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Recently, I've read Donald Trump's latest quote on the story:

​So now it comes out, conclusively, that the FBI BURIED THE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY BEFORE THE ELECTION knowing that, if they didn’t, ​’​Trump would have easily won the 2020 Presidential Election​'”

Omitting TONS of emotions from that quote - what are the developments in the Hunter Biden's laptop story?

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    "At the moment, Truth Social is available for U.S. users only, but rest assured, we are working hard to make it available in your country" - but according to fresh articles - nypost.com/2022/08/29/… - it's a question of days
    – user2501323
    Commented Aug 30, 2022 at 2:57
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    Zuckerberg apparently had something to say about shutting down the story on an interview with Joe Rogan. nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/…
    – Italian Philosophers 4 Monica
    Commented Aug 30, 2022 at 2:57
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    Simply put. The story died after it lost political saliance. Democrats don't talk about it because Biden is President. Republicans don't talk about it because they have more galvanizing stories to tell now. The press doesn't talk about it because there really wasn't a story in the first place. Trump is still talking about it because he is Trump.
    – QuantumWalnut
    Commented Aug 30, 2022 at 4:41
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    FYI, in case your google fu is really that bad: skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/49658/… I'm not convinced this is a suitable Q here. It's a story that Trump likes to bring up but not much more political than who mounted the "stripper poles" in the latest round of right-rage.
    – got trolled too much this week
    Commented Aug 30, 2022 at 4:52
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    You mean a laptop that was under the control of multiple 3rd party individuals for a significant amount of time who had good reason to try and make Hunter/Joe Biden look bad to impact the Presidential election? That they had significant amount of time and opportunities to modify the data on the laptop? That suddenly had info formation on it released to the public right before the election when there was plenty of time to do so before? There are a lot of unanswered questions about how this all took place and the timing of it.
    – Joe W
    Commented Aug 30, 2022 at 15:32

2 Answers 2

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It has been difficult to continue to drum up outrage on a subject that does not have much by way of new reporting.

What we currently know is that the laptop in question was brought to John Paul Mac Isaac's shop in Wilmington, Delaware in April of 2019 with water damage by someone who claimed to be Hunter Biden. Because Isaac is legally blind, he is unable to verify whether or not this was, in fact, Hunter Biden. Isaac copied the hard drive data over to another drive in order to prevent data loss due to the waterlogged laptop, which he had to download in batches as the computer died several times during data transfer, and then apparently backed it up elsewhere. The person who gave him the laptop did not leave forwarding information and did not come back for the laptop, and Isaac contacted the FBI in July 2019. Starting in April of 2019, kompromat dealers in Ukraine claimed to have a copy of the laptop and were trying to sell it for $5 million dollars. In November of 2019, Russia managed to infiltrate Burisma's computer system, which it could have used to spoof emails. The FBI came and seized the physical laptop in December 2019 with a grand jury subpoena.

In 2020, Isaac sent a copy of the copy he made to the New York Post for an undisclosed amount of money, and to Rudy Giuliani. Jack Maxey managed to get a copy of the data from Rudy Giuliani and sold it to the Washington Post in June 2021.

The drive data that the Post received was 286,000 individual user files, of which between 1,800 and 22,000 of them were emails with intact, verifiable cryptographic signatures. Evidence exists of several people repeatedly accessing the laptop remotely from 2016-2019, both adding and removing files. The analysts also noted that the drive had been handled in such a way that logs and other files used by forensic analysts to examine system activity had been repeatedly deleted. The verified emails cover a time period of 2009-2019.

The vast majority of the verified emails were boring stuff: political newsletters, real estate listings, and notifications regarding his children's school activities, along with around 1,200 Wells Fargo emails for banking notifications. More rare were exchanges with Hunter Biden's business partners, personal assistants or members of his family.

Some of the verified emails detail business dealings Hunter had with CEFC China Energy, for which he received $5 million dollars, and others dealt with his work for Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company for which he was a board member.

Bottom line from the emails that can be verified for certain, Hunter Biden is a shady figure who wasn't faithful to his wife, repeatedly used both prostitutes and drugs (both illegal where he lived), and seems to have used his last name to add credibility to shady business dealings, of which very few of these dealings actually came to fruition.

Amongst the emails that can be verified for certain, there is no evidence that President Biden had any illegal or morally-gray involvement with his son's business dealings, and no evidence of pedophilic dealings for either father or son. It is unclear whether Hunter's dealings in Ukraine were illegal from the emails that can be verified.

It is currently unknown if the grand jury subpoena turned into an actual case against Hunter Biden or if it was dropped, as we have seen no evidence either way for two or three years.

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    That's a lot of emails with verifiable cryptographic signatures, given how few people actually use them. I'm not saying it isn't possible, since I haven't looked into it at all, but it sounds implausible to me.
    – Bobson
    Commented Aug 30, 2022 at 14:37
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    @Bobson Apparently Gmail does it natively without any extra work.
    – Carduus
    Commented Aug 30, 2022 at 14:41
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    Ah, that would do it. That is entirely believable - good for them! And now I've learned something.
    – Bobson
    Commented Aug 30, 2022 at 14:41
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    And I wonder if there were any privacy violations? I assume there were no search warrants? And if we talk about “shady dealings” by “shady persons”, doesn’t that match Giuliani?
    – gnasher729
    Commented Aug 31, 2022 at 12:05
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    @gnasher729 Isaac sent the laptop copy to the FBI because of some of the unverifiable user files that included sexually inappropriate content and direct ties to President Biden, but the Post was unable to verify that those files were put there by Hunter Biden (and not some third party either via the 2016-2019 outside access or planted there after the fact), and the Grand Jury never indicted anyone as far as we know.
    – Carduus
    Commented Sep 1, 2022 at 12:32
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Carduus gave an excellent answer.

However in the last 12 months the main 'controversy' has nothing to do with what was on the laptop but more about the FBI / Big Tech cover up.

Whereby the FBI directly engaged Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies to suppress the story (not mentioning Hunter directly but alluding to it). Even though FBI knew the laptop story was legit evidence suggest FBI intentionally covered up the story to assist Joe Biden in the upcoming election.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/09/hunter-biden-laptop-suppression-twitter-fbi-social-media/

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    "Whereby the FBI directly engaged Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies to suppress the story." - the BBC article you linked explicitly says "[Zuckerberg] said the FBI did not warn Facebook about the Biden story in particular." The other two articles don't support your claim either. The FBI gave the social media giants a more general warning about Russian interference - the social media giants arguably over-reacted to a specific story about Hunter's laptop.
    – Lag
    Commented Jun 30, 2023 at 9:55
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    Fact is that the FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship. No one at FBI or Big Tech had any evidence that the story was fake and did no research to confirm.
    – Daveo
    Commented Jul 1, 2023 at 11:01
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    Additionally many sources suggest a small number of voters would have changed their vote if they knew about the laptop story prior to the election enough to change the election result
    – Daveo
    Commented Jul 1, 2023 at 11:08
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    "No one at FBI or Big Tech had any evidence that the story was fake and did no research to confirm" innaccurate; Fox News passed on the story, the original author refused to publish under their byline, both before the original publication, because of their not-FBI-related reasons. There's a Skeptics post about this if you want to know more.
    – bharring
    Commented Jul 3, 2023 at 13:08

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