Original article (in Croatian) was published on 11/04/2022
The computer of the president’s son, which was declared Russian disinformation by all security services, American media and social networks on the eve of the election clash between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, really exists.
Hunter Biden, the son of current US President Joe Biden, has been involved in business affairs with companies from China and Ukraine for many years, which is why he is under investigation to determine whether these were illegal and corrupt practices that could endanger national security.
Hunter Biden’s computer, also known as the “laptop from hell”, which a year and a half ago, on the eve of the election clash of presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump, was declared Russian disinformation by all security services, major US media and powerful social networks, really exists, and CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that the data from that laptop was actually true.
New information is being published every day that opens the possibility of extending the investigation to other members of Joe Biden’s family, including his brother James Biden, and the role of the so-called “mainstream” media, Facebook and Twitter, in the whole mess, is also being questioned.
While President Joe Biden denies that his son has done anything wrong and reiterates that he never talks to his son about his affairs, political opponents from the Republican camp are announcing new investigations and claiming that the father and son must have been in collusion.
The United States has thus embarked on a new complex debate that, in addition to the international crisis over Russia’s aggression on Ukraine, rising inflation, persistent coronavirus and election campaigns ahead of the midterm elections in November, will provoke new dramatic divisions.
Republicans believe that the big media helped Biden by deliberately hiding the real truth about his son’s famous laptop, while Democrats point out that there is no evidence to charge President Biden legally. In the coming months, therefore, there will be heated arguments about checking, publishing and hiding facts, trusting the media, and ways to possibly expel from politics those who engage in murky international activities alone or with family members. Meanwhile, American fact-checkers went in all directions to explain something about the famous laptop for which even the FBI does not want to confirm where it is now.
The computer of the forgetful son
In April 2019, a male person visited a small computer service in the state of Delaware. It has never been determined whether it was Hunter Biden himself who brought three MacBook laptops for repair due to water damage. On the hard drive of one of the laptops, service owner John Isaac found a video of a sexual act involving an unidentified woman and Hunter Biden, as well as some other intriguing documents. The person who brought the devices to the service did not answer phone calls, and after three months, since no one came to pay for the service and pick up the laptops, the owner of the service contacted the FBI.
In November 2019, FBI agents made a forensic copy of the hard drive, but did not pick up the original device. Just two weeks later, the FBI returned and confiscated the original device, but in the meantime, John made a copy of the hard drive that he kept to himself. In early 2020, Isaac, as he claims, contacted some members of the US Congress and, after no response, contacted Rudy Giuliani, who was close to then-President Donald Trump.
In September 2020, two months before the presidential election, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon contacted The New York Post, a tabloid close to the right-wing political spectrum, which then began publishing alleged information about Hunter’s laptop. Joe Biden denied the veracity of these articles, and US security services estimated that it is probably a Russian-directed setup aimed at spreading harmful disinformation. Influential media such as The New York Times and The Washington Post say they are unable to determine who is telling the truth and who is lying and that the FBI refuses to answer questions about the laptop. Social networks Twitter and Facebook, on the other hand, significantly limit the reach of any information about Hunter’s laptop, arguing that independent fact-checking organizations have not verified the data. This all happened in the tense weeks ahead of the US presidential election, during which Donald Trump accused Joe Biden and his son Hunter of being involved in murky affairs with Ukrainians and Chinese, which Biden resolutely denied in pre-election confrontations.
Hard drive secrets
After Joe Biden won the election, Hunter’s laptop falls into oblivion, only to suddenly emerge shockingly in March this year when The New York Times reported that some emails about strange collaborations with Ukrainians are actually authentic.
The Washington Post then writes that their computer experts used cryptographic methods to establish the truth of thousands of emails from laptops, but not all of the nearly 130,000 emails from a hard drive with over 200 gigabytes of documents. Namely, these are copies of the original disk that do not have the original cryptographic markings, so it is difficult to determine what is the original, what is a copy, and what is a setup. The FBI, which is said to be in possession of the original MacBook, is not providing answers on where the computer is and whether any data on the documents have been identified. Meanwhile, Republican activists are announcing the release of 450 gigabytes of material on the Internet, hitherto unknown and inaccessible.
