Hunter's gun charge wasn't why Bidens were eager to bury laptop evidence. Will a friendly Delaware jury care?
Surveillance video shows Hallie Biden throwing Hunter Biden's gun in supermarket dumpster
Video of Hallie Biden attempting to get rid of the gun was shown to the jury in Hunter Biden's criminal trial Thursday. Hunter Biden is charged with lying about his drug use on a firearm application.
Hunter Biden spent nearly four years insisting that his laptop was stolen, or it was not really his, or it contained false information likely planted by those sneaky Russians. Take your pick.
There was never any evidence to support those claims. None. He simply made it up.
Hunter’s devious deception was finally exposed in court this week with the first witness to take the stand in his federal trial in Delaware on gun charges. FBI Special Agent Erika Jensen was handed the MacBook Pro 13 and verified the serial number as belonging to President Joe Biden’s son.
Forensic analysis, she explained, determined that the device had not been tampered with and that all the material contained therein — emails, text messages, photographs and a plethora of documents — were original and authentic. It was all corroborated by Hunter’s subpoenaed iCloud account with Apple.
Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, departs the federal court with his wife Melissa Cohen Biden, on the opening day of his trial on criminal gun charges in Wilmington, Delaware, U.S., June 3, 2024. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)
In other words, the U.S. government that was a one-time party to the lie, belatedly confirmed the lie. It is about time.
The FBI seized the laptop in December 2019, 11 months before the 2020 presidential election. The bureau knew immediately that it was the real deal because the computer was self-authenticating. Records found on it were also corroborated by those who sent and/or received communications with Hunter Biden.
Not only did the FBI remain mum by actively concealing the truth, it pressured social media companies to censor the laptop story when the New York Post first reported its incriminating contents several weeks before the election. On cue, Facebook and Twitter suppressed the story and suspended access to those who attempted to share it online. They locked then-President Donald Trump’s accounts.
Simultaneously, Joe Biden’s media handmaidens doubled down on the lie by running endless accounts of how the laptop was a fraud conjured up by Moscow to smear Biden and help his opponent get re-elected. Nearly every major television and newspaper organization denounced the laptop as thoroughly debunked, even though it was not. And they knew it.
Journalists never bothered to independently verify anything. They didn’t want to. Instead, they blindly endorsed the canard that it was a fake in the worst example of media malpractice since the notorious Russia Hoax in which they assured Americans that Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin in the bowels of the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election.
Only after Biden was sworn in as the new president did the press come clean and affirm the authenticity of the laptop. There were no apologies or mea culpas. Merely an acknowledgment that the device was accurate. Very few disclosed that the contents were so damning that Biden might have lost his bid for the White House if the truth had been known to voters before they cast their ballots.
Polling data indicates that the outcome would have been different if the laptop story had not been misreported and smothered.
Joe Biden recognized the incendiary nature of the material, which is why he shamelessly embraced the laptop lie in the second and final presidential debate with Trump on October 22, 2020. "There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant," declared an angry Biden as he called his son’s computer a "bunch of garbage."
In other words, the U.S. government that was a one-time party to the lie belatedly confirmed the lie. It is about time.
That memorable line was, itself, an artful lie based on a clever pretense. Three days earlier, 51 former intelligence officials signed and made public an infamous letter suggesting that the device had all the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign. They had no legitimate basis nor actionable intelligence for such wild speculation. But that was irrelevant. Selling the fiction to unduly influence the election was their urgent objective.
Only much later did a top intel official, former CIA acting director Michael Morell, confess in a congressional hearing in 2023 that a Biden operative inspired the letter during a telephone call he initiated. That person’s name is Anthony Blinken, who was rewarded with the lofty position of Secretary of State. Naturally, he denies it to this day.
Why were the Bidens and their confederates so frantic to hide the laptop from the American public? It was not because it contained evidence that could be used against Hunter in any future federal gun charges. No, there was something far more damaging and ruinous at stake.
The computer harbored shocking evidence of the father’s key involvement in his son’s vast influence-peddling schemes that netted tens of millions of dollars from many of our nation’s adversaries. The payola was funneled through some 20 shell companies to disguise the source and then distributed, in part, to Biden family members.
The facts are compelling that Joe and Hunter were selling access to the elder Biden and promises of future influence to Russia, Ukraine, China, Romania, Kazakhstan and other countries in what may be the largest corruption scandal by a public official in U.S. history.
Why, then, have no charges been brought under for Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or the Foreign Agents Registration Act or even U.S. bribery and conspiracy statutes? The IRS whistleblowers offered the stunning answer, accompanied by convincing evidence: Biden’s Department of Justice shut down any effort at prosecution for those serious criminal offenses. The investigation was effectively scuttled to protect Joe and Hunter Biden.
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It is ironic that the laptop has surfaced now as the central feature in a trial over whether Hunter lied on a federal form about his unlawful use of drugs when he purchased a firearm in 2018. Of all the possible scenarios involving criminal jeopardy, that one was the least foreseeable.
But sometimes, it’s the little stuff that trips you up.
A court sketch depicts Hunter Biden watching as Hallie Biden testifies on the stand during his federal trial in Wilmington, Delaware on Thursday, June 6, 2024. (William J. Hennessy Jr.)
Hunter may escape accountability yet, mind you. Yes, the evidence against him in the Delaware courtroom is overwhelming. His defense that he was in denial about his addiction and, therefore, did not knowingly lie about it is patently absurd. But unlike Trump’s recent New York trial, there is no hostile jury sitting in judgment in Wilmington. Just the opposite.
This is the Biden family’s home turf, their personal fiefdom. They all but own the state. So, the friendly jury may choose to overlook the laptop evidence where Hunter implicated himself and reject all the testimony from witnesses that would otherwise lead to a quick and inevitable conviction.
The defense team knows this, which is why they have devised a two-fold legal strategy —sympathy for a recovering drug addict and jury nullification. The latter relies on the unstated power of 12 individuals to disregard their oath and ignore both the evidence and the statutes to acquit because — quite simply — they want to.
Overriding the law defiles a jury’s sacred commitment to fulfill its duty impartially. While the U.S. Supreme Court has stated that juries have no right to negate the law when rendering a verdict, secrecy of deliberations offers them protection, as well as unfettered authority to do as they please.
Regardless of the outcome, at least one salient truth has emerged from the trial. The laptop was always authentic and never Russian disinformation.
Not that Joe or Hunter Biden will ever cop to their brazen lies.
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Gregg Jarrett is a Fox News legal analyst and commentator, and formerly worked as a defense attorney and adjunct law professor. His recent book, "The Trial of the Century," about the famous "Scopes Monkey Trial" is available in bookstores nationwide or can be ordered online at the Simon & Schuster website. Jarrett’s latest book, "The Constitution of the United States and Other Patriotic Documents," was published by Broadside Books, a division of HarperCollins on November 14, 2023. Gregg is the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling book "The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump." His follow-up book was also a New York Times bestseller, "Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History."
