It only took them 769 days.
CBS News said Monday that it confirmed the authenticity of data from Hunter Biden’s former laptop — more than two years after The Post first revealed its contents — as the first son’s lawyer complained he didn’t “consent” to the release.
The laptop links President Biden to his son Hunter and brother Jim Biden’s foreign influence-peddling, but high-ranking former spy agency officials claimed before the 2020 election it was likely Russian disinformation and the story was censored by Twitter and Facebook.
Most news outlets ignored the laptop’s contents until recently. CBS’s report follows belated verification of the laptop in March by the Washington Post and New York Times.
CBS correspondent Catherine Herridge reported that she received a copy of Hunter Biden’s hard drive from former Delaware computer repairman John Paul Mac Isaac, and that Minnesota computer scientists led by former Secret Service computer crimes expert Mark Lanterman said the files appeared legitimate.
Lanterman’s firm determined that the laptop’s contents accumulated over the course of time, as would be expected, and that there was no evidence that the documents were altered by outsiders.
Herridge did not specifically say which documents from the laptop were determined to be authentic. But she said that two sources confirmed to her that Joe Biden was the person identified as the “big guy” in an infamous May 2017 email that described a 10% side-aside as part of a deal with a Chinese government-linked company.
“Two of Hunter Biden’s former business partners, including Tony Bobulinski, who received the email, told CBS News that the 10% ‘held by H for the big guy’ was shorthand for 10% held by Hunter for his father,” Herridge reported. “The author [of the email, James Gilliar] has not responded to CBS News’s questions.”
Mac Isaac says that Hunter Biden brought the laptop to his Delaware shop and never picked it up. He says the FBI took the original laptop in December 2019 after he alerted the bureau to its contents. In October 2020, he provided files from the device to The Post.
“At no time did any individual, including Mr. Mac Isaac, have Mr. Biden’s consent to access his computer data or share it with others,” Hunter Biden’s attorney, Chris Clark, griped to CBS.
Clark also said, without providing any specific examples, “There have been multiple attempts to hack, infect, distort and peddle misinformation regarding Mr. Biden’s devices and data.”
The incoming Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), said Thursday that he will help lead GOP efforts to learn about Joe Biden’s connection to his family’s business endeavors.
“This committee will evaluate whether this president is compromised or swayed by foreign dollars. This is an investigation of Joe Biden,” Comer said.
The first document reported by The Post from Hunter Biden’s laptop described then-Vice President Joe Biden’s attendance at a 2015 dinner at DC’s Cafe Milano to which his son invited an array of associates — including a representative of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, which paid Hunter Biden up to $1 million pear year while his father led the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.
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