Late to the Party: WashPost Publishes Bombshells Confirming Hunter Biden Laptop

Late Wednesday morning, The Washington Post decided that, as our Tim Graham tweeted, Democracy Has a Sunrise instead of Dying in Darkness as reporters Matt Viser, Tom Hamburger, and Craig Timberg published two bombshell articles acknowledging the existence of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop and detailing the First Son’s life of corruption as it relates to a Chinese energy company.

The trio’s admission came a year and a half after the laptop was first exposed by the New York Post and a full-court press and open collusion ensued between Big Tech, the liberal media, and the Biden campaign to censor and silence those who merely shared the New York paper’s groundbreaking story.

As we found after the 2020 election, 9.4 percent of Biden voters in swing states wouldn’t have voted for him if they had been made aware of his son’s negligence.

“Here’s how The Post analyzed Hunter Biden’s laptop” came first and did what the Daily Caller was able to do back on October 29, 2020, which was analyze and verify its validity as “unquestionably authentic.”

Viser, Hamburger, and Timberg explained in their lead “[t]housands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden…are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures from Google and other technology companies.”

They quickly added they were “a small fraction of 217 gigabytes of data provided to The Post” in June 2021 “on a portable hard drive by Republican activist Jack Maxey” with copies of files from his laptop because “[t]he vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post” though “neither found clear evidence of tampering.”

The Post blamed the lack of conclusiveness on “sloppy handling of the data, which damaged some records” affecting its “cryptographic features” and the Delaware repair shop owner’s copy having been “repeatedly accessed and copied…over nearly three years” while the original belongs to the FBI.

They then shamelessly downplayed the lies and screeches about the laptop being Russian disinformation (click “expand”):

The contents of Biden’s laptop computer have sparked debate and controversy since the New York Post and other news organizations in the closing month of the 2020 presidential campaign reported stories based on data purportedly taken from it.

Many Republicans have portrayed this data as offering evidence of misbehavior by Hunter Biden that implicated his father in scandal, while Democrats have dismissed it as probable disinformation, perhaps pushed by Russian operatives acting in a well-documented effort to undermine Biden. Facebook and Twitter in 2020 restricted distribution of stories about the drive’s contents out of concern that the revelations might have resulted from a nefarious hacking campaign intended to upend the election, much as Russian hacks of sensitive Democratic Party emails shaped the trajectory of the 2016 election.

The Washington Post’s forensic findings are unlikely to resolve that debate, offering instead only the limited revelation that some of the data on the portable drive appears to be authentic. The security experts who examined the data for The Post struggled to reach definitive conclusions about the contents as a whole, including whether all of it originated from a single computer or could have been assembled from files from multiple computers and put on the portable drive.

(….)

The portable drive provided to The Post contains 286,000 individual user files, including documents, photos, videos and chat logs. Of those, Green and Williams concluded that nearly 22,000 emails among those files carried cryptographic signatures that could be verified using technology that would be difficult for even the most sophisticated hackers to fake.

The nearly 3,000-word story said the “cryptographic signatures are a way for the company that handles the email — in the case of most of these, Google — to provide proof that the message came from a verified account and has not been altered in some way” with any changes rendering the emails “unverifiable.”

Downplaying the 22,000 confirmed e-mails as “routine messages, such as political newsletters, fundraising appeals, hotel receipts, news alerts, product ads, real estate listings and notifications related to his daughters’ schools or sports teams” and “bank notifications,” they said others touched on his business dealings with the Chinese energy group CEFC (covered in their second story) and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

The D.C. paper retraced the journey of the Wilmington repair shop owner from when Hunter abandoned it on April 12, 2019. With Hunter refusing to return his calls and the first Trump impeachment swirling, John Paul Mac Isaac “contacted the FBI” in July 2019 and, five months later, they picked it up.

According Mac Isaac’s lawyer, he made a copy “in case he was ever thrown under the bus as a result of what he knew.” Sure enough, his intuition was spot on.

The copy made its way outside his orbit in August 2020 via Rudy Giuliani as Mac Isaac’s other attempts to contact members of Congress failed. Shortly thereafter, it was obtained by Giuliani and then given to the New York Post.

Now, here’s where The Washington Post explained why they couldn’t easily identify its full contents. More or less, it pertained to repeated copying and slight alterations to its organization, but they were able to all but rule out hacking or manipulation (despite attempts by the liberal paper to give Resistance types reason to say its not a done deal) (click “expand”):

In their examinations, Green and Williams found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.

Maxey had alerted The Washington Post to this issue in advance, saying that others had accessed the data to examine its contents and make copies of files. But the lack of what experts call a “clean chain of custody” undermined Green’s and Williams’s ability to determine the authenticity of most of the drive’s contents.

“The drive is a mess,” Green said.

He compared the portable drive he received from The Post to a crime scene in which detectives arrive to find Big Mac wrappers carelessly left behind by police officers who were there before them, contaminating the evidence.

That assessment was echoed by Williams.

“From a forensics standpoint, it’s a disaster,” Williams said. (The Post is paying Williams for the professional services he provided. Green declined payment.)

But both Green and Williams agreed on the authenticity of the emails that carried cryptographic signatures, though there was variation in which emails Green and Williams were able to verify using their forensic tools. The most reliable cryptographic signatures, they said, came from leading technology companies such as Google, which alone accounted for more than 16,000 of the verified emails.

Neither expert reported finding evidence that individual emails or other files had been manipulated by hackers, but neither was able to rule out that possibility.

They also noted that while cryptographic signatures can verify that an email was sent from a particular account, they cannot verify who controlled that account when the email was sent. Hackers sometimes create fake email accounts or gain access to authentic ones as part of disinformation campaigns — a possibility that cannot be ruled out with regard to the email files on Biden’s laptop.

(….)

Analysis was made significantly more difficult, both experts said, because the data had been handled repeatedly in a manner that deleted logs and other files that forensic experts use to establish a file’s authenticity.

“No evidence of tampering was discovered, but as noted throughout, several key pieces of evidence useful in discovering tampering were not available,” Williams’ reports concluded.

Along with further explaining the problems with the copy, they alluded to what the New York Post and Daily Mail exposed long ago as things beyond e-mails, vaguely alluded to former Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski, the infamous claim of ten percent of the CEFC deal being marked for “the big guy,” and how Team Biden had lied about the e-mail at the center of the original New York Post story (click “expand”):

Green, working with two graduate students, verified 1,828 emails — less than 2 percent of the total — but struggled with others that had technical flaws they could not resolve. He said the most common problems resulted from alterations caused when the MacBook’s mail-handling software downloaded files with…