Republican politicians, on the other hand, set out to showcase bank receipts and contracts they have reached in the meantime, which mention Hunter Biden, numerous companies and generous amounts. In the US Senate, documents were presented on a Chinese energy company that Republican sources claim is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and which, according to the 2017 agreement, undertook to pay $ 100,000 a month to Hunter Biden for consulting services, and $ 65,000 dollars a month to his uncle, James Biden.
Good job in Ukraine
In Ukraine, from 2014 to 2019, Hunter Biden was a board member of the energy company Burisma, where he received about $ 50,000 a month. Burisma was owned by oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, who is close to pro-Russian interests, and who fled Ukraine after the fall of Viktor Yanukovych’s government. Corruption investigations have been launched against Zlochevsky, whose whereabouts are unknown. An inadmissible pressure was exerted by Donald Trump, who in 2019 called his Ukrainian counterpart, the newly elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, from the White House, and asked him to investigate what the Biden was doing in Ukraine, to tarnish Joe Biden. Trump thus tried to take advantage of the presidential position by illegally seeking service abroad to improve his own chances in the election, which was used by the Democratic Party and launched the process of Trump’s impeachment in Congress.
These months, complex relations between the US and Ukrainian authorities are gaining further weight when investigating all that happened before the Russian aggression on Ukraine.
After the Russian Ministry of Defense accused the United States of holding biological weapons development laboratories in Ukraine, the name of the San Francisco-based Metabiota company and its affiliation with Hunter Biden were mentioned. Fact-checker of the Washington Post explained in an extensive analysis that Hunter was briefly one of the three co-owners of the company that invested in Metabiota, but that in 2014 he was removed from these business relationships due to drugs. Namely, Hunter was expelled from the US Navy reserve in early 2014 because he tested positive for cocaine, and other investors believed that such an unreliable partner could damage the company’s reputation. Metabiota, on the other hand, was active in Ukraine until 2020, where, according to The Washington Post, it had an office for research aimed at understanding the threat of tularemia and anthrax and for organizing public campaigns to reduce the risk of African swine fever.
A rich Russian widow
One of the many companies co-owned by Hunter Biden was mentioned in the context of millions in payments coming from Moscow a few years ago from Elena Baturina, billionaire and ex-wife of the late Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, but there is no evidence Biden benefited from it. It was an investment into American real estate on which Baturina has made millions so far. Baturina, who sat next to Vladimir Putin at her husband’s funeral, settled in London and was declared a fugitive in Russia because she did not appear at the scheduled court hearing.
Until the publication of this text, there was no evidence of any involvement of President Joe Biden in the affairs of his son Hunter, and the President of the United States is so far legally completely clean.
Biden still stands by the statements he gave in the first and second pre-election confrontations when he vigorously defended his son regarding the affairs in Ukraine and China, and reiterated that he had nothing to do with all that. In the past few weeks since the investigation began, Biden’s presidential popularity has not fallen, and he has not suffered significant political damage. But during the run-up to the midterm election in November, when a majority of US Congress members are elected, Republican candidates will continue to fiercely attack the president’s family, ignoring the many painful and truly severe wounds from the Bidens’ past.
The difficult years of the Biden family
Forty-six US President Joe Biden, whose full name is Joseph Robinette Biden Junior, was elected US Senator when he was only 29 and already had three children with his wife, Neilia. Just weeks after winning the first election in 1972, his wife and one-year-old daughter were killed in a car accident that injured his sons, three-year-old Beau and two-year-old Hunter. As a young single father, with the help of his sister Valerie and brothers James and Frank, he cared for his two sons and won the Senate re-election for decades. In his second marriage to his wife, Jill, he got a daughter, Ashley. As an influential senator, he has an important say in shaping American foreign policy. In 1988, he announced his presidential candidacy, which he withdrew after it was discovered that he had plagiarized one speech, and in 2009 he became vice president in Barack Obama’s administration. His son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015, and another son, Hunter, who graduated in law from the prestigious Yale University, suffers from a long-standing addiction to alcohol and hard drugs.
