A forensic analysis reportedly determined the data found on the laptop believed to belong to Hunter Biden appears to be authentic.
Cyber forensic experts from Maryman & Associates were commissioned to examine thousands of text messages, emails, and photos on the laptop’s contents that were found on a copy of the hard drive obtained by the Daily Mail. The materials themselves offer a look into the personal life and business dealings of the son of President Joe Biden.
The review found the data on the system “before April 2019 appears to be related to Mr. Biden, with timestamps appearing to be between 2016 and 2019,” according to a report that culminated from the examination.
“The operating system timestamps appear to be authentic, and no evidence was found to suggest that the timestamps or data were altered or manufactured,” the report added. “No indications were found that would indicate the data was manufactured.”
The laptop and hard drive were given to a computer shop in Delaware to repair in April 2019, according to John Paul Mac Isaac, the computer store’s legally blind owner, who said that the hardware was never retrieved by the owner and the laptop and hard drive were seized by the FBI through a grand jury subpoena dated December 2019.
One copy of the hardware’s contents was obtained by Rudy Giuliani, who was then a personal lawyer to former President Donald Trump, and the data were shared with various media outlets.
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Hunter Biden, 51, has never denied the authenticity of the computer materials, and he has never directly addressed what appears to be a computer repair invoice signed by him on April 12, 2019.
On a media blitz this past week for his new memoir about his struggle with drug addiction, Beautiful People, the son of the president said he didn’t know if the laptop was his and falsely claimed that the U.S. intelligence community concluded the story surrounding the device was “Russian disinformation.”
Hunter Biden has said the laptop “certainly” could be his and suggested it could have been stolen, he could have been hacked, or Russian intelligence services could have been involved. He provided no evidence to support those suggestions. Biden also said he doesn’t know if he ever lost a laptop, saying, “Not that I know of, but, you know, read the book, and you’ll realize that I wasn’t keeping tabs on possessions well for about a four-year period of time.”
Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, along with many in the media, dismissed the laptop story as being part of a Russian disinformation operation, without evidence. Concerns about Hunter Biden gained broader attention late last year after multiple outlets reported that he is being investigated by the Justice Department in connection with his taxes and potentially related to his overseas business with China. Trump’s director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, said last year that “there is no intelligence that supports that, and we have shared no intelligence … that Hunter Biden’s laptop is part of some Russian disinformation campaign.”
A recent report released by the Biden administration’s intelligence community concluded Russia meddled in the 2020 election but did not reference the laptop story and reached no public conclusions related to it.
The examination of the hard drive copy commissioned by the Daily Mail was conducted by Brad Maryman, the founder of Maryman & Associates who before that worked at the FBI for 29 years as a veteran supervisory special agent, and Joseph Greenfield, a digital forensics consultant at the firm. Maryman additionally served as information systems administrator and security programs manager at the bureau, and in 1991 he “founded the FBI’s first Computer Analysis Response Team (CART) and served as its team leader. He established the agency’s first state of the art computer forensics laboratory,” according to Maryman’s biography.
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The Daily Caller also obtained a copy of Hunter Biden’s purported hard drive and reported in October that Robert Graham, the founder of the cybersecurity firm Errata Security, said that at least one key email that had been published by the New York Post was “absolutely verified beyond a shadow of a doubt” after the outlet provided him with a copy of the email and its metadata for forensic analysis.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email from Burisma board member Vadym Pozharskyi dated April 17, 2015, reads, but there were no additional details about what the “meet” might entail or if it had occurred.
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Joe Biden’s presidential campaign has denied that such a meeting took place based on “Biden’s official schedules from the time” but only as it was described in the New York Post. Politico later reported that former Biden senior advisers “said that while there was never an official meeting, it’s technically conceivable that Pozharskyi would have approached Biden on the sidelines of some broader U.S.-Ukraine event.”
Amos Hochstein, a longtime adviser to Biden on Ukrainian affairs, insisted to Time that the meeting “never” took place.
Hunter Biden’s ex-business partner Tony Bobulinski also corroborated the authenticity of a May 13, 2017, email from investor James Gilliar to himself, Biden’s business associate Rob Walker, and James and Hunter Biden detailing a business deal between a Chinese company called CEFC and themselves, which included a reference to “the big guy” — who Bobulinski claims was Joe Biden.
