow in the period when he obtained new devices — including the laptop believed to be the one that ended up in John Paul Mac Isaac’s shop.

It’s easy to see, then, how and when Ablow might have come into possession of a Hunter Biden laptop and Hunter Biden might have started using the new one that would end up becoming a big political hit job.

[Update: I corrected my timeline here. Hunter Biden started using the laptop believed to be the one brought to Mac Isaac’s shop in October, not November.]

Baystate or Bluewater

Dimitrelos says the invoice, “correlates [with] email communications with Keith Ablow and the Practice Manager.”

But the invoice doesn’t. It differs with the emails we see with Ablow and his practice manager, a woman named Tiffany Bartholemew, as they appear in the BidenLaptopEmails dot com collection, in at least one key respect. The bill is from “Bluestate Psychiatry.” But Bartholomew writes from “Bluewater Wellness.”

The discrepancy may arise from a difference in treatment: and therefore also payment schemes. Of the emails related to Ablow sent by Hunter, about a dozen had to do with accommodations, including:

  • Emails Bartholomew sent on December 4, 2018 (and so before the invoice) about payment for “this week” at Plum Island Rental
  • The confirmation for that reservation, sent the same date as the invoice, to the rhbdcicloud and cc’ed to Bartholomew, followed by one sent on January 3, not cc’ed to Bartholomew, providing instructions for getting in
  • An email sent on January 26 from the “manager of Dr. Ablow’s cottage”
  • Seven emails from a guy who seems to have made himself Hunter’s Chief of Staff at a meeting on January 24, all of which pertain in part or in whole to finding a new place in Newburyport, MA

Those were all sent to the rhbdcicloud. Another email from Bartholomew, sent to the same email, alerted Hunter to a rescheduled Yoga session while in Massachusetts.

There were several other more curious emails involving Bartholomew:

  • An email sent on January 5, 2019 to rhbdc at me.com, seemingly asking Hunter for advice about how to deal with an insane temp leaving adverse reviews on Google
  • An MP4, dated January 8, 2019, titled Neverending story, sent first via Google Drive from a Gmail account, then forwarded the next day from her Ablew email account, both times to the rhbdcicloud

In this same period, Hunter paid someone with the last name Bartholomew but a different first name, via Venmo, for purchases at CVS, using his rhbrspdc account.

Guys are you getting my emails?

But several of the emails demonstrate Hunter’s communication woes during this period.

The very first email from Hunter Biden to Ablow in the Marco Polo set, sent on January 3, 2019, was misaddressed, and bounced. It was sent again, with the subject line “yyyy.”

While no body of that text appears in the Marco Polo set, Ablow responded to it, adding a third person, Rock, and asking for help getting a doctor to review Hunter’s daughter’s x-rays from a bad skiing accident.

Hunter responds, saying he is attaching the x-rays (and reply emails show jpg attachments):

I am attaching the X-rays and would so much appreciate your helopmputting [sic] them in the right hands.

Hunter and Ablow exchange two emails among themselves.

Then Ablow responds to his own email, which this time is marked [External], noting that “His [apparently meaning Hunter’s] email is screwed up,” and then saying he had texted Rock.

From: Keith Ablow <kablow[redacted]>
Sent: Thursday, January 3, 2019 11:40 AM
To: Positano [redacted]; rhbdcicloud
Subject: [EXTERNAL]Re: From Keith

CAUTION: External Email.

Rock
His email is screwed up

I texted you

The doctor responds — happy to help — and provides his contact. Ablow thanks him. Hunter responds to that, plaintively,

Guys are you getting my emails?

And though neither of the external interlocutors ever said a thing directly to Hunter, Ablow says, yes, suggesting they had gotten his emails, then instructs Hunter to contact the doctor and “send him the x-rays,” even though in the original email Hunter already sent 2 jpgs.

Hunter then tried to email the doctor directly, using the same email included in Ablow’s email (possibly even using the link from the doctor’s own email), and it bounces, “RecipientNotFound; Recipient not found by SMTP address lookup.”

At least based on the Marco Polo set, Hunter Biden didn’t send much between then and January 15 (though I may return to what he did send; he had important exchanges with his lawyer George Mesires).

Then he had another communication failure with Ablow’s team, though apparently of a different type.

On January 15, 2019 at 11:13AM, Hunter sent Ablow’s practice manager, Bartholomew. an email from his droidhunter account, asking “Schedule?” The email itself appears in the MarcoPolo collection, but any other body of the email is not preserved.

Bartholomew responded, on January 15 at 11:19PM, to the droidhunter account, describing his schedule for both “today” (seemingly meaning January 15) and “tomorrow,” his Ketamine treatment on January 16.

Then, just under 3.5 hours later, she sent that same email again, to both the droidhunter and rhbdcicloud with the message:

Below is the response I sent within minutes of receiving your email.

I called you this morning
Both Keith and I texted – I, multiple times, both on the group text and solo
I tried calling
I had Jodi text and call and you did not answer until 2pm

I texted you after sending the below email and mentioned adding yoga on for tomorrow – I did not receive a response and I will not waste people’s time booking them if you do not stay in touch

Bartholomew appears to have attributed this to Hunter’s mental struggles, and it may well have been (though it is notable since it is the sole exchange with her involving the droidhunter email).

The reason people love my Dad Chris iOS because he’s the son they hope to raise

The questions about whether Hunter was communicating externally — to say nothing of the effect of the Ketamine treatment, which by context would have been January 16 — makes me really uncomfortable with what happened with a statement Hunter Biden shared for this Vanity Fair story on whether Hunter’s problems were leading Joe to hesitate about running.

The exchange starts with Hunter forwarding an email he sent to Doug Brinkley on his rosemontseneca email to Ablow, using his rhbdcicloud email, with his long and very rough draft of a statement.

Ablow asks if he wants edits.

I could also make a few other edits, with humility. Would you like me to?

Hunter responds by saying it needs both edits and to be more concise. So Ablow promises to do it overnight.

I can make it all happen by 8 am.

Not to worry.

This is my thing.

Stay tuned.

As that exchange was happening, Hunter sent the statement to his lawyer, George Mesires, via his rhbdcme address. Mesires responded saying, “I can’t stop crying,” but providing no edits.

Hunter sends two snide comments to the journalist to his attorney George Mesires, from the rosemontseneca email, ccing Ablow.

Then ultimately he sends the statement as rewritten by Ablow to Mesires.

“FIXED A FEW OF MY TYPOS . . .” Hunter said of the statement substantially written by Ablow. Mesires would have no way of knowing that Ablow had made all the changes.

Vanity Fair removed one paragraph about Hunter’s own background as well as this significantly edited snide comment to him:

I hope that answers your question, Chris. I would ask this one of you: Are your talents best used as a tabloid journalist? If you were willing to endure more pain to make a more powerful contribution to our shared world, what would you do? What has stood in your way? My father would tell you this: Don’t let it. Reach deep down and deliver the gifts you were meant to give to others. And that’s the message Americans will see come to life in 2020.

At a time when Hunter Biden was in a communications vacuum, just days off a Ketamine treatment, and probably getting his life hacked irreparably, to become the non-stop political hit job of those trying to take down his father, Keith Ablow replaced Hunter’s statement with his own.

In the process Ablow replaced this fairly amazing paragraph about Joe Biden … [I’ve left all typos, including the charming, “iOS” instead of “is.”]

The reason people love my Dad Chris iOS because he’s the son they hope to raise he’s the parent they hope to be he’s the brother and friend we all look up to. They love him Chris because he is as real an American as they are and they all want to be. He’s not perfect’ he’s got a horrible temper, he spoils his grandkids, he loves my Mom almost too much and he still thinks he can still make me angrier than anyone on earth sometimes. There’s nobody I want to make more proud of me than my Dad and there’s no-one that I know can ever be more proud of me and my whole family. May Dad never has asked anyone of us to be less human he’s just taught us all what it means to be a good man in hard world. He taught me what his mom and dad taught him “Always remember no man is better than you and you are no better than you.”if er to break I m certain they would all say —no one will ever know you better than your brothers and your sisters you always take their side no matter how badly they screwed up. Every Biden kid knows there’s nothing that they could do to make anyone in this family to stop loving you. And finally always be kind to the people in pain (unless they hurt your grandmother your mom your aunt or your sister- then you’re free to beat the shit out of them if your sister hasn’t beat you to it.)

With this one:

I believe that my father has become an ongoing symbol of what it means to keep on fighting for what is good in oneself, in others and in our country. I can tell you that I wouldn’t be alive today, if my dad hadn’t kept fighting for me, too, through my darkest days. So the idea that tragedy or tough times or any number of trials would dissuade a Biden from serving his fellow man—whether a friend or a fellow citizen—could not be more misguided. My dad has proven, ag ain and again, that he is (as Teddy Roosevelt once said of himself) “as strong as a bull moose” and that America “can use [him] to the limit.”

There’s no sign Brinkley ever responded to Hunter’s email. Instead, Hunter sent him three emails — one, responding to an email Brinkley sent him in July 2018, saying,

Obviously I didn’t send that stream of conscience rant with personal attacks and 7000 grammatical spelling and plain unintelligible errors made tons of edits and cutout 80%.

A minute later he sent two more responding to the email he had actually sent Brinkley, quoting just the bolded part of this last line of his own second paragraph.

And its made us understand that the one thing that binds us all not just my family everyone you will ever meet is what it is to feel pain and how the even the smallest gesture of genuine kindness and love can make you hope for a better day.

That line about small gestures of kindness, like much else from Hunter’s own statement, had been removed.

It’s not yet clear what happened between Ablow and Hunter — or whether Ablow’s awareness of Hunter’s technical communication problems went further than that single email.

What is clear is that, in the process, Ablow managed to replace Hunter’s own, heartfelt words about his father and his own struggles.


* At least the first of Dimitrelos’ reports is on Scribe. He sent me copies, but would only permit me to repost them (which would take far more redactions) with some kind of indemnity for ongoing privacy violations. I instead reached out to Hunter Biden’s attorneys for permission to share it privately with some experts but have heard nothing.

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Hunter Biden’s Matryoshka Cell Phone: How the IRS and Frothers Got Hunter’s Encrypted iPhone Content

Believe it or not, what sent me down the rabbit hole of Hunter Biden’s “laptop” was not the laptop itself.

It was a cell phone.

Or, more specifically, it was two details in purported IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley’s testimony. First, after introducing summaries from some Hunter Biden WhatsApp chats — summaries that, Abbe Lowell claimed, got the most basic details wrong — Shapley explained that the chats didn’t come from the laptop itself, they came from a warrant served on Apple for the iCloud backup to which they were saved.

