Washington Post Authenticates Hunter Biden Laptop After Dismissing It In 2020

The paper published a lengthy report on Wednesday about Hunter Biden’s multimillion-dollar ties to a Chinese company.

The Washington Post authenticated thousands of emails from the scandalous laptop, more than a year after the paper joined other outlets in downplaying and disparaging the reporting during the 2020 presidential election.

WaPo‘s lengthy report focused on Hunter Biden’s “multimillion-dollar” financial ties to the Chinese energy company CEFC China Energy.

wapo

Archived page of today’s Wapo piece: https://archive.ph/9gFzx

Over the course of 14 months, the Chinese energy conglomerate and its executives paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and his uncle, according to government records, court documents and newly disclosed bank statements, as well as emails contained on a copy of a laptop hard drive that purportedly once belonged to Hunter Biden,” the Post reported, before writing that it found no evidence that President Biden “personally benefited from or knew details about the transactions with CEFC” which all took place after he left office as vice president.

The Washington Post then addressed Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was one of several sources on which the report was based.

The Post review draws in part on an analysis of a copy said to be of the hard drive of a laptop computer that Hunter Biden purportedly dropped off at a Delaware repair shop and never came to collect. The laptop was turned over to the FBI in December 2019, according to documents reviewed by The Post, and a copy of the drive was obtained by Rudy Giuliani and other advisers to then-President Donald Trump a few months before the 2020 election,” the Post reported.

“After the New York Post began publishing reports on the contents of the laptop in October 2020, The Washington Post repeatedly asked Giuliani and Republican strategist Stephen K. Bannon for a copy of the data to review before the election, but the requests were rebuffed or ignored.”

In a separate piece explaining how The Washington Post analyzed Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Post wrote, ‘Thousands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures from Google and other technology companies,” according to two security experts.

“The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post. Neither found clear evidence of tampering in their examinations, but some of the records that might have helped verify contents were not available for analysis, they said,” the paper went on.

The latest reporting from The Washington Post comes days after The New York Times released its own report, which also authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop.

In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, The Washington Post largely kept its readers in the dark as to the seriousness of the Hunter Biden scandal.

The Post first addressed the Biden controversy on Oct. 14, 2020, the day the New York Post broke its story, running the headline, “Three weeks before Election Day, Trump allies go after Hunter — and Joe — Biden.”

On Oct. 15, 2020, WaPo columnist Greg Sargent penned a piece declaring the scandal “fake” and “laughably weak,” claiming, “While Trump and his propagandists would surely prefer to have a more compelling scandal to tout, the thinness of this new gruel is largely secondary.”