Troubled Hunter Biden, while involved in many of the above-mentioned lucrative business projects, falls in love and has a fling with the widow of his deceased brother, divorces his first wife with whom he has three daughters, falls into debt, enters into a new marriage and soon has a son, does not pays taxes, falls under investigation for money laundering and businesses abroad that may be interpreted as detrimental to US national security. In the growing investigation involving Hunter Biden, many more details are expected to be published, including over 150 international transactions, which include considerable amounts.
Sticky fingers are better prevented than cured
Each of us carries a stain and a secret that we would not want to be revealed because, as the writer Robert Penn Warren wrote in All the King’s Men, one of the best novels about corrupt politicians: “man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud”. The family of incumbent President Joe Biden is certainly not the only one to be blamed for the possible mutiny, as in recent years, many have benefited financially from China alone – from the wife of prominent Republican politician Mitch McConnell to George W. Bush’s brother, while financial injections for political campaigns received Jeb Bush and former President Bill Clinton.
There are also ongoing investigations against several American politicians – from Donald Trump, who, among other things, received illegal support for the campaign from abroad, to Hillary Clinton for financial sloppiness and spreading not fully verified information during the 2016 campaign.
But Hunter Biden’s case is specific because it has shown how challenging it is to establish facts quickly and judiciously in complicated circumstances. Fact-checking takes time and requires expert findings, and even then, the fact-checking result may not be completely accurate. Namely, the evaluation of data on computers is always questionable because, even with good cryptographic methods, it is difficult to determine whether a document is a setup or an original. On the other hand, financial transactions are often carried out through a number of companies that are not connected at first glance, making it difficult to trace corrupt money laundering, especially in international payments. Therefore, those who want to do something fishy while in power will be difficult to stop unless more serious legal obstacles and obligations are established.
Former FBI agent Frank Figliuzzi suggests that all candidates for the US Congress and the highest office in the state, including the president and vice president, be required to report what they and their family members do abroad. Politicians should be forced to be more transparent so that voters have enough information, says Figliuzzi, who is aware that there is no ideal solution. In each election cycle, someone will, with hidden intentions, representing the interests of another state, approach political candidates or their relatives and thus try to compromise them. Stricter rules should therefore apply to presidential candidates and oblige them to, according to Fordham Jesuit University, publish not only tax returns and property ownership, but also all of their travel history abroad and verification of everything their family members do around the world.
“Corruption has become the way the system works”, said Sarah Chayes, author of On Corruption in America, which seeks swift reform and urges citizens to organize themselves and initiate change. Chayes considers corruption the biggest threat to security because globalization has made it easier to hide wealth, as evidenced by occasional revelations such as Panama or Pandora documents.
Calm down with Twitter
If you turn on some TV channels in the United States or watch a Donald Trump rally, you might think you went back a few years in the past because the same harsh words and accusations are repeated, and old conspiracy theories are recycled. It’s as if it’s 2016. Trump’s followers at rallies are shouting “lock her up” as soon as they hear Hillary’s name, announcing that they still want to put her in jail, and loudly protesting as soon as they hear the word media. Trump reiterates that he was robbed in the 2020 elections, urges supporters to join polling stations to better control the ballot boxes in the next election, and announces victory in 2024.
The United States is entering the next election cycle in not the best shape, with all kinds of domestic scandals, the still unresolved biggest epidemic in a hundred years, the highest inflation in 40 years and the most dangerous European conflict in over 70 years.
If they check the facts with restraint and avoid hasty judgments, including those about the documents from Hunter’s laptop, the media and social networks could greatly help prevent a new wave of disinformation or violence. As still the most respected American newspaper in the world, the New York Times is already giving indications that caution will be more important than speed, and the editorial decision announces a smaller presence on Twitter. The newspaper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, told his reporters – “tweet less, tweet more thoughtfully, and spend more time reporting”.