Q Could you tell us about this document, what is it, and how was it obtained —

A Sure. So there was an electronic search warrant for iCloud backup, and these messages were in that backup and provided —

Q Okay.

A — from a third party, from iCloud.

This appears to be the search warrant return obtained — again, per Shapley’s testimony — in August 2020.

For example, in August 2020, we got the results back from an iCloud search warrant. Unlike the laptop, these came to the investigative team from a third-party record keeper and included a set of messages. The messages included material we clearly needed to follow up on.

Shapley’s disclosure that there were WhatsApp texts saved to iCloud stunned me. That’s because, for all the material produced from the laptop itself — which even frothers have treated as all the content in Hunter Biden’s iCloud account — I had never seen WhatsApp texts.

Plus, there’s a technical issue. WhatsApp texts, like Signal texts, don’t automatically back up to iCloud. If one really wants to use their end-to-end encryption to best advantage, one doesn’t store them in the cloud, because then the only easy way to get the texts would be directly from someone’s phone. These texts purported to involve a Chinese national (though, as noted, Lowell says that’s false) whose phone would presumably be inaccessible overseas. And at the time the IRS obtained these texts, Hunter Biden didn’t know about the investigation into himself. They hadn’t seized his phone.

For Shapley’s description to be true, then, Hunter Biden would have had to back up the texts to his iCloud. But if he had, they should have shown up on the laptop itself, right along with every other scrap of the President’s son’s private life.

There were crumbs of an explanation for this in Shapley’s notes from the October 22, 2020 meeting on the government’s treatment of the laptop attributed to Hunter Biden.

In the meeting, Whistleblower X — who by his own description saw things online that he hadn’t obtained via the laptop directly, even though DOJ warned the agents not to do that — kept prodding about whether the investigative team had been provided all the messages on the laptop.

29. SA [Whistblower X] asked if all information on the hard drive had been reviewed…the answer is that they did not look at all of that SA [Whistleblower X] questions if Dillon reviewed all iMessage’s that wore relevant and not privileged. They would find the answer.

As Shapley recorded, on February 27, 2020, the forensics people provided all messages from the hard drive of material John Paul Mac Isaac restored from the laptop.

30. 2/27/2020 DE3 with all messages from the hard drive were provided by computer forensics— via USB Drive

That production included iPad and MacBook messages, but no iPhone messages.

32. 227 Productions

DE3 USB containing exported messages (ipad and macbook messages) No iphone messages

They didn’t get messages off any iPhone until they found a password, conveniently written on a business card, and with that password, were able to get into encrypted iPhone content on the laptop.

Laptop — iphone messages were on the hard drive but encrypted they didn’t get those messages until they looked at laptop and found a business card with the password on it so they were able to get into the iphone messages [my emphasis]

This still didn’t answer my question — how was the IRS able to get WhatsApp texts from iCloud when they weren’t on the iCloud content that appears on the Hunter Biden laptop.

But a detail on the fourth of Guy Dimitrelos’ reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop may explain it.

In his first report, Dimitrelos explained that the 5 million artifacts found on the hard drive were connected to Hunter Biden’s iCloud account, which he says was tied to the email [email protected].

  1. The hard drive contained approximately 5,791,819 files and system artifacts and was connected to and authenticated on an Apple iCloud account of [email protected] which is owned by Robert Hunter Biden (RHB).

[snip]

  1. Since this Apple MacBook Pro model was not released until 2017, all data prior to 2017 was stored (backed-up) to the [email protected] account and then downloaded to the MacBook Pro hard drive Downloads folder as illustrated in paragraph 30.

In his fourth report — basically 133 pages into his sequential reporting — Dimitrelos noted that Hunter Biden had another iCloud account, one tied to one of the emails he identified on page 4 of his report: [email protected].

In fact, at least according to the unreliable emails released at BidenLaptopEmails dot com (AKA MarcoPolo), that’s the account to which the laptop believed to be the one that ended up at Mac Isaac’s shop was registered to, not the [email protected] account.

At the Marco Polo site, there are 453 pages of emails from the [email protected] account (so around 22650). They include some of the most interesting in the collection, the ones directly with the Biden family and others indicating sensitive travel. There are 269 from the [email protected] account (so around 13,450) — but it’s the latter that seems to have been taken over in early 2019. I’ve described that the droidhunter88 gmail account effectively took over control of the iCloud account in that period (though I need to go back to the timeline and distinguish which events happened on one iCloud account and which on the other), and I think that’s right. But importantly, at times, the RosemontSeneca email is linked into it. That is, a RosemontSeneca email was used on both iCloud accounts.

As to the phone, Dimitrelos describes that he found a phone registered to the [email protected] account in an encrypted container in an iTunes backup.

I identified an encrypted container located within Apple’s MobileSync iTunes default backup folder.

[snip]

I identified the iOS backup to be an iPhone with the phone number below and Apple id of

[email protected] which is one of Robert Hunter Biden’s iCloud accounts.

Part two of Dimitrelos’ report described finding passwords for the iTunes account in two places. First, a picture of a partly rumpled lined piece of paper stored in a Hidden Album. This picture included Amazon, WiFi, iTunes, GMail, and Apple ID passwords, all registered to a different Gmail account. And then, associated with an iPad registered to still a third iCloud account, registered to a Gmail account.

The latter shows that Hunter Biden’s iTunes password was changed on January 30, 2019, solidly in the middle of the period I’ve argued that his account was taken over by the DroidHunter gmail account.

And screencaps in parts two and four of Dimitrelos’ report show that both the iPad and the iPhone were backed up during this same period, on February 6, 2019. Someone changed the iTunes password, and backed up these two devices, where they were found on the laptop. All in this same period where Hunter Biden seems to have lost control over his laptop.

In part four of Dimitrelos’ report, he describes that there were, indeed, WhatsApp messages on the iPhone, registered to that entirely different iCloud account, seemingly backed up to iTunes on the [email protected] account.

I can’t be sure about this, because I’m not a forensics expert, both Shapley and Dimitrelos are deliberately unreliable narrators, and even they don’t have all the data to understand what went on here. But it appears that the reason why there were no WhatsApp texts on the laptop itself, which had all the content in the [email protected] iCloud account, is that they weren’t used by a device registered to the [email protected] iCloud account. They were used by a device registered to the [email protected] account, which was (as Shapley’s notes reflect) stored in encrypted fashion on the laptop.

There’s one more very important point about this.

The government had a warrant. If they really did find a business card (one not described anywhere I’ve seen in Dimitrelos’ report) with a password, they were able to get the encrypted content (though oftentimes prosecutors will recommend you go back and get a second warrant for that). From there, it seems, the IRS got another warrant for the other iCloud account, the [email protected] one. That’s how they got a legally sound copy of the WhatsApp texts in August 2020.

But for people like Rudy Giuliani or Garrett Ziegler or John Paul Mac Isaac, taking a laptop they purport to have been abandoned, and then using a password found on that laptop to access an encrypted container — especially one of a different iCloud account — is legally another level of conduct.

Update: I screwed up the number of emails; I’ve corrected that now.

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The Laptop Everyone Knows as Hunter Biden’s Appears to Have Been Deleted Starting February 15, 2019

I’ve been wading through Hunter Biden data all weekend. There’s some evidence that the descriptions of the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” based on the drive Rudy Giuliani has peddled do not match the description of what should be on such devices given what the FBI and IRS saw.

Before I explain that, though, I want to talk about how the life of Hunter Biden’s iCloud account differs from what is portrayed in this analysis paid for by Washington Examiner.

As that report describes, Hunter Biden activated a MacBook Pro on October 21, 2018, then set it up with Hunter’s iCloud on October 22. Hunter then used the MacBook as his primary device until March 17, 2019, a month before it waltzed into John Paul Mac Isaac’s computer repair shop to start a second act as the biggest political hit job ever.

There are problems with that story. A longer table of the devices that logged into Hunter Biden’s iCloud includes devices that appear to have been accessing core Hunter Biden content.

That same table doesn’t show any access after November 15, 2018, with the last access being the device Roberts MacBook Pro that would end up in a Delaware repair shop, but showing up six days earlier than it should. There’s a phone that should but does not show up in those devices, too.

The report doesn’t discuss the import of the shifts between these emails.

RHB used several emails for business and personal use including:
[email protected] [sic]
[email protected] ([email protected])
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

One email missing from this list is a Gmail account under which a bunch of passwords were stored. That’ll become important later.

The most important email is the Gmail account (misspelled above), [email protected], which Hunter Biden used to contact sex workers, probably including the Russian escort service that the IRS used to predicate the IRS investigation. That email account got added to his iCloud account at the same time as his iCloud contents were requested, and then again before the MacBook stopped being used. Those changes often happened in conjunction with changes to the phone number.

For now, though, I just want to map out the major events with Hunter’s iCloud accounts from September 1, 2018 (perhaps the months before the IRS would open an investigation into him because he was frequenting a Russian escort service) until the final email as found on the laptop itself. There’s a bunch more — one after another credit card gets rejected, and he keeps moving his Wells Fargo card over to pay for his Apple account; the iCloud account shows Hunter reauthorizing use of biometrics to get into his Wells Fargo account in this period.

In January 2019, the Gmail account Hunter Biden used to contact sex workers (probably including the Russian escort service he had been using) effectively took over his iCloud account and asked for a complete copy of his iCloud account. Then, the next month, all the data on the Hunter Biden laptop was deleted.

Update: I’ve taken the reference to the HB RediPhone out altogether–it’s clear that’s a branded iPhone–and replaced it with a better explanation of the other devices.

Update: I see that he does have D[r]oidhunter88, but doesn’t discuss the import of it.

Update: I’ve added a few things that happened while Hunter’s account was pwned. Importantly, as part of this process an app called “Hunter” was given full access to his droidhunter88 gmail account. There are also a few emails that seem to be a test process.

Update: Added the missing Gmail account.

Hunter Biden’s iCloud

9/1/18: An account recovery request for your Apple ID ([email protected]) was made from the web near Los Angeles, CA on August 31, 2018 at 9:36:07 PM PDT. The contact phone number provided was [Hunter Biden’s].

9/1/18: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on September 1, 2018 at 10:29:36 AM PDT: Password

9/1/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud on a MacBook Pro 13″.
Date and Time: September 1, 2018, 10:34 AM PDT

9/1/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser.
Date and Time: September 1, 2018, 10:42 AM PDT

9/2/18: Your Apple ID, [email protected], was just used to download Hide2Vault from the Mac App Store on a computer or device that has not previously been used.

9/2/18: Welcome to your new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.

9/11/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser.

