The Trump campaign launched an attack on Democratic rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden after the New York Post published an explosive story on emails exchanged between Hunter and a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm about a meeting with his father when he was serving as the Vice President.
The report stated that in one email that dates back to May 2014, about a month after Hunter joined the board of the Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma Holdings, Vadym Pozharskyi the third-ranking executive at Burisma, emailed him asking for "advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message" or a "signal."
In another email on April 17, 2015, the Post said Pozharskyi thanked Hunter for inviting him to DC and introducing him to his father. Trump and his aides immediately seized the opportunity and promoted the article as evidence that the Bidens were in bed with the Ukrainian government and that Hunter took advantage of his position on Burisma's board to link up his father with top Ukrainian officials.
Emails 'Leaked' by Trump Supporter
The most obvious question that everyone is asking is how did the Post get its hands on the emails or whether they are legitimate.
The report claims that in April 2019, an unidentified individual dropped off a water-damaged MacBook Pro with the emails and other scandalous material about Hunter at a laptop-repair shop in Delaware, the Biden's family home state. While the NY Post report said the publication obtained the information from repair shop's owner, it did not reveal any details about his identity.
The metadata of one of the photos in the story indicated that the repair shop's owner is a man named John Paul Mac Issac, whose social media activity indicates he is an avid Trump supporter and voted for him in the 2016 election, according to the Daily Beast. His store, called the The Mac Shop, is located in Wilmington, and the GPS information embedded in some of the images confirms this.
According to the Post, Isaac claimed the man who dropped off the laptop never returned to collect it but he recovered the data from the laptop before informing the FBI, who seized the MacBook and the hard drive in December 2019. He said he made a copy of the hard drive first and gave it to Rudy Giuliani's lawyer, Robert Costello.
Who Dropped Off the Laptop?
The report said the repair shop was not sure who dropped off the laptop or whether it belonged to Hunter but the device had a Beau Biden Foundation sticker on it,named after Hunter's late brother.
On Wednesday, a journalist from the Daily Beast tracked down Isaac, who appeared to be "nervous" and did not appear to have a clear "grasp" on the timeline of the laptop arriving at his store. Isaac also told the publication that he had a medical condition that prevented him from actually seeing who dropped off the laptop.
Email PDF Files Created Months After Laptop Was Dropped Off
The metadata on the PDF filed purporting to show Hunter's emails published by the Post suggest they were created on a Mac laptop on September 29 and October 10, 2019, which raises questions about its authenticity as the files were created several months after Biden allegedly dropped off the laptop at the repair store in April.
One weird thing about those two Hunter Biden emails the @NYPost published.
— kpoulsen (@kpoulsen) October 14, 2020
Instead of going straight to the cloned hard drive they've had since Sunday, the paper published PDFs of the emails prepared (per metadata) by a third-party, Giuliani or someone else, over a year ago. pic.twitter.com/g5ewl6HZyr
