Scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s businesses has been renewed in the mainstream press, evidenced most emphatically by a New York Times story published last week that was based, in part, on documents the publication says appear to have been taken from Hunter Biden’s personal laptop.
The story revealed that President Joe Biden’s son recently paid off “a significant tax liability,” a year after he disclosed the existence of a federal investigation into his taxes.
He reportedly told an associate he had to take out a loan to make the payment of more than $1 million, according to the story. It did not disclose who lent the money to the president’s son.
The story further described that a grand jury in Wilmington is gathering evidence as part of a wide-ranging federal examination of Hunter Biden’s businesses, and said federal prosecutors over the last two years “have issued scores of subpoenas for documents related to Hunter Biden’s foreign work and for bank accounts linked to him and his associates.”
Those associates include Devon Archer, who founded the investment firm Rosemont Seneca along with Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz, stepson of John Kerry, the former senator and secretary of state.
Hunter Biden and Archer also previously worked together as board members for the Ukrainian gas giant, Burisma Holdings.
While the Times story heightened the national focus on Hunter Biden, the existence of the grand jury first was revealed in February by the British tabloid the Daily Mail in a piece that described how the mother of Hunter Biden’s 3-year-old daughter had testified as part of the proceedings in Delaware.
The Daily Mail story followed yet another piece published in late January by Politico about a New York Times open records lawsuit filed that month, arguing for the State Department to turn over emails sent by U.S. embassy officials in Romania that mention Hunter Biden and his former partner, Tony Bobulinski, among others.
In the leadup to the 2020 presidential election, Bobulinski went public with claims he had evidence of Joe Biden knowing about his son’s businesses abroad and benefiting financially from them. The president has denied the claims.
Also pending with the State Department is an open records request filed by another news organization seeking emails sent in April 2013 by staff at the embassy in Mexico City that mention the younger Biden.
Hunter Biden took a trip to the Mexican capital that month where he met with business leaders and with then-U.S. ambassador Anthony Wayne, according to local news reports.
Following the Daily Mail article, a flurry of new reports mentioning Hunter Biden appeared after his business partner, Archer, was sentenced to one year and one day in prison. The conviction, which had previously been thrown out by a lower court federal judge, was for Archer’s role in a scheme to fraudulently sell $60 million in bonds in 2014 and 2015 on behalf of a Native American economic development entity in South Dakota.
Instead of economic development, prosecutors say $43 million of the proceeds from the bond sales were used to acquire companies that were to be “rolled up” into a large financial institution. According to court documents, the new conglomerate would have Archer as chairman and Hunter Biden as a vice chairman.
The CEO was to be Jason Sugarman, a California businessman and advisor to the Banc of California where his brother served as CEO.
Others charged in the case include Jason Galanis and his father John Galanis, each of whom possesses a long history of involvement in white-collar crime. Court documents indicate the Galanis’ and other defendants used the Biden name to sell the fraudulent bonds to unsuspecting investors.
A lawyer for Hunter Biden did not respond to a request to comment.
Sugarman was not criminally charged in the case, but the SEC has named him as a defendant in a civil lawsuit for his alleged role in the scheme.
Biden camp says meeting ‘never took place’
The recent Hunter Biden news comes more than a year after the New York Post published a story stating Joe Biden had met with an executive at Burisma Holdings in 2015, despite his previous statements denying he had ever met with his son’s business associates.
The story hinged on an email sent from the apparent account of the executive, Vadym Pozharskyi, to Hunter Biden thanking him for the “opportunity” to meet then-Vice President Biden and spend “some time together.”
Another email published in the story showed Pozharskyi asking Hunter Biden for advice on how he could use his “influence to convey a message/signal, etc. to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions.” At the time the message was sent, May 2014, then-Vice President Biden served as President Obama’s point person on Ukraine.
Hours after the story’s publication, Biden’s presidential campaign categorically stated, “No meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”
Still, the emails were among thousands of documents found on a hard drive from a laptop the Post said had been left in April 2019 at a Wilmington computer repair store, called the Mac Shop, by a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden.
The story described how the shop owner, later identified as John Paul Mac Isaac, made a copy of the hard drive before turning it over to the FBI in December 2019.
By September the following year, he gave it to Robert Costello, an attorney for former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Guiliani’s team subsequently provided it to the New York Post.