9/11/18: The password for your Apple ID ([email protected]) has been successfully reset.

9/11/18: Robert’s iPad is being erased. The erase of Robert’s iPad started at 2:56 PM PDT on August 5, 2018.

This is one of several times in several weeks that Hunter loses his iPhone, but while it’s lost, someone also pings his MacBook.

9/16/18: A sound was played on iPhone. A sound was played on iPhone at 8:25 PM PDT on September 15, 2018. (Repeats 25 times in 5 minutes)

9/16/18: A sound was played on Robert’s MacBook Pro at 8:30 PM PDT on September 15, 2018. (Repeats 2 times)

9/16/18: A sound was played on iPhone at 8:31 PM PDT on September 15, 2018. (Repeats 7 times)

9/16/18: iPhone was found near Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area 23287 Palm Canyon Ln Malibu, CA 90265 United States at 11:32 PM PDT.

9/16/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser.

9/19/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser.

9/20/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud on an iPhone 8 Plus.

This is the second time he loses his phone. What follows is basically a chase of Hunter Biden’s iPhone across LA. It’s not clear it is ever recovered — but it is over two weeks before a new iPhone logs into his account.

9/27/18: Lost Mode enabled on Robert Hunter’s iPhone. This device was put into Lost Mode at 7:20 PM PDT on September 27, 2018.

9/27/18: Robert Hunter’s iPhone was found near [address redacted] Lynwood, CA 90262 United States at 7:20 PM PDT.

9/27/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud on an iPhone 8 Plus.

9/27/18: A sound was played on Robert Hunter’s iPhone at 7:20 PM PDT on September 27, 2018.

9/27/18: A sound was played on Robert Hunter’s iPhone at 7:20 PM PDT on September 27, 2018.

9/27/18: Robert Hunter’s iPhone was found near [address redacted] Lynwood, CA 90262 United States at 7:20 PM PDT.

9/28/18: Robert Hunter’s iPhone was found near [different address redacted] Lynwood, CA 90262 United States at 4:24 PM PDT.

9/28/18: Robert Hunter’s iPhone was found near [third address redacted] Lynwood, CA 90262 United States at 5:27 PM PDT.

9/28/18: Robert Hunter’s iPhone was found near [fourth address redacted] Los Angeles, CA 90036 United States at 6:22 PM PDT.

9/28/18: Robert Hunter’s iPhone was found near [fifth address redacted] Los Angeles, CA 90069 United States at 6:38 PM PDT.

10/13/18: Bobby Hernandez to [email protected]: You left your phone. How do I get it to you?

10/14/18: The password for your Apple ID ([email protected]) has been successfully reset.

By date, this login is the HB rediPhone, but Apple recognized it as an iPhone X.

10/14/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud on an iPhone X. Date and Time: October 14, 2018, 11:24 AM PDT

10/17/18: The password for your Apple ID ([email protected]) has been successfully reset.

10/17/18: The following information for your Apple ID (r•••••@rspdc.com) was updated on October 17, 2018. Trusted Phone Number Added – Phone number ending in 73

10/17/18: New sign-in to your linked account [email protected] Your Google Account was just signed in to from a new Apple iPhone device.

Per the Gus Dimitrelos report, the following activity reflects the creation of a new MacBook account called Robert’s MacBook Pro — the laptop that would end up in Mac Isaac’s shop. But there doesn’t appear to be an alert for a new device like there is the for the iPhone 8 Plus the following day.

10/21/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud on a MacBook Pro 13″. Date and Time: October 21, 2018, 5:50 AM PDT

10/21/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser. Date and Time: October 21, 2018, 9:06 AM PDT

10/22/18: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on October 22, 2018 at 7:47:30 PM EDT: Phone number(s)

10/23/18: Your Apple ID, [email protected], was just used to download Quora from the App Store on a computer or device that has not previously been used.

10/23/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud on an iPhone 8 Plus. Date and Time: October 23, 2018, 4:10 PM PDT

10/23/18: New sign-in to your linked account [email protected] Your Google Account was just signed in to from a new Apple iPhone device.

Several spyware apps get purchased in this period.

10/29/18: Your mSpy credentials to your control panel: Username/Login: [email protected]

11/2/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud on an iPhone XS.

11/16/18: You recently added [email protected] as a new alternate email address for your Apple ID.

11/21/18: You’ve purchased the following subscription with a 1‑month free trial: Subscription Tile Premium

11/22/18: Your Apple ID, [email protected], was just used to download KAYAK Flights, Hotels & Cars from the iTunes Store on a computer or device that has not previously been used.

12/28/18: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser. Date and Time: December 28, 2018, 7:06 AM PST

1/3/19: Keith Ablow (then Hunter’s therapist) says Hunter’s email is screwed up

1/6/19: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser. Date and Time: January 6, 2019, 1:51 AM PST

1/12/19: Your Recent Mac Cleanup Pro Order [ADV181229-7742-90963]

1/14/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 13, 2019 at 10:28:31 PM EST: Phone number(s)

1/14/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 13, 2019 at 10:31:15 PM EST: Password

1/14/19 The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 13, 2019 at 10:52:13 PM EST: Billing and/or Shipping Information

1/14/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 13, 2019 at 10:53:40 PM EST: Phone number(s)

1/14/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 13, 2019 at 11:12:45 PM EST: Billing Information

1/16/19: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser. Date and Time: January 16, 2019, 1:59 PM PST

While Hunter is in Ketamine treatment at Keith Ablow’s, a service called “Hunter” gets access to the droidhunter88 gmail account

1/16/19: Here’s my first tip for you!

1/16/19: Hi Robinson, Hunter now has access to your Google Account [email protected].

Hunter can:
View your email messages and settings
Manage drafts and send emails
Send email on your behalf

A bunch of things happen in this four day period: first, someone accessed droidhunter88 from a new iPhone. Someone changed the phone number for the Hunter Biden iCloud. Then, droidhunter88 was given access to the iCloud account. Then the iCloud account ordered all of Hunter’s iCloud contents. Then the password for the account was reset.

1/17/19: New device signed in to [email protected] Your Google Account was just signed in to from a new Apple iPhone device.

1/17/19: I am here to help you find the emails you need!

Giovanni here from Hunter.

I wanted to quickly check if I can help you getting started with Hunter.

There are plenty of functionalities included with your free plan that will allow you to find, verify and enrich a set of data in bulk: these are all explained in our video guides.

However, if you already have a precise task to perform, reply to this email so I can better assist you!

1/17/19: n (from [email protected])

1/18/19: Long email to tabloid journalist sent under rosemontseneca email (this is sent first to Keith Ablow and then George Mesires, the latter of whom responds); this would have shown how the email account worked

1/19/19: The following information for your Apple ID (r•••••@rspdc.com) was updated on January 19, 2019. Trusted Phone Number Removed – Phone number ending in 13

1/20/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 20, 2019 at 5:24:54 PM EST: Phone number(s)

1/20/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 20, 2019 at 5:31:21 PM EST: Apple ID
Email address(es)

1/20/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 20, 2019 at 5:31:21 PM EST: Apple ID Email address(es)

1/20/19: A request for a copy of the data associated with the Apple ID [email protected] was made on January 20, 2019 at 5:40:26 PM EST

1/21/19: The password for your Apple ID ([email protected]) has been successfully reset.

1/21/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 21, 2019 at 8:28:05 AM EST: Name — changed from Robert Hunter to Robert Biden

1/21/19: You recently added [email protected] as the notification email address for your Apple ID

1/21/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 21, 2019 at 8:31:02 AM EST:
Rescue email address

1/22/19: The following information for your Apple ID (r•••••@icloud.com) was updated on January 22, 2019. Trusted Phone Number Removed – Phone number ending in 96

1/22/19: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser. Date and Time: January 22, 2019, 4:21 AM PST

1/22/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 22, 2019 at 10:05:20 AM EST:
Email address(es)

1/22/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 22, 2019 at 10:05:29 AM EST:
Email address(es)

1/22/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on January 22, 2019 at 10:05:34 AM EST:
Email address(es)

1/24/19: You recently added [email protected] as a new alternate email address for your Apple ID.

I think that after ordering all Hunter’s data, the account is reset to what it had been from the start. But Droidhunter88, not [email protected], gets the iCloud backup.

1/24/19: Your contacts have been restored successfully on January 24, 2019, 1:17 PM PST.

1/25/19: The data you requested on January 20, 2019 at 5:40:26 PM EST is ready to download. [Sent to both Droidhunter88 and [email protected]]

1/27/19: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser. Date and Time: January 27, 2019, 7:41 AM PST

Several photo editing apps are purchased in this period (and one CAD app).

1/27/19: You’ve purchased the following subscription with a 1‑month free trial: Subscription Polarr Photo Editor Yearly

2/6/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on February 5, 2019 at 11:39:09 PM EST: Phone number(s)

2/9/19: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser. Date and Time: February 9, 2019, 9:52 AM PST

2/9/19: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser. Date and Time: February 9, 2019, 5:08 PM PST

Hunter connected to your Google Account
Hi Robinson,

2/9/19: Hunter now has access to your Google Account [email protected].

2/9/19: test To:[email protected]

2/9/19: jkFrom:”Robinson Hunter” [email protected]:[email protected]

2/9/19: The following information for your Apple ID (r•••••@icloud.com) was updated on February 10, 2019. Trusted Phone Number Added – Phone number ending in 96

2/9/19: You recently added [email protected] as the notification email address for your Apple ID.

2/9/19: You recently added [email protected] as the notification email address for your Apple ID

2/9/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on February 9, 2019 at 8:33:57 PM EST: Rescue email address

2/9/19: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud on an iPhone 6s. Date and Time: February 9, 2019, 6:11 PM PST

2/10/19: Your Apple ID, [email protected], was just used to download Call recorder for iphone from the iTunes Store on a computer or device that has not previously been used.

2/15/19: Hi Robinson, Did you know? Hunter doesn’t have only one Chrome extension! We recently built a simple email tracker for Gmail.

This is where the data on the MacBook that would end up in Mac Isaac’s shop started getting deleted.

2/15/19: Robert’s MacBook is being erased. The erase of Robert’s MacBook started at 4:18 PM PST on February 15, 2019.

2/15/19: Robert’s MacBook Pro has been locked. This Mac was locked at 8:36 PM PST on February 15, 2019.

2/19/19: Noiseless MacPhun LLC

2/20/19: where the fuck are youi? from DroidHunter88 to dpagano:

this is hunter
i dont have your #

call me please

The droidhunter88 account bought a new iPhone — but, after telling Apple they would recycle the old one, instead kept it. That would effectively be another device associated with Hunter Biden. Given some of the other apps involved, this may have served as a way to get Hunter Biden’s calls (eg, from Mac Isaac). Unlike the new devices that show up in 2018, this one was paid for. 

