Hunter Biden’s Scandal: Russian Meddling or Genuine Cause for Concern?
Hunter Biden, son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden (left); Personal attorney to President Donald Trump and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Source.
October is known for campaign surprises. And Akin to the 2016 election, emails could spell potential disaster for the Democratic presidential candidate, but this time it is Joe Biden. Hunter Biden, the son of the former Vice President, has been a target for conservative activists for many months. Last week, a damning set of emails and a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden were released into the public sphere. This discovery could prove harmful to the prospect of Joe Biden’s election. However, with the recent confirmation from the United States intelligence community that Russia and Iran have been actively meddling in the 2020 election, the validity of the Hunter Biden hard drive has come into question.
The story begins in a small computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware. In April of 2019, shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac states Hunter Biden dropped off his damaged personal Apple computer. The shop owner is legally blind, and therefore he can not personally attest to whether the individual was Hunter Biden or not. However, the man identified on his ticket as Hunter Biden, and he came to the shop twice but never collected his computer or the hard drive with the backed up content. After reviewing the contents on the computer, John Paul Mac Isaac contacted the F.B.I due to the concerning nature of the data. The shop owner refused to discuss specifics, but the F.B.I confiscated the computer in late 2019 along with the copied hard drive. The owner grew increasingly worried following the quietness surrounding the investigation in light of President Trump’s impeachment, and so he decided to take matters into his own hands and alert those with contact to one of Trump’s closest allies, Rudy Giuliani.
In the hands of Rudy Giuliani, the materials were soon published in The New York Post, and from there, information pertinent to Joe Biden’s involvement in business dealings in both China and Ukraine has dominated headlines in conservative outlets such as the Rush Limbaugh Show, the Ben Shapiro Show, and Tucker Carlson Tonight. However, despite the inferno raging across the conservative media landscape, no other news organization has been able to verify the contents of the leak and Hunter Biden has not commented on the validity of the laptop’s contents. The “smoking gun” email contains evidence of a supposed meeting placed between Joe Biden as Vice-President in 2015 with a head of a Ukrainian gas firm, Burisma, named Vadym Pozharskyi. The email states “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together,” and if factual, could provide some basis to assume Joe Biden was making back door deals for financial gain as Vice President.
While this evidence remains to be validated, one must remember Russia’s history with meddling in the American political process and the heated partisan struggle that has driven Trump’s associates to look for leverage over Biden. A letter signed by over 50 U.S. intelligence officials stated that a “...laptop-op fits the bill… [and would be] consistent with some of the key methods Russia has used…” in previous multi-year disinformation campaigns. Furthermore, the letter goes on to conclude that U.S. intelligence officials previously warned the White House of an influence operation by Russia specifically targeting Giuliani, and currently these officials are investigating whether the laptop is a “...a smoke bomb of disinformation pushed by Russia.”
Ultimately, Giuliani has vowed to release documents proving the corruption of Joe Biden for months, and given the circumstances in which these documents arose, the quality of the content should certainly be questioned. With two Republican-led Senate committees, during Trump’s impeachment investigation, reaching the same conclusion that “Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing,” we must assume innocence on Joe Biden’s behalf until proven guilty. In conclusion, it is too early to determine the validity of these documents, but we should view them with continued skepticism as the intelligence community works to calculate if Russia was involved and whether Joe Biden acted out of self interest in his role as Vice-President.