Joseph Ziegler Allegedly Chased Doctored Laptop Evidence
Following the news that Fox News has complied with one of Hunter Biden’s demands by taking down a six-part fictionalized series on Joe Biden’s son, Sarah Fitzpatrick, one of the journalists who first reported on Hunter Biden’s threats to sue Fox news yesterday, has a new scoop out.
A retired Secret Service agent implicated in the most clearcut laptop related fabrication, Robert Savage, is suing the NYPost, reporters who claimed that he had helped run cover-ups for Hunter Biden in LA, and the US affiliate of the Daily Mail. (NYP, Associated Newspapers)
A former Secret Service agent sued two news organizations for defamation Tuesday and accused them of publishing stories based on fabricated text messages that he says falsely linked him to Hunter Biden.
Robert Savage, a 25-year veteran of the U.S. Secret Service and the Special Agent in Charge of the agency’s Los Angeles Field Office from 2015-2017, filed the lawsuits in New York against the New York Post and two of its reporters, and the owner and publisher of the Daily Mail.
Savage alleged that the reporters and publications recklessly disregarded information that the text messages, which came from a laptop that purportedly belonged to Hunter Biden, were fabricated. Despite that, they published articles and tweets in 2021 and 2023 that suggested Savage communicated with and met and met with Biden in Los Angeles.
“Rob has not and has never met Hunter Biden, does not know Hunter Biden, has no connection with Hunter Biden, and has never corresponded with Hunter Biden,” Savage’s attorney, Mark Goidell, told NBC News.
The lawsuit itself is not the big part of the story: It’s that someone presenting as Joseph Ziegler questioned Savage about the incident.
In March 2022, Savage was visited at his home by an FBI agent and an IRS agent who said they wanted to ask him questions about his association with Hunter Biden and the laptop. Savage was also served with a grand jury subpoena from the U.S. Attorneys Office in Delaware, which later charged him with tax and gun charges.
NBC News obtained security footage of the interaction, copies of the business cards left by the agents and a copy of the subpoena.
The IRS agent identified himself as Joseph Ziegler, who testified as a whistleblower to a House committee investigating Hunter Biden in 2023. Ziegler alleged that the Department of Justice prosecutors limited his investigation of Hunter Biden, a charge that DOJ officiales denied. Ziegler’s attorney declined to comment.
Goidell said that the law enforcement agencies appear to have ended their investigations of the alleged text exchanges between Savage and Biden.
It has long been known that there was fabricated data on at least some versions of the hard drives created from the laptop. But it has been unclear whether those fabrications existed on the copy shared with the FBI.
If Joseph Ziegler really did visit Savage, it means one of two things: Either there is fabricated data on the FBI laptop and investigators have known that since 2022, or that Ziegler allowed himself to be tainted by the publicly released claims about the laptop, complete with fabricated data.
Remember, in August last year, when David Weiss’ purportedly sheep-dipped prosecutors told Abbe Lowell they were going to pursue felony charges against Hunter Biden, they confidently bragged that they had backstop for all the data on the laptop. They said that four months before they first obtained a warrant to access the laptop for evidence relating to gun crimes.
Their confidence turned out to be misplaced; in filings before Judge Noreika that persuaded her they had plenty of evidence against Hunter Biden, they relied on evidence that appears only to be available from the laptop.
And Savage’s lawsuit strongly suggests that prosecutors are sitting on evidence that they know the laptop is unreliable.
Update: This post has been updated, among other things, with links to the lawsuits.