2/21/19: New device signed in to [email protected] Your Google Account was just signed in to from a new Apple iPhone device.

2/21/19: Hi Robinson, Welcome to Google on your new Apple iPhone (tied to droidhunter88)

2/28/19: Your items are ready for pickup.Order Number: W776795632Ordered on: February 28, 2019

2/28/19: Your trade-in has been initiated. Thanks for using Apple GiveBack.

3/1/19: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud on an iPhone XR. Date and Time: March 1, 2019, 8:52 AM PST

3/5/19: Recently you reported an issue with Polarr Photo Editor, Polarr Photo Editor Yearly using iTunes Report a Problem

3/7/19: Your Apple ID, [email protected], was just used to download Lovense [sic] Remote from the App Store on a computer or device that has not previously been used.

3/9/19: New sign-in to your linked account [email protected] Your Google Account was just signed in to from a new Apple iPhone device.

3/9/19: Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose (Unabridged)

3/13/19: Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser. Date and Time: March 13, 2019, 5:43 PM PDT

3/16/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on March 16, 2019 at 11:59:16 PM EDT:Email address(es)

Droidhunter88 is added back to Hunter’s iCloud contact again.

3/17/19: You recently added [email protected] as a new alternate email address for your Apple ID.

3/17/19: The following changes to your Apple ID, [email protected] were made on March 17, 2019 at 12:02:06 AM EDT: Email address(es)

3/17/19: We haven’t received your device.

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Walt Nauta and the Single Box

The section of the less redacted search warrant affidavit showing when Walt Nauta moved boxes in and out of the storage room differs from the timeline shown in the indictment in one key way.

The search warrant affidavit used to demonstrate probable cause doesn’t describe how, on May 22 of last year, the former valet spent over half an hour in the storage room, and then left carrying a single box.

53. On May 22, 2022, NAUTA entered the Storage Room at 3:47 p.m. and left approximately 34 minutes later, carrying one of TRUMP’s boxes.

There are several possible explanations why that description may not be in the search warrant affidavit.

Perhaps investigators didn’t think it important — though that would be hard to believe, given that the affidavit observes something that the indictment does not as explicitly: that all this box moving happened in the same period when Nauta disavowed any knowledge of box movement.

On May 30, 2022, four days after WITNESS 5’s interview with the FBI during which the location of boxes was a significant subject of questioning, WITNESS 5 is observed exiting the ANTEROOM doorway with approximately fifty Bankers boxes, consistent with the description of the FPOTUS BOXES. [my emphasis]

Perhaps investigators simply didn’t see Nauta and the single box on May 22. But note that the surveillance video was motion activated, so any movement on May 22 should show up just like all the other movement did, and in close proximity to his movements captured two days later.

[T]he FBI determined that the drive contained video footage from four cameras in the basement hallway of the PREMISES in which the door to the STORAGE ROOM is located. The footage on the drive begins on April 23, 2022, and ends on June 24, 2022. The recording feature of the cameras appears to be motion activated, so that footage is only captured when motion is detected within each camera’s field of view.

Or perhaps this movement, Nauta spending half an hour in the storage room then leaving with a single box, is one of the surveillance footage gaps that investigators spent much of a year trying to fill and explain.

The different treatment of this one box is more interesting given other details of the timeline.

For example, Nauta retrieved that single box just two days before the original deadline for the subpoena, May 24.

The return date of the subpoena was May 24, 2022.

Nauta retrieved that box the day before Trump met with Corcoran and another attorney who hasn’t been IDed yet, but who may be Boris Epshteyn. At the meeting, a day after presumably getting a box that didn’t show up in the search warrant affidavit, Trump whined that, “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes!”

54. On May 23, 2022, TRUMP met with Trump Attorney 1 and Trump Attorney 2 at The Mar-a-Lago Club to discuss the response to the May 11 Subpoena. Trump Attorney 1 and Trump Attorney 2 told TRUMP that they needed to search for documents that would be responsive to the subpoena and provide a certification that there had been compliance with the subpoena. TRUMP, in sum and substance, made the following statements, among others, as memorialized by Trump Attorney 1:

a. I don’t want anybody looking, I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t, I don’t want you looking through my boxes.

b. Well what if we, what happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?

c. Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?

d. Well look isn’t it better if there are no documents?

Amidst all that whining, Trump agreed to let Corcoran search for documents, but only after a ten day delay. And then Trump delayed his departure to Bedminster so he would be at Mar-a-Lago to sort boxes and to see the scheme through.

56. On May 23, TRUMP also confirmed his understanding with Trump Attorney 1 that Trump Attorney 1 would return to The Mar-a-Lago Club on June 2 to search for any documents with classification markings to produce in response to the May 11 Subpoena. Trump Attorney 1 made it clear to TRUMP that Trump Attorney 1 would conduct the search for responsive documents by looking through TRUMP’s boxes that had been transported from the White House and remained in storage at The Mar-a-Lago Club. TRUMP indicated that he wanted to be at The Mar-a-Lago Club when Trump Attorney 1 returned to review his boxes on June 2, and that TRUMP would change his summer travel plans to do so. TRUMP told Trump Attorney 2 that Trump Attorney 2 did not need to be present for the review of boxes.

57. After meeting with Trump Attorney 1 and Trump Attorney 2 on May 23, TRUMP delayed his departure from The Mar-a-Lago Club to The Bedminster Club for the summer so that he would be present at The Mar-a-Lago Club on June 2, when Trump Attorney 1 returned to review the boxes.

Something that doesn’t show up in the indictment but does in the affidavit is that Corcoran then pushed for an extension on the subpoena deadline.

On May 25, 2022, while negotiating for an extension of the subpoena, FPOTUS COUNSEL 1 sent two letters to DOJ COUNSEL. In the second such letter, which is attached as Exhibit 1, FPOTUS COUNSEL 1 asked DOJ to consider a few “principles,” which include FPOTUS COUNSEL 1’s claim that a President has absolute authority to declassify documents. In this letter, FPOTUS COUNSEL 1 requested, among other things, that “DOJ provide this letter to any judicial officer who is asked to rule on any motion pertaining to this investigation, or on any application made in connection with any investigative request concerning this investigation.”

Just one of the two letters Corcoran sent that day has been released — the one falsely claiming Trump had returned documents in good faith earlier that year, though Corcoran may not have known that was false. Nauta would repeat a version of that claim the next day, on May 26, in his FBI interview, though unlike Corcoran, he is credibly accused of knowing well that was a lie.

All the other movement of boxes, then, occurs during that subpoena extension (and this might be another reason why the May 22 movement is not included on the affidavit — perhaps investigators focused on what happened during the subpoena extension). Nauta empties the storage closet of 64 more boxes, moving all these boxes in the same week when, in an FBI interview, he allegedly denied knowing anything about an earlier scheme to sort through boxes.

On May 24, 2022, WITNESS 5 is observed exiting the ANTEROOM doorway with three boxes.

On May 30, 2022, four days after WITNESS 5’s interview with the FBI during which the location of boxes was a significant subject of questioning, WITNESS 5 is observed exiting the ANTEROOM doorway with approximately fifty Bankers boxes, consistent with the description of the FPOTUS BOXES. FBI did not observe this quantity of boxes being returned to the STORAGE ROOM through the ANTEROOM entrance in its review of the footage.

The next day, on June 1, 2022, WITNESS 5 is observed carrying eleven brown cardboard boxes out the ANTEROOM entrance. One box did not have a lid on it and appeared to contain papers.

And then, after Nauta told a female Trump that Trump wanted to pick from all those boxes, Nauta loaded up several of the boxes withheld from Corcoran’s search onto Trump’s plane to take to Bedminster, never to be seen again.

72. Earlier [on June 3], NAUTA and others loaded several of TRUMP’s boxes along with other items on aircraft that flew TRUMP and his family north for the summer.

So it may or may not be a significant detail, but the day before Trump orchestrates this scheme to keep 35 boxes shielded from Corcoran’s search, Nauta spent half an hour in the storage room retrieving a single box.

Some weeks after this scheme, on June 21, the day before DOJ asked Trump Organization for surveillance footage, per the discovery letter, Nauta appeared before a grand jury, his second (and only other) interview with investigators.

A bunch of reports last year, such as this one from Devlin Barrett that likely confuses Nauta with Molly Michael, described that Nauta changed his testimony in what would be this grand jury appearance, admitting that Trump ordered him to move boxes.

When FBI agents first interviewed Nauta, he denied any role in moving boxes or sensitive documents, the people familiar with the situation said in interviews before Nauta’s name became public. But as investigators gathered more evidence, they questioned him a second time and he told a starkly different story — that Trump instructed him to move the boxes, these people said.

But those reports came at a time when DOJ was still trying to get more testimony from Nauta.

Prosecutors have indicated they are skeptical of an initial account Mr. Nauta gave investigators about moving documents stored at Mar-a-Lago and are using the specter of charges against him for misleading investigators to persuade him to sit again for questioning, according to two people briefed on the matter.

So, particularly given that a grand jury appearance would have been in — and so would be charged — in DC, it’s not really clear whether Nauta did correct his story before the grand jury. If he didn’t, Jack Smith could prosecute Nauta individually on a perjury charge that might go to trial within months, not the year the Espionage Act trial is expected to take.

Whether or not he cleaned up his testimony, on June 21, Nauta appeared before the grand jury.

Having locked that testimony in, on June 22 prosecutors asked Trump Organization — probably Alan Garten, from whom discovery has been deficient in past investigations — for surveillance footage.

DOJ COUNSEL has advised me that on or about June 22, 2022, counsel for the Trump Organization, a group of business entities associated with FPOTUS, confirmed that the Trump Organization maintains security cameras in the vicinity of the STORAGE ROOM and that on June 24, 2022, counsel for the Trump Organization agreed to accept service of a grand jury subpoena for footage from those cameras.

Shortly after that, per reporting on some of the last grand jury testimony banked in DC before DOJ took steps to charge the Espionage charges in Florida, Nauta called Chief of Operations for Trump Organization, Matthew Calamari Sr.

To resolve the issue about the gaps in the surveillance footage, the special counsel last week subpoenaed Matthew Calamari Sr, the Trump Organization’s security chief who became its chief operating officer, and his son Matthew Calamari Jr, the director of corporate security.

Both Calamaris testified to the federal grand jury in Washington on Thursday, and were questioned in part on a text message that Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, had sent them around the time that the justice department last year asked for the surveillance footage, one of the people said.

