“The defining development in this case is one huge piece of evidence that has been put into the public record by the United States government,” Hannity said. “And that is Hunter Biden’s authentic laptop. The United States federal government has not only confirmed that Hunter’s laptop is authentic, they have confirmed that the contents of it are authentic and have not been tampered with by anyone.”
“In other words, we were lied to at a very high level by many people and entire institutions right before the election,” he continued.
Hannity’s argument is that Donald Trump’s opponents banded together in October 2020 to launch a false attack on a New York Post report centered on materials stolen from Hunter Biden’s laptop. A letter from several former intelligence officials called it “Russian disinformation,” in the words of Hannity’s guest, commentator Jonathan Turley. Social media companies chose to limit the spread of the story after it was published. Hannity’s presentation showed that all of this was not only false, but the result of “lies” by people who “want Joe Biden to win by any means necessary.”
Hannity’s account contains at least two significant errors. First, he confuses the laptop that was submitted as evidence in the trial (obtained by the FBI in 2019) with the “laptop” that was the source of the New York Post article.
The FBI began investigating Hunter Biden when he sent his laptop for repairs in April 2019. The FBI eventually learned of the abandoned device and seized it, along with a hard drive containing materials recovered from the device. At another point, the FBI also obtained the contents of Hunter Biden’s iCloud account, which had been stored by Apple. The materials included photos, messages, and emails.
The New York Post obtained a copy of the hard drive that appears to have been made by repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac, who tipped off the FBI about the device and, with no word of a federal investigation, contacted Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani as the 2020 election approached, who served as a conduit for the Post and pitched it to Fox News, which got the idea.
At the time of the original report, other media outlets did not have access to the materials. (Giuliani told The New York Times that he was worried reporters would “spend as much time as possible trying to refute them before they published.”) When The Washington Post finally gained access to the materials in 2022, we were able to confirm that some of them were authentic. But there was also evidence that the materials on the hard drive given to the Post by Giuliani had been moved with some additional information added. Even Mac Isaac cautioned that the materials attributed to the “laptop” were not on the laptop at the time he ran the file recovery process.
At trial, the government witnesses They are What they had was the original laptop and materials from Hunter Biden’s iCloud account. But that was just one branch of how that information was released to the public. The other was the copy that went to Giuliani and the press. There may have been another branch even earlier. Time magazine reported shortly after the New York Post’s initial story that materials attributed to Hunter Biden had been provided in Ukraine in 2019, possibly after his Apple account was illegally accessed.
This overlaps with another fallacy in Hannity’s argument: When the New York Post reported the story, the issue was not that the documents might not be authentic, but that they were authentic and had been released in October 2020 as part of a foreign effort to try to influence the outcome of the presidential election.
As it turns out, Russian actors had done exactly that four years earlier: In 2016, Russian-linked hackers accessed Democratic Party networks and the email accounts of senior staffers in Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Many of those documents were then provided to WikiLeaks, which published them in batches between July and October of that year. (The second batch of documents began releasing on the same day that intelligence agencies raised public alarm about Russian interference efforts.) This was an attempt to use illegally obtained, legal materials to influence how Americans viewed the election.
The federal government, then led by President Trump, was working with social media companies to put in place guardrails to block similar efforts in 2020. There were already signs that Russia was trying to help Trump’s election again. Then the New York Post article came out.
The letter from 51 former intelligence officials was one of the earliest to express concern that history was repeating itself, but it was also more cautious than many (including Turley) have suggested.
“We want to emphasize that we do not know the authenticity of the emails provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani,” the statement said. “We have no evidence of Russian involvement, but our experience leads us to deeply suspect that the Russian government played a significant role in this incident.”
As you know, Giuliani spent a significant amount of time in Europe in the past few months trying to find evidence of wrongdoing by Biden family members, including interactions with individuals who were added to sanctions lists in September 2020 as Russian operatives.
Some, including Biden, have linked the New York Post article to Russia, but such concerns are not without precedent at this point.
The New York Post “laptop” and the one used at trial were different, and these two factors — a focus on sourcing over credibility — help explain why Hannity’s testimony at trial did not have the resonance he hoped for. Also, it was already recognized that the government considered the laptop to be legitimate, with media outlets such as the Washington Post reviewing some of the material.
After Hannity lamented the media’s silence on so-called “important developments,” Turley offered a theory as to why the silence continued.
“If the laptop is real and those files are real, it would provide a detailed record of a multi-million dollar peddling operation run by the Biden family, and they would be real, but the media simply doesn’t want to go that far,” he said.
However, we already know that many of those files are real because we have accessed and verified them. The reason the media doesn’t want to “go that far” on the smothering allegations about a “Biden family” influence operation is because the materials don’t prove such an operation. It shows, as has now been thoroughly explained, a job heavily funded by Hunter Biden and his uncle James, but in which President Biden clearly had no involvement. The goal of the House Republican impeachment effort was to prove Joe Biden’s involvement, and they failed to do so.
One should not necessarily assume that Sean Hannity or his guests are sincerely lamenting the failure of the media. It is politically useful for the right and for Trump to suggest that the Hunter Biden trial revealed something new and incriminating about the traditional media. It didn’t, but readers of this article probably don’t need convincing of that. And since Hannity’s viewers probably aren’t reading this, why not?