While the Post story was damning, its credibility was questioned as it was unclear at the time whether it truly was Hunter Biden who abandoned the laptop. For months, Giuliani had been looking for dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine and elsewhere, Days after the Post story ran, Time Magazine and Politico each published pieces citing sources who claimed emails and photos purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden had been circulating in Ukraine.
In November, Mac Isaac’s attorney Brian Della Rocca said his office was investigating whether computer files Giuliani had publicly claimed to have taken from the hard drive existed on the device when it was handed over by his client the previous September.
In April 2020, Hunter Biden told CBS he did not remember leaving a laptop at Mac Isaac’s shop.
“But whether or not somebody has my laptop, whether or not … it was hacked, whether or not there exists a laptop at all, I truly don’t know,” Hunter Biden said in the interview.
‘Better at this political spy press thing than I am’
Hours after the Post published the story, Mac Isaac told The News Journal that in April 2019 a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden brought three liquid-damaged laptops to his small repair shop in a Trolley Square shopping center.
Only one was left for repair, he said. No one returned to retrieve it, he said.
In the subsequent year and a half, Mac Isaac said several people were involved in the story that ended with people in President Donald Trump’s circle taking possession of a copy of the laptop hard drive.
At the time, Mac Isaac described one person who helped him as “better at this political spy press thing than I am.”
Della Rocca later revealed the FBI go-between as Mac Isaac’s father, retired United States Air Force Col. Richard “Steve” Mac Isaac.
After discussing with his son what to do, the elder Mac Isaac took a copy of the hard drive to FBI agents near his home in New Mexico.
“The FBI turned John Paul’s father away,” Della Rocca said in a statement in November of 2020.
Three months later, an FBI agent contacted the retired colonel, according to Della Rocca, and he passed along his son’s contact information.
“The FBI reached out to John Paul and met him at his house (in Wilmington) to discuss John Paul’s concerns. On December 9, 2019, the FBI served a subpoena on John Paul for the computer, the hard drive, and all related paperwork,” Della Rocca said.
In the months after the Post’s story, Mac Isaac shuttered his Wilmington shop and appeared to open a new one in Colorado, according to his social media account.
Mac Isaac also published a series of videos on Youtube sharing his and his family’s accounts of the saga.
In one, he claimed that an FBI agent had directed him in late 2019 to only communicate through text messages and not email. He also claimed, the agent said, “in our experience, nothing ever happens to those who don’t talk about these things,” – a comment Mac Isaac said was “a thinly veiled threat.”
Later in the video, Mac Isaac’s father described how he reached out to two members of Congress after interactions with the FBI, but congressional staff rebuffed requests to speak with lawyers there.
Steve Mac Isaac also reportedly helped his son link up with former Fox News executive Ken LaCorte, according to a story from the Daily Beast.
LaCorte told the New York publication that John Paul Mac Isaac’s “family member” had contacted a friend and former employee of Fox News’ parent company, who then linked LaCorte with Mac Isaac.
The Daily Beast cited two people familiar with the situation who claimed that the unnamed family member was Steve Mac Isaac.
In a tweet from 2020, LaCorte said he spoke with Mac Isaac several times before publication of the New York Post story.
“He was worried about losing his business as we talked about potential media outlets. He never once suggested that he go to an outlet that would offer him $$$. He’s a patriot,” LaCorte said.
In John Paul Mac Isaac’s Youtube video, Steve Mac Isaac said he also sought help from his brother in-law, retired Air Force Col. Ronald J. Scott.
Scott, a Colorado resident, is active in public policy as director of operations at the liberatarian American Constitution Foundation, and as founder of the Leading Edge Research Institute, which seeks to change education in China to ensure a “peaceful relationship with the U.S. for the next generations,” according to its website.
In Mac Isaac’s Youtube video, Scott said he posted a message to the White House and others during the first half of 2020 to alert them to the existence of the laptop. He said he received no response.
While the origin of the harddrive has been questioned, documents found on it have been confirmed over the past year by reporters.
Last summer, Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger published a book called, The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power. In it, he said he verified several emails from the laptop by, among other tactics, sending an open records request to the Swedish government for communications between its embassy staff and Hunter Biden, who rented office space at the facility in Washington, D.C.
Emails resulting from the request matched those on the laptop, Schreckinger said.
“There is at least some authentic material in this leak,” Schreckinger said in an interview with CBS in 2020.