The text message is understood to involve Nauta asking Matthew Calamari Sr to call him back about the justice department’s request, one of the people said – initially a point of confusion for the justice department, which appears to have thought the text was to Calamari Jr.

Then, less than two weeks later, on July 6, Trump Organization provided DOJ with surveillance footage showing Nauta moving a great many boxes out of the storage room, and moving fewer than half of them back in before Evan Corcoran searched them. That’s pretty damning stuff! It provided some of the most compelling evidence in the affidavit justifying a search on the former President’s beach resort.

DOJ only got two months of footage, not the five they had asked for (which would have covered the tail end of the earlier sort of boxes). That’s unsurprising: even normal businesses only retain such footage for a limited period of time.

But in addition to obtaining fewer months than they had requested, the footage Trump Org turned over reportedly had other gaps, gaps that have not yet been charged or even mentioned, at least in unsealed form, in any official DOJ filing.

What’s unclear is whether that May 22 footage, showing that Nauta spent half an hour in the storage closet only to come out with a single box, was originally one of those surveillance gaps or not.

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Serving as Julian Assange’s Unwitting Data Mule to Israel Shamir Is Not Journalism

It’s a testament to how effective WikiLeaks’ propaganda is that almost none of the people implicated by things Julian Assange did years ago and almost none of the people who brainlessly repeat Julian Assange’s propaganda now know about this May 16, 2022 filing, submitted last year in the Josh Schulte case, which I wrote about here.

The redacted bits of the filing almost certainly describe things obtained in an ongoing investigation of WikiLeaks that pertain to how the data stolen by Schulte was used. The unredacted parts, however, describe that what must be the WikiLeaks investigation is both ongoing and has a scope that, “is neither known to the public nor to all of the targets of the investigation.”

“All of the targets.” That phrase is telling. At least one target — Assange — knows he is a target. The other targets (and DOJ uses the jargon to describe people who almost certainly will be charged, not just people who might be) don’t know.

The WikiLeaks investigation — which is ongoing and not just, as many boosters claim, an attempt to shore up the case against Assange — is not an investigation into Assange, exclusively. There are other targets.

Key WikiLeaks people almost certainly know about this filing, because they treated Schulte’s second trial — where he defended himself and repeatedly tried to publicly share classified information, almost certainly including details of the discovery about the ongoing WikiLeaks investigation he had received — differently than the first.

They’re just not telling you that there are other targets of the WikiLeaks investigation.

They’re not telling you, in part, because it ensures that when the Met or FBI or other investigators approach people to obtain information about those other targets, they’ll refuse, because they don’t want to be part of a prosecution of Julian Assange for what they’re telling themselves is journalism.

James Ball is the latest person describing how that happened.

In a Rolling Stone post describing the two year effort to obtain his cooperation, he claims journalists are being asked to cooperate against Assange.

And he claims he’s being approached — for information that clearly pertains to Israel Shamir — as a journalist.

He asserts that he’s being approached as a journalist by claiming that DOJ wants to talk to him about this 2013 article, rather than about his own conduct described in the article.

As the article described, in 2010, he unwittingly served as Assange’s data mule, handing off 90,000 State Cables to Israel Shamir, who then exploited them — by sharing them with Belarusian dictator Alexandr Lukashenko and/or selling them — before the entire Cable set was released.

Shamir is an anti-Semitic writer, a supporter of the dictator of Belarus, and a man with ties and friends in Russian security services. He and Julian—unknown to us—had been in friendly contact for years. It was a friendship that would have serious consequences.

Introduced to WikiLeaks staff and supporters under a false name, Shamir was given direct access to more than 90,000 of the U.S. Embassy cables, covering Russia, all of Eastern Europe, parts of the Middle East, and Israel. This was, for quite some time, denied by WikiLeaks. But that’s never a denial I’ve found convincing: the reason I know he has them is that I gave them to him, at Assange’s orders, not knowing who he was.

Why did this prove to be a grave mistake? Not just for Shamir’s views, which are easy to Google, but for what he did next. The first hints of trouble came through contacts from various Putin-influenced Russian media outlets. A pro-Putin outlet got in touch to say Shamir had been asking for $10,000 for access to the cables. He was selling the material we were working to give away free, to responsible outlets.

Worse was to come. The NGO Index on Censorship sent a string of questions and some photographic evidence, suggesting Shamir had given the cables to Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Europe’s last dictator. Shamir had written a pro-Belarus article, shortly before photos emerged of him leaving the interior ministry. The day after, Belarus’s dictator gave a speech saying he was establishing a WikiLeaks for Belarus, citing some stories and information appearing in the genuine (and then unpublished) cables. [my emphasis]

As he admits, at least by 2013, Ball was aware that Shamir had ties to Russian spooks.

What Ball describes in the piece is that he entered into an agreement with Assange to provide data to someone, Shamir, that Shamir did not publish, but instead shared with a repressive dictator and, probably, with Russian intelligence services.

That’s not journalism. That’s spying.

To be sure: as Ball describes, he realized his error and promptly left WikiLeaks (and, as he described in the 2013 article, refused to sign some of the NDAs Assange was pushing). That’s why he was approached as a witness and not a subject, because he made affirmative efforts to leave the conspiracy that has already been charged against Assange and almost certainly will be charged against Shamir, if it hasn’t already been, under seal.

After having served as an unwitting data mule for Assange in a handoff that would result in Lukashenko (and possibly Russian spies) getting advance access to the content of the Cables, Ball subsequently became a journalist. But that does not retroactively change what happened in 2010. Nor does that mean FBI approached him as a journalist. They approached him as a guy who once unwittingly served as a data mule for the part of the Cable releases that undermines all the claims that Assange is nothing but a publisher.

Here’s what people miss about the publication charges against Julian Assange, including the Cable count. They charge him for, “distributing them and then by publishing them.” Proving that Assange distributed the State Cables via unwitting data mule James Ball to Shamir is all DOJ would have to do to prove that charge against Assange, to prove that Assange shared them with someone not authorized to receive them. At a hypothetical trial of Assange (and whoever else gets charged), they’ll undoubtedly explain that after first giving privileged access to the Cables to Shamir, who handed them onto people who would use them to suppress dissent, Assange published all of them. That’s part of the cover. That’s part of what leads people like Ball to imagine he was involved in journalism when he shared the Cable files with Shamir.

For a number of WikiLeaks releases, there’s some story like this, about how before publication, files were either removed from the publication set or provided exclusively to someone in advance. The publication is, in part, cover for that earlier sharing. Schulte even described how if Russia got the source code he shared with WikiLeaks but which WikiLeaks, with limited exceptions, did not publish, they would never publish it, because it would be more useful to reverse engineer what the CIA had been doing.

These tools are MUCH more valuable undiscovered by the media or the nation that lost them. Now, you can secretly trace and discover every operation that nation is conducting.

Schulte is one of the people that anyone charged in a larger WikiLeaks conspiracy would be charged with conspiring with.

That’s the tough thing about US conspiracy law: Once you enter into a conspiracy, you’re on the hook for the actions of anyone who later enters into that conspiracy — like Shamir or Schulte — whether or not you know about it personally. You’re on the hook unless and until you take affirmative actions to leave the conspiracy. Lots of people with ties to WikiLeaks want no tie to Assange’s relationship with Shamir, but if DOJ adds him as a co-conspirator, then they’re not going to have much choice in the matter.

In any case, because so few of WikiLeaks’ boosters know that there are other targets in this investigation, they seem to be getting unfortunate legal advice, such as regarding the import of the detail that FBI obtained a statement from Shamir — whose statements, if and when he is charged as a co-conspirator, can be entered at trial — stating that Ball provided Cables, which he claimed to be about “the Jews,” to him.

The U.S. government cannot make much use of what I revealed in the article in a court of law unless I testify to it — and it is not hard to see how I could be useful if they were trying to strengthen the political case against Assange. In the article, I admit that I was the one who gave Shamir the material, albeit on Assange’s orders, without knowing who he was. If I testified to all this, it could, at least in theory, open me to criminal charges of my own.

[snip]

When, after months of delaying tactics had run out of road, we said a final “no”, there was a small sting in the tale from a DOJ prosecutor to my lawyers. Sending a statement in which Shamir had falsely claimed I had provided him with cables on “the Jews,” the prosecutor noted:

“Upon seeing those words from Shamir, I cannot help but ask whether Mr. Ball would reconsider his decision about speaking to the investigators, even if only just to respond to Shamir’s allegations.”

Yeah, it was a sleazy tactic, but also one designed to alert his lawyer that Ball does not currently have exposure but at a trial in which Shamir is a co-conspirator, Ball’s own conduct will be introduced at trial as part of proving that Cable charge and can be introduced without the article Ball wrote in 2013. Ball was advised they can’t use his article without his testimony — and because he had already left any agreement with Assange that’s probably right — but FBI can certainly introduce Shamir’s claims that he got the Cables from Ball, along with whatever other evidence they have about what Shamir did with them afterwards.

One more reason the fact that this is an ongoing investigation into targets not publicly identified matters: DOJ may or may not  or may already have gotten the UK to approve superseding the existing indictment against Assange, the one that has led people to believe he is the only target of it. But they certainly have the ability to charge a conspiracy in which Assange is an uncharged co-conspirator, showing a seven year conspiracy involving Russian spooks — starting no later than that handoff of cables to Shamir — charging everyone else that entered into a conspiracy via Assange with Russian spooks. Back in 2020, prosecutors implied to Jeremy Hammond that the long extradition process of Assange would provide the opportunity to charge Assange’s involvement in the 2016 Russian hack-and-leak. And because at least one of the people who would be charged in such a conspiracy, Josh Schulte, appears to have continued his efforts to leak through last year, any statute of limitations might go through 2027. That’s why they’re in no rush to charge Shamir publicly: because the way conspiracy law works in the US, they can charge everyone who didn’t affirmatively leave the WikiLeaks conspiracy so long as the conspiracy remains ongoing.

Ball may well be right that the other people the FBI has approached are being approached for coverage of WikiLeaks they did, as journalists (though there are some edge cases). But of the descriptions I’ve seen, there’s always another as yet uncharged target about whom the FBI is asking. That may not change their calculus about whether they want to cooperate, but it means, whether they know it or not, that their refusals are not limited to a bid to protect Assange’s conduct.

I think the people approached for their coverage of WikiLeaks should definitely tell the FBI to fuck off.

But there’s more going on here, particularly with the request to Ball.

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Double Booked: Whistleblower X Described Inappropriate Presidential Interference … Back in 2019

There’s a line in Whistleblower X’s testimony that hasn’t gotten enough attention amid the uncritical treatment of Gary Shapley’s media tour claiming improper political interference in the investigation of Hunter Biden.

