So many lies were told at the House Oversight’s first committee hearing Wednesday into the corruption scandal involving Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and the subsequent cover up by the FBI with social-media firms to rig the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden.
Or, as Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tried to rebrand it: “Hunter Biden’s half-fake laptop.”
It’s a sign of desperation that more than two years after The Post published the first bombshell story from the laptop, Dems can’t get their stories straight on what the laptop really is.
Is it Hunter’s property, his “personal data” that was stolen from him, as his lawyers claimed last week in letters demanding the Department of Justice investigate John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the Delaware computer repair shop where Hunter abandoned his laptop while a crack addict in April 2019?
Or is it the “so-called laptop,” as Hunter’s lawyers claimed in a backflip clarification the next day?
It’s hard to keep up.
It was so simple to start with.
First the laptop was Russian disinformation.
It had “all the earmarks of a Russian information operation,” asserted 51 former intelligence officials in a dishonest open letter five days after The Post published its Oct 14, 2020, bombshell about damaging emails from the laptop showing that, while he was vice president, Joe had met his son’s paymaster at Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company which paid Hunter $4 million over five years.
It was a “Russian plant” Joe told us in all sincerity in his final debate of the 2020 presidential race against Donald Trump, when, of course, he knew all along it was his son’s laptop.
It was “hacked material,” Twitter declared when it censored The Post’s scoop and locked our account for more than two weeks.
It was part of a “hack-and-leak operation’’ by “state actors” involving Hunter Biden, which would “likely” appear in October, the FBI had warned Twitter in a pre-bunking operation before the 2020 election.
Of course, the FBI knew the laptop was not “hacked” or a “Russian plant” because it had had the device in its possession since December 2019, when Mac Isaac handed it over to two FBI agents. He was concerned that the contents relating to payments to the Biden family from Ukraine, Russia and China were a high-stakes matter of national security.
And, boy, was he right that the stakes were high. An election depended on it.
The impressive blitzkrieg of lies mounted by Democrats Jamie Raskin, Daniel Goldman and AOC during Wednesday’s hearing shows just how high the stakes remain for the president as the Republican-controlled House begins to unravel the deceptions.
Sadly for the liars, the rest of the media finally has acknowledged that the laptop was not a “Russian plant” and that the stories The Post published from it are factual and accurate.
As we uncovered further damning evidence that Joe Biden was involved in his family’s international influence peddling scheme while he was vice president, the story became impossible to bury.
Then libertarian Elon Musk bought Twitter and decided to release evidence in the form of the so-called Twitter Files showing that the FBI had “pre-suaded” and coerced Twitter executives for weeks beforehand into viewing our story as Russian disinformation.
These new bombshells combined with revelations from whistleblowers that operatives inside the FBI’s Washington field office had deliberately buried the laptop, along with other derogatory material about Joe Biden before the 2020 election, including from Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski, who sat for a five-hour interview at FBI headquarters and handed over the contents of three devices which corroborated material on the laptop.
The FBI never called on him again. His evidence was buried with Hunter’s laptop.
As with Watergate, the cover up was now bigger than the original tale of corruption.
So, the stage was set Wednesday by Oversight Committee chairman James Comer, who called three former Twitter executives to testify under oath.
There was James Baker, the top lawyer at the FBI who was up to his neck in Russiagate and then was parachuted into Twitter as deputy general counsel five months before the 2020 election. There was Twitter’s former policy director Vijaya Gadde and ex-chief censor Yoel Roth, who was prone to tweeting slurs against conservatives, once describing the Trump White House as Nazis.
Roth had divulged in a sworn statement in December 2020 that he was told during his weekly meetings with the FBI before the 2020 election that “the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms . . . There were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden… likely in October.”
So the only option available to Democrats running cover for the president on the committee Wednesday was to try to rebrand the laptop and debunk The Post’s reporting. But the only way to debunk a true story is to lie, which is precisely what freshman congressman Daniel Goldman boldly tried to do.
“Right off the top, the very first paragraph of this so-called bombshell story is completely false,” he said, gesturing grandly at the giant blown up copy of the Post’s front page from Oct 14 2020 sitting on an easel behind Comer.
“The very first paragraph says Hunter Biden introduced his father to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.
“That is false, 100 percent false”.
Comer interjected drily: “Is the gentleman sure about that?
Goldman: “Yes, in fact I am sure about that and . . . as the lead counsel in the first impeachment investigation, we proved that he was actually fired because he was not prosecuting corruption, not that he was fired because he was prosecuting corruption.”
Comer: “Corruption of the president’s son’s company?”
Goldman, flustered: “The fact that Joe Biden [had] fired . . . the prosecutor general in Ukraine because he did not prosecute corruption . . . has been proven over and over and over . . .
“You should talk to the British authorities because they were the ones who were prosecuting Burisma and they could not get any cooperation from the Ukrainian prosecutor general so that’s why he was fired”.
So many lies.
Let’s break it down.
Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin was actively investigating Burisma when Biden had him fired in March 2016. Among the evidence is that on Feb 2, 2016, Shokin issued warrants to seize all “movable and immovable property” belonging to the owner of Burisma, Russian backed Ukrainian oligarch Nikolay Zlochevsky, including four large houses, two plots of land, and “a Rolls-Royce Phantom car,” as reported by the Kyiv Post, Interfax-Ukraine, and other contemporaneous media.
Shokin was retired at the time his corrupt predecessor Vitaly Yarema allegedly took a $7 million bribe in 2014 to save Zlochevsky from a British investigation by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office, much to the fury of the US state department.
Yarema was the prosecutor general Goldman asserted was fired at the behest of the British authorities, not Shokin.
Shokin was brought out of retirement in Feb. 2015 by Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko to do what the US was demanding: clean up corruption.
When Shokin was fired for doing just that, politician Yuriy Lutsenko was installed in his place and all legal proceedings against Zlochevsky and Burisma were dropped.
Biden phoned Poroshenko to demand Shokin’s firing 10 days after the prosecutor had started seizing Zlochevsky’s property. Biden would boast that he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, if Shokin was not fired.
“Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018.
Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.
