It’s October, 2020, an election year. As is the Republican tradition, they try to launch an “October Surprise” against the Democrat running for president. Well, here it is, so let’s go through this (Note that while Joe Biden is from Delaware, Hunter Biden lives in California.):
According to Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, Hunter traveled to Delaware to get his computer fixed. We’re to believe that there’s no one in all of California (home to Apple) who can fix a MacBook.
According to Rudy, Hunter, the son of the Democratic candidate, chose a very explicitly pro-Trump shop to repair his laptop.
The store owner, who is legally blind, swears it’s Hunter who dropped the laptop off (could you identify Hunter Biden if you happened to unexpectedly meet him?). The store’s video surveillance for that day has been erased, so there’s no evidence to confirm or refute his claim.
Later, the store owner changed his statement to: “couldn’t positively identify the customer as Hunter Biden, but the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunter’s late brother.” The Beau Biden Foundation is based in Delaware and is popular. It’s not unusual to see stickers for it on laptops.
The store’s owner either gave the laptop to the FBI, who immediately asked him to hack the hard drive because they couldn’t. OR he hacked the hard drive then gave it to the FBI. He keeps changing his story on this point. Why exactly he would give a customer’s computer to the FBI is a fair question, not answered.
He then gave the hard drive to Rudy (so what did he give to the FBI?) OR he gave a copy of the hard drive to Rudy. OR he gave printouts of some emails and some pictures to Rudy. Again, his story changes depending when you ask.
Side note: somehow, indicted felon Steve Bannon also has a copy of this stolen property.
Rudy, a lawyer, who, if he’s telling the truth here, knows he is in possession of stolen property, does not turn it over the police, but instead starts shopping it to news outlets. BUT he wants an outlet that won’t be critical or dig too deeply into the story.
Even Fox News wouldn’t take the story. They’ve been worried about Rudy’s credibility.
Rudy settles on the NY Post. Rudy says, “nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.” So no one else would take it without fact-checking it. The NY Post (a Rupert Murdoch paper) would.
The NY Post’s own journalists won’t touch the story, so a former producer for Sean Hannity’s Fox News show is credited with the byline. A second name is added to the byline, a Post journalist who didn’t know her name was being assigned to the story. She isn’t happy about her name being attached to it.
President Trump is saying that any journalist who doesn’t report this story as 100% true is a criminal.
The FBI is now investigating whether the source material originated in a foreign power’s disinformation campaign.
Rudy says there’s only a 50/50 chance he was working with Russian spies on this story.
UPDATE March 2021:
50/50 becomes 100%. US intelligence report confirms Giuliani was working with Russian intelligence agents. Oops.