Whistleblower X described that when investigators asked late last year why prosecutors hadn’t yet charged Hunter Biden, they learned that the attorneys had “found some emails” that made them question whether “they could actually charge the case.”

So we found out through talking with our SAC that the attorneys had found — we were always asking for updates on charging. When are we going to charge? When are we going to charge? We were told that the prosecutors had found some emails that concerned them if they could actually charge the case. That’s what they said to us.

This explanation — that prosecutors had discovered emails that made them question whether they could charge the case, at all — would present an entirely different explanation for the delayed (and seemingly softball) charging decision with regards to Hunter Biden, one for which there is abundant evidence in the two transcripts, yet one that has been ignored by lazy journalists.

It suggests there may be evidence of past misconduct that, if shared with Hunter Biden’s lawyers in discovery, would lead to dismissal of the entire case, or at least an acquittal.

Non-Virgin Birth

Start with how the investigation was set up. Shapley described that the investigation into Hunter Biden was spun off of an investigation into what he called a “foreign-based amateur online pornography platform.”

The investigation into Hunter Biden, code name Sportsman, was first opened in November 2018 as an offshoot of an investigation the IRS was conducting into a foreign-based amateur online pornography platform.

Whistleblower X, who opened the case immediately after joining the International Tax and Financial Crimes group, described that “amateur online pornography platform” differently; he described it as a “social media company” that may have hosted a prostitution ring.

I started this investigation in November of 2018 after reviewing bank reports related to another case I was working on a social media company. Those bank reports identified Hunter Biden as paying prostitutes related to a potential prostitution ring.

Also included in those bank reports was evidence that Hunter Biden was living lavishly through his corporate bank account. This is a typical thing that we look for in tax cases — criminal tax cases, I should say.

Remember that Whistleblower X has a habit of seeing sex workers everywhere he looks.

Whistleblower X then went from there to look for evidence of crime in public reporting on Hunter Biden’s divorce proceedings.

In addition, there was media reporting related to Hunter Biden’s wife, ex-wife, divorce proceedings basically talking about his tax issues. And I wanted to quote some of the things that were said in her divorce filing which was public record.

“Throughout the parties’ separation, Mr. Biden” — referring to Hunter Biden — “has created financial concerns for the family by spending extravagantly on his own interests, including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, gifts for women with whom he had sexual relationships with, while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills.

“The parties’ outstanding debts are shocking and overwhelming. The parties have maxed-out credit card debt, double mortgages on both real properties they own, and a tax debt of at least $300,000.” [my emphasis]

Then, in response to questioning from Minority Counsel, Whistleblower X described how, on his third attempt to open the investigation, he ran bank reports for Burisma, which is what convinced his supervisor to permit him to open the investigation.

Mr. X. My initiation packet, so sending the case forward to get — we call it subject case. It’s an SCI. It’s elevating the case to actually working the investigation. My first one showed the unfiled returns and the taxes owed for 2015 and that was it on my first package. So that was the wrongdoing that we were alleging.

And my supervisor goes: You don’t have enough. You need to find more.

So I kept digging for more and more. And even after that point, he goes: You haven’t found enough. So I ended up searching bank reports that [I] ran on the periphery of what we were looking at.

So I ran bank reports for Burisma, and in those bank reports I had found additional payments that Hunter had received. And then at that point I had found that Hunter did not report the income for 2014 related to Burisma.

So now I had a false return year. So that alone — it was basically so much evidence that I put in there — allowed us to elevate the case.

A potentially “amateur” sex worker site, to divorce proceedings, to Burisma. It all sounds like an effort to find a crime, and finding that crime has been a significant focus of a 12-person international tax group supposedly tasked to find much more significant tax crime ever since.

I don’t think anyone asked how long this process of making three bids to open an investigation into Hunter Biden took. So it’s actually unclear how the timing works with the investigation in Delaware opened in January 2019.

So in [or] around March or April of 2019, the case went up to DOJ Tax. And at that time we were told that William Barr made the decision to join two investigations together. So at that point in time I had found out that Delaware had opened up an investigation related to the bank reports and that that occurred in January of 2019, so 2 months after I started mine.

Likewise, there has never been an explanation for what predicated the separate investigation in Delaware opened in 2019, though NYT describes that an existing civil review of Hunter Biden’s tax problems became a criminal investigation that also included the foreign influence peddling, largely, Burisma, that appears to have since been dropped.

Then, we learn, that shortly after Barr was confirmed, and in a period when he was trying to reverse the prosecution of Michael Cohen, sustaining investigations into Greg Craig and Andrew McCabe, perpetuating efforts to seed an investigation into John Kerry, and launching a four year witch hunt based off fabricated claims about Hillary Clinton, the Attorney General consolidated everything in Delaware — the perfect venue if Joe Biden is your target but (as Whistleblower X noted), the wrong place for Joe Biden’s son, who lived in LA or DC during the alleged crimes in question.

Documented Sixth Amendment Concerns

How all this got started matters, because this early period may be when adverse emails that could make it impossible to prosecute Hunter Biden at trial got put into the record.

That’s because Whistleblower X’s supervisor for the first period of the investigation — for a period that may have spanned over 14 months — believed there were Sixth Amendment and political influence problems with the investigation.

When describing how this perturbed him, Whistleblower X freely admitted that he was reading everything in the press about Hunter Biden (that detail will become important later) and that he went to his supervisor’s boss to get his boss to stop raising concerns about Trump’s tweets.

Whistleblower X described his supervisor Matt Kutz’ concern about Trump’s tweets — a direct example of precisely what Republicans are searching for, inappropriate Presidential interference!! — as exhibiting a liberal viewpoint.

From what I was told by various people in my agency, my IRS supervisor, Matt Kutz, created memos which he put in the investigative files regarding the investigation potentially violating the subject’s Sixth Amendment rights. He also referred to Donald Trump’s tweets at the time.

I recall that at one point I had to go around my supervisor and ask his boss, ASAC George Murphy, to tell him to stop sending me and the Hunter Biden prosecution team these emails and that I was searching media articles on a weekly basis and was aware of everything being written in the media regarding the case.

[snip]

A So it was actually Matthew Kutz. He was my supervisor at the time and from the articles that he was sending me, I would say he had more of a liberal view than I had and it was pretty obvious from the things he would send me and discuss. And that’s just me making an observation.

So I later found out about these memos that were put in the file regarding the issues that he saw with the investigation, the fact that we even had it opened. So I only learned about those after.

And then it came to a point to where he’s sending us so many media articles about different issues that I had to tell him stop, please. And I had to go around him. And that’s when I went to my ASAC at the time, George Murphy, who was above him. [my emphasis]

After learning of an example of Presidential interference, but from Trump, GOP staffers in the interview interrupted the Minority’s questioning by going off the record about something, as if they were the witness.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 2. Off the record.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Off the record.

[Discussion off the record.]

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. On the record.

That off the record discussion appears to have discussed why Whistleblower X believed that his supervisor’s concerns about the Sixth Amendment were proof of liberal bias, because that’s what Whistleblower X explained immediately after going back on the record. And then, Whistleblower X explained to Minority Counsel, that Matt Kutz raised concerns four years ago about whether this could ever be prosecuted.

Mr. X. So these articles were a lot about — were a lot of articles regarding Trump and getting a fair investigation and things related to that, Trump’s tweets and stuff like that. So, that’s what drew me to my conclusion.

BY MINORITY COUNSEL 1: Q What was the purpose behind him sending you the Trump tweets? What was he trying to get at, or was he trying to give you more information for your case? Why would he send those, or do you know?

A Yeah, I think he was bringing up concerns with potentially us prosecuting the case down the road, potential issues we’re going to incur. I don’t remember the exact email that he sent that caused me to be — that he had to stop sending me some of the news articles, because it wasn’t even the fact that he was sending me these news articles.

It was the opinion he was providing in those emails that I did not agree or that I did not — not agree with but did not think was appropriate. [my emphasis]

Whistleblower X told us in one part of the interview that prosecutors had found something in the email record that led them to worry they could not prosecute this case at all, and then in another part of the interview he told us that the supervisor for the first year or so of this investigation believed they would have problems prosecuting it down the road because of Trump’s constant badgering for precisely this investigation.

Maybe, just maybe, the reason no US Attorney’s Office wanted to take this to trial is because this investigation was plagued by inappropriate tampering from the other President from the start?

Gary Shapley’s Involvement

In January 2020, in the same period when Bill Barr was setting up an alternative channel via which DOJ could ingest dirt about Hunter Biden that Russian spies shared with Rudy Giuliani, Gary Shapley became Whistleblower X’s supervisor, overseeing the 12-person International Tax group that would hunt Hunter Biden for five years.

Now is probably a good time to note that Shapley — who splits his time between Baltimore and DC — seems to have a good relationship with Rod Rosenstein, a Maryland AUSA who went on to become US Attorney and then Deputy Attorney General during a period when DOJ was launching politicized investigations into Trump’s enemies.

Mr. Shapley. No. I think I’ve said it, that this is not the norm. This is — I’ve worked with some great guys, some great prosecutors that went on to be U.S. attorneys and went on to be the deputy attorney general and, I think I have experience enough to where it means something.

As noted, Shapley became Whistleblower X’s supervisor just as Barr was setting up a protected means to ingest dirt pertaining to Burisma. But by his own description, Shapley didn’t start liaising more closely with David Weiss until later….

… Until Rudy Giuliani released the laptop.

From around October 2020 through October 2022, I was the IRS CI manager who interacted directly with the United States Attorney, David Weiss, and individuals at DOJ Tax Division the most.

This coincidence — that Shapley became more involved just after Rudy disclosed that a blind computer repairman had shared a laptop with the FBI before he himself, the President’s personal lawyer, got a copy — may be significant.

The Really Really Really Dated Claim about the Laptop

By Shapley’s description, he contacted the AUSA on the case, Lesley Wolf, and not only complained that the FBI was misrepresenting the laptop (when in fact they were mostly no-commenting), but also raised the possibility that John Durham may have searched the laptop.

On October 19th, 2020, I emailed Assistant United States Attorney Wolf: “We need to talk about the computer. It appears the FBI is making certain representations about the device, and the only reason we know what is on the device is because of the IRS CI affiant search warrant that allowed access to the documents. If Durham also executed a search warrant on a device, we need to know so that my leadership is informed. My management has to be looped into whatever the FBI is doing with the laptop. It is IRS CI’s responsibility to know what is happening. Let me know when I can be briefed on this issue.”

In his congressional testimony Durham specified that Hunter was the one Trump enemy he hadn’t been ordered to investigate — but remember that there were reports Ukrainians brought dirt to him.

In his testimony, Shapley admitted that the investigative team called this meeting because, “we were just making sure that everything was being handled appropriately.” But he emphasized Whistleblower X’s complaints that parts of the laptop had been withheld from investigators.

As I noted in this post, per Shapley’s own notes, that’s not what the bulk of the meeting was about.

Of 43 numbered entries, just eight deal in part or in whole with access Whistleblower X had, and some of that is conflicting [note that Shapley misspells Cellebrite “cellabright” throughout]. Here’s what those eight numbered entries describe:

  • 14a. Describing that the John Paul Mac Isaac 302 about what he saw on the laptop was being withheld from the prosecution team (as a whole), even though the taint team had found no privileged items discussed in it
  • 25. Describing that Whistleblower X had never seen a PDF version of the Cellebrite report from the drive, but instead had to look at the device itself
  • 29. Describing Whistleblower X asking whether all the iMessages that were relevant and non-privileged had been reviewed, the answer to which the team didn’t know immediately [this seems to confirm the IRS was not doing the scope review of the laptop]
  • 30. Describing that all messages from the hard drive had been shared in the third disclosure to investigators in February 2020, which seems to partially address item 29
  • 33. Discussing a March 2020 email describing limits on the quality and completeness of the recovery of the hard drive; in response to Whistleblower X’s complaint that he hadn’t seen it, an AUSA (probably Wolf) said they would eventually see a redacted version of the report
  • 40c. Quoting Whistleblower X complaining [it’s unclear whether this is in an April 2020 email or live] that he never saw the Cellebrite file
  • 41. Describing that the Cellebrite file was uploaded sometime in May [which may refute 40c]
  • 42. Describing Whistleblower X stating that if they’re going to testify, they need to see everything, in response to which Lesley Wolf said they would return to that issue

Most of the report seems to be an effort to ascertain legal chain of custody, given the discovery that the original source of the laptop had just spent the last few months turning it into a campaign season political hit job. But amid that discussion, Whistleblower X appears to have aired a series of complaints about decisions DOJ made about access in the interim year.

In his testimony, Shapley also made much of the final bullet point in his notes — the only part of the memo, aside from Whistleblower X’s complaints, that memorializes contemporaneous discussion. In his testimony, Shapley quoted AUSA Lesley Wolf stating, just over a week after NYPost released their first story on the laptop, that there was no reason to think anything had been added to the laptop.

We have no reason to believe there is anything fabricated nefariously on the computer or hard drive. There are emails and other items that corroborate the items on the laptop and hard drive.

Shapley repeated that judgment from October 2020 in May 2023 uncritically, as if it is remotely definitive.

AUSA Wolf acknowledged that there was no reason to believe that any data was manipulated on devices by any third party. She further supported this belief by mentioning that they corroborated the data with other sources of information received.

Right wingers are predictably going nuts over this, claiming it proves something it does not.

Even ignoring the timing of Wolf’s comment, just days after the initial disclosure of the laptop, this comment falls far short of validating authenticity of the laptop. Wolf was only validating the laptop — all of it!! — by matching data points. Importantly, “the computer guy” at the meeting (who could probably spell Cellebrite correctly) proposed doing a report showing document creation date.

If the FBI did that after that meeting, Shapley chose not to disclose the outcome. Given what we know about Mac Isaac’s treatment of the laptop, such a step might have showed whether the blind computer repairman’s failure to airgap the machine resulted in email updates — including from the recently hacked Burisma — being loaded to the laptop.

More importantly, the discussion shows that a year after the government obtained the laptop, no one had yet done this kind of validation of the laptop (and given the recovery problems with it, it’s not entirely clear they could).  A year after obtaining the laptop, the government was still just working off trust in Mac Isaac’s sketchy and changing story.

Plus, it’s one thing to say the laptop as Mac Isaac delivered it to the FBI had nothing added, if that’s true, but we know that the laptop as released by Rudy did have alterations. And the fact that Rudy altered the laptop in the midst of launching an election-year attack discredits any claim that anyone makes about the laptop as released by him.

Whistleblower X’s Hot and Cold Affection for Forensic Reports

One of Whistleblower X’s serial complaints about the laptop — that he couldn’t get the Cellebrite report of the laptop itself, items 25, 40c, and 41, above — is of particular interest: That’s because the WhatsApp messages that Shapley shared with the Committee, showing Hunter Biden invoking his father in an attempt to get business in China, also did not come from the forensic format in which they’d be received from Apple.

In fact, they’re not even direct copies of the report from Apple — they are summaries, as Shapley admitted to the Committee. Shapley doesn’t even know who did the summary.

Q Could you tell us about this document, what is it, and how was it obtained —

A Sure. So there was an electronic search warrant for iCloud backup, and these messages were in that backup and provided —

Q Okay.

A — from a third party, from iCloud.

Q Okay. Who was it provided to?

A The — the investigative team from —

Q Okay. A It would go through all the same processes of — since it’s electronic, it would go to one of the computer analysis folks, and then they would put it in a readable format, and then it would go through filter review.

Q Okay. And these aren’t WhatsApp messages, these are summaries of WhatsApp messages, correct?

A Yeah, that’s correct. Because it was something about the readability of the actual piece, right? It was easier to summarize in a spreadsheet.

Q Okay. And who did the summary? Who prepared this document?

A It was either the computer analysis guy or [redacted, probably Whistleblower X], one or the other

This is the content that the Committee tried to recreate to look like real messages, only to mix message type and appearance.

Here’s what an FBI production from WhatsApp messages obtained from an iCloud warrant would look like in official admissible form, from an exhibit in Vladislav Klyushin’s trial.

It is also a reconstruction (and includes translations), but one that has enough information to afford reliability. It’s also entirely readable.

There’s simply no reason to further summarize from there, much less to do so without all the metadata included, as the IRS reportedly did. It’s not the Committee that first did sketchy reconstructions. Shapley, or Whistleblower X, did, off material they claimed to obtain directly from a warrant return.

These WhatsApp messages from Hunter Biden’s iCloud are important for several reasons: notably, that investigators reportedly had them in hand, directly from Apple, by August 2020, possibly relying on the laptop they had not yet fully validated to get them, then using them to validate the laptop content, the kind of investigative bellybutton that can get a case thrown out.

Further, when discussing them, Whistleblower X makes much of the fact that he wasn’t able to get location data to see whether Hunter was with his father when he sent these emails.

They had just served a search warrant on Apple, which should have gotten a good deal about Hunter Biden’s data — at the very least, the IP from which he was logging in. But given that they had an Apple return in hand, Whistleblower X’s complaint that they weren’t able to get it … almost certainly means he’s complaining that they weren’t able to get Joe Biden’s location data.

In 2020.

During the election.

Taint

With that in mind, go back to Whistleblower X’s complaints, over and over, that he didn’t have all the content from the laptop.

As Shapley explained in response to questioning, the investigative team was instructed not to look at anything from the Internet that was otherwise available, including — especially — the laptop.

Q Now, was your team, were they permitted to use open-source methods for looking at the materials for this case? Like, if materials were published on the internet related to Hunter Biden or related to Hunter Biden’s business concerns, were you allowed to consult that?

A No. We were directed that if there’s anything from the laptop from other sources to not look at it because then it’s potential for it to be tainted.

Q Okay. So if it’s posted on the internet, if it’s written about in the newspaper, you were not allowed to consult that open source method?

A Yeah. We were directed not to.

Q Is that customary?

A I would say yes. Yes.

Whistleblower X, however — after describing that the case predication itself came from press coverage of Hunter Biden’s messy divorce and that he was referencing press coverage of Hunter Biden’s messy life on a weekly basis — described seeing videos on Twitter that he had not received from the laptop.

And one thing that I want to be clear on, that there was information — and I don’t know the detail of that information that was withheld from us — but there was information withheld from the investigators.

And some of that was withheld for privilege. But there was other things — we went out and talked to one of the potential prostitutes. And there were videos that I’ve seen out there on Twitter, on the internet, and information related to that person that I had never seen before.

And I brought this up as an issue. I’m like: I’m seeing things here. Why am I not seeing that from you guys? And when I say “you guys,” the prosecutors. And there was a notion that some information was being held back from us, and I don’t know what that information was.

Whistleblower X, who chased down every one of Hunter Biden’s known sex partners for interviews, complained there were videos online — videos that would have come from a laptop that had been altered — that he had never seen.

Attorney-Client Taint

Whistleblower X risked tainting the investigation by reviewing material released on a laptop that had been altered.

That wasn’t the only taint concern though.

Twice in the interview, Congressional investigators introduced exhibits that Shapley hadn’t seen before: first an email from Eric Schwerin to Hunter Biden, which Shapley explained that he “ha[d]n’t seen it in this form, but I’ve seen excerpts of this document.” Then they showed Shapley an email involving — in addition to Schwerin and Hunter Biden — George Mesires, an email clearly marked as “Re: Tax Analysis — Attorney Communication.”

When Majority Counsel asked Shapley if he has seen that email, he and his attorney went off the record.

Have you seen this document before?

Mr. Lytle. Can we talk to our client just briefly.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 2. Of course. We can go off the record.

[Discussion off the record.]

MAJORITY COUNSEL 2. We’re back on the record.

Having had to consult his attorney about what the simple yes or no response was, Shapley came back to note that this was privileged.

BY MAJORITY COUNSEL 2: Q The question is whether you’ve seen this document before.

A No. Anything from George Mesires was considered privileged —

Q Okay.

A — attorney-client privilege and was not provided to us.

Q Okay. And so that was kept from you by the FBI?

A No. It would be a filter team.

Q Okay.

A When we get any information, and even from the laptop and hard drive, it went through filter reviews, and we only saw what came back as nonprivileged.

A long discussion ensued in which Republican lawyers complained that DOJ conducted privilege reviews for lawyers and accountants working for lawyers. It was immediately after that discussion that Majority Counsel asked whether the investigative team could review material made public from the laptop, as described above.

No, they couldn’t, Shapley explained, because they might see something that would taint the prosecution.

In response to a later question from the Minority, Shapley admitted that if he remained on the prosecution team, reviewing the Mesires letter would amount to taint.

In his response, he referred to Mesires as a “quote-unquote” attorney.

Q Okay. And this was back in 2017. Okay. And then on exhibit 5, it’s the same question, George Mesires, and I think you might have mentioned him earlier, do you know his relationship?

A Yeah. I know him to be a personal, quote, unquote attorney to Hunter Biden. And if I wasn’t taken off the case, I would have been tainted by this document

For example, in August 2020, we got the results back from an iCloud search warrant. Unlike the laptop, these came to the investigative team from a third-party record keeper and included a set of messages. The messages included material we clearly needed to follow up on. [my emphasis]

That’s how Shapley “quote-unquote” dealt with Mesires.

Whistleblower X, who admitted seeing videos online he hadn’t seen in material shared from the filter team, was different though.

As he was reading from an email that, he said, showed Lesley Wolf refusing to get approval for interviews, Whistleblower X stopped himself from reading one particular name.

Lesley Wolf says to me on September 9th, 2021: “I do not think that you are going to be able to do these interviews as planned. The document requests require approval from Tax Division. At present, Jack and Mark are racing to get the EWC motion on Stuart’s desk” — so Stuart was the [Acting] Deputy [Assistant] Attorney General, Stuart Goldberg at Tax Division — “Stuart’s desk for approval before he leaves town for a week. “Along with the approval for the” — and I’m going to leave the name out of that — “both of these items are higher priority and we can’t pull time and attention away to move these subpoenas through. [my emphasis]

In follow-up, Minority counsel asked Whistleblower X what name he had asked to leave out.

It was George Mesires.

Q Okay. You mentioned — this is a little ways later — I believe on September the 9th of 2021 that you had an email. You were reading through it, and you had mentioned that Stuart Goldberg was leaving town. You said there was a name that you wanted to leave out when you were reading the email. What was that name?

A So it was the name of Hunter’s personal counsel, George Mesires.

A year after complaining loudly that he hadn’t been provided stuff he saw on Twitter, he tried to subpoena Hunter Biden’s “quote unquote attorney.”

Whistleblower X’s Unclean Dirt

There’s one more detail that suggests whatever prosecutors found in email could have made the case unsustainable — and also makes Whistleblower X’s urgent concerns, in a meeting just over a week after NYPost reported on Rudy’s version of the laptop — far more suspect.

In what appears to be the last of his complaints about not getting information on the laptop (item 42), he said, as recorded by Shapley,

42 SA [redacted, probably X] — For items not seen by agents shouldn’t they see everything because if they have to testify to it they need to see it

a. Lesley response is that this is a historical review and we can discuss that later.

To get access to the entirety of the laptop, Whistleblower X made an argument about what he would need to do to prepare to be the key witness against Hunter Biden at trial.

That argument is 180 degrees the reverse from what he explained over and over in his testimony, about how he was avoiding anything that might taint him as a witness.

For example, he said he had been avoiding testimony to Congress to preserve his ability to testify.

I’d like to note that I wasn’t present at the leadership meeting on October 7th, 2022, that Mr. Shapley and leaders from the IRS were a part of with U.S. Attorney David Weiss, the meeting where he made the statements about not being in charge.

I also wanted to continue to protect the record and my ability to testify as the case agent in the future, which is also a part of the reason I didn’t come forward to you.

[snip]

I was interviewed by an investigator — I think they were with TIGTA. I told them, I didn’t leak anything. I thought that the leak might have come from either defense counsel, or from DOJ like the other ones came. But what I can tell you, and I’ve told this to the prosecution team, I’ve done everything that I can to keep my record clean and to keep my ability to testify as the case agent as clean as I possibly can.

He explained that he purposely wouldn’t write stuff down to preserve his ability to be summary witness.

Mr. X. On the record.

I just want to say that I made every effort to — when we work these cases, you have to be careful of what you might say that could be used against you if you were to go to trial or if you were to go in front of a grand jury. Usually, the IRS special agent is the final witness, the summary witness. So things that you put out there in emails, they can attack you at a later date.

So I did everything that I could to possibly make the record as clean as it possibly could, investigated the case, but in doing that, here’s all the things that happened because of that.

Shapley, on the other hand, did put all that in writing. When Minority Counsel pressed him on the fact that he really hadn’t disclosed any of this to supervisors, he described that he kept taking notes of bitch sessions so that the others could testify.

Q No one at IRS above — other than CI, no deputy commissioners, no commissioner? A That is correct. And, there was a common theme that and the co-case agent Christine Puglisi would — after all these pros team calls we would have a follow-up call. And sometimes FBI agents would be on there as well. And it was basically talking about the strategy and it often became like, Wow, they are not letting us do this. Can you believe they said that? Like that type of thing.

And we — in order to protect the record of the investigation basically it was me that could only document that, right? Because we wanted to make sure that the agents weren’t documenting things that would eventually be turned over in discovery and could somehow affect the viability of the case.

So that is something that I documented moving forward. And each time we were, like, Wow, they didn’t let us do the search warrant. Like she said — to overcome probable cause with a search warrant is, like, that is it, right? That is really, like, okay, well, you are going to go do it, because we want evidence that is unfiltered, right? But the whole point is we were like, well, there is no way they are not going to charge us. The evidence is there. They say the evidence is there. And we just really couldn’t believe that they would be doing something wrong. It was a very heavy burden to overcome from my experience and training to be, like, wow, there is something going on here.

[snip]

Now I want to talk about exhibit 6, which is your memo about the laptop and the hard drive. Was this memo provided to anyone?

A This memo was discussed in length with the case agent and co-case agent, but to protect the record, these I couldn’t send to them.

Q Okay.

A So after each time we had calls like this, I would have conversations with them. There was even a document that I produced where they were like, well, there was this problem, this problem, this problem. So I was like, I’ll record it, because we don’t want this to potentially be discoverable and have any issues in the future. So this is an example of that, where if there are at least two people that will say that we talked about this right after, and most of the conversation is to discuss what happened during that, to make sure that it was accurate.

Q But you don’t provide a copy to your supervisor or Mr. Fort or anyone else in your chain of command?

A No.

Q It just stays with you?

A That’s correct. [my emphasis]

Effectively, what Shapley and Whistleblower X described to Congress is that the IRS investigators were keeping a double set of books regarding the investigation.

To be fair, I think many — perhaps most! — government investigative teams do this. Short of that, they get an agent who investigated just a small corner of the whole, shielded from any ongoing investigation. Or a paralegal.

But if an investigator really really wants to take the stand against they guy they’ve been investigating for five years, they have to be sure to keep their books clean.

Reviewing the full Hunter Biden laptop would have tainted Whistleblower X as a witness, though. Even ignoring probable chain of custody problems with the laptop, reviewing the laptop as reviewed with a search warrant would have made Whistleblower X a tainted witness. Reviewing the laptop as Rudy released it after altering it, all the more so.

Plus, some of the details in the IRS’ double set of books about the Hunter Biden investigation raise questions not about DOJ approval processes, but about integrity of evidence, including the laptop and everything that came after that.

For example, because in September 2020, AUSA Lesley Wolf raised the possibility (and then debunked) that the investigation would shut down after the election, as this double set of books recorded, it raises real concerns about whether this investigation was nothing more than an election stunt, whether Bill Barr’s DOJ was simply investigating Hunter Biden for a campaign ploy. When Wolf described that DOJ was under fire for self-inflicted reasons, it’s unclear whether she was talking about past disclosures, like the Carter Page IG Report that focused on FBI’s conduct, or whether she was talking about Barr’s tampering in ongoing investigations, something that was quite pressing in September 2020.

Gary Shapley created a double set of books in the Hunter Biden investigation and described it as such. That double set of books raises ample questions about whether this investigation was about Hunter Biden … or his father.

Cleanup on Aisle Nine

The press release from Delaware US Attorney David Weiss’ office announcing two Informations as part of a plea deal stated the investigation into Hunter Biden was “ongoing.”

The team assigned to the plea deal includes two Special AUSAs, Leo Wise (who has been brought into troubled cases in the past) and Derek Hines, and includes Benjamin Wallace from DE USAO rather than the AUSA at the center of allegations of abuse, Lesley Wolf.

Whistleblower X — a big fan of hearsay — told the House Ways and Means Committee that FBI Agents were being treated the same way IRS Agents are: requiring that they report through their Special Agent in Charge to Weiss.

A I did hear from FBI that they were being treated the exact same way — that they had to communicate through their SAC to the U.S. Attorney in Delaware.

So in spite of Gary Shapley’s wails that his team got cut off as retaliation, there’s some reason to believe everyone did.

Whistleblower X also referenced two topics into which there might be an ongoing investigation. The first was a CEFC deal with Hunter Biden in 2017 and 2018.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Can I go off the record? Mr. X. Yeah. Off the record.

[Discussion off the record.]

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Back on the record?

Mr. X. I don’t feel comfortable disclosing anything further on that issue.

The other involves the circumstances of how Kevin Morris paid off Hunter Biden’s tax debt in 2000.

A So on his 2020 tax return, personal tax return, Hunter stated: “See statement in 2020. The taxpayer received financial support from a personal friend totaling approximately $1.4 million. The parties agreed in 2020 to treat the support as a loan and later documented their agreement in a promissory note in the amount of $1.4 million, 5 percent interest. “The promissory note requires periodic payments between 2025 and 2027. The promissory note was executed by both parties on October 13th, 2021. “The taxpayer is treating this amount as a loan for tax purposes. The balance of the financial support is treated as a gift. No amount of the support is treated as a reported taxable event on this tax return.” So that’s what was filed with the return.

Q And has that transaction been investigated or —

A I’m no longer a part of an investigation related to that.

[snip]

Q It’s a voluntary interview. If you’re not comfortable saying, you don’t have to answer the question, any of our questions.

A It goes back to one of my — if there is potentially a current investigation that’s out there to —

Mr. Zerbe. Let’s go off the record.

[Discussion off the record.]

MAJORITY COUNSEL 2. Go back on the record?

Statutes of limitation on the latter event would not expire until at least 2025 (though, as noted, the terms of the loan only require that the President’s son start repaying the loan in 2025). It could well be that Hunter Biden, or his benefactor, will eventually be charged with a serious felony — potentially include campaign finance violations — for the way Joe Biden’s son eliminated some of his past tax exposure (though this post-dated the election).

So I think it very possible that Weiss effectively reset the Hunter Biden investigation as a way to move past a great deal of dodgy shit that went down in the last five years.

But amid the media attention Shapley has generated, there are signs that something else — not lefty political bias — undermined the case against Hunter Biden, potentially up to and including outright misconduct. There is a whole range of communications that may have made a prosecution of Hunter Biden unsustainable: documentation of political pressure from Trump, concerns about the sources of leads, evidence of potential taint, and a clear obsession with investigating Joe, not just Hunter.

Those thing should make a Hunter Biden prosecution unsustainable. And the people who kept a double set of books recording some of it are now wailing as if someone else blew the case.

When they may have.

The leaks that seem to have been the proximate cause of the turmoil may make — may already have made — such misconduct more apparent.

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