The moment that irked me most during Thursday’s hearing with my colleague Emma-Jo Morris came when Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) implied the Russians had tampered with Hunter Biden’s “Laptop from Hell” before her bombshell story on its contents.
Goldman to Morris: "You received that hard drive from Rudy Giuliani, right? Who had been openly associating with an agent of Russian intelligence in the months leading up to your story." pic.twitter.com/CCmEbKBXky
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 20, 2023
Goldman, quite unsubtly, insinuated that Russian agents had tampered with the information on the laptop before she received a copy of its data:
REP. DAN GOLDMAN: There’s been a lot of talk about the laptop being real. And that is true. There was a laptop. It’s a computer, keyboard, screen. It is real. But you never got a laptop before you wrote that story, did you?
EMMA-JO MORRIS: That’s correct.
GOLDMAN: You got a hard drive.
MORRIS: Hard drive.
GOLDMAN: And you received that hard drive from Rudy Giuliani, right?
MORRIS: Yep.
GOLDMAN: Who had been openly associating with an agent of Russian intelligence in the months leading up to your story. You agree with that, right?
MORRIS: Uh, I guess.
GOLDMAN: Now, did you do a forensic examination of that hard drive before you printed your story?
MORRIS: We had tech people in the Post looking at it. Yes, yes.
GOLDMAN: That’s a forensic analysis?
MORRIS: No, not–
GOLDMAN: I highly doubt the New York Post has the ability to do a forensic analysis of a hard drive.
Left-wing pundits think Goldman secured a major own here. The top comment on social media reacting to this video states: “the entire story was based on an unverified, questionably-sourced hard drive that came from Rudy Giuliani.”
The only fig leaf left for the Hunter Laptop Truthers is this: sure, there’s incriminating stuff on there, but SOME of it could be planted. You have outside corroboration like Tony Bobulinksi and Hunter’s PornHub account, but SOME of it could be disinformation cooked up by Russian intelligence, which casts doubt on the whole thing, right?
But here’s the thing: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And the federal agents who can do the kind of forensic evidence that got Goldman sneering have had four whole years to produce any such evidence about the Laptop from Hell.
Just one fake email. Just one photoshopped picture. That’s all it would take from the alphabet agencies that use their talking heads like Goldman, James Clapper, John Brennan, and others to blow smoke about Russians manipulating the laptop revelations.
Representative Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat from Florida,, left, talks with Representative Dan Goldman, a Democrat from New York, during a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, July 19, 2023. (Haiyun Jiang/Bloomberg via Getty)
If they could prove just one forgery on that hard drive, wouldn’t it have leaked to the Washington Post or New York Times before November 1, 2020?
If they could prove just one forgery on that hard drive, wouldn’t it be widely disseminated before the 2022 elections?
If they could prove just one forgery on that hard drive, wouldn’t the FBI have shown it to its subsidiary, Twitter, before execs Yoel Roth and Vijaya Gadde were grilled by Congress?
John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the store where Hunter abandoned his laptop, gave the device to the feds in September 2019. They’ve had nearly four years. Do you think it would take even four months for the feds’ top experts to find just one planted bit of disinformation?
There’s a simple explanation here. They haven’t produced any information altered by the Kremlin because there isn’t any information altered by the Kremlin. Now, that could be for one of two disturbing reasons:
- The laptop is real, no one tampered with it, and it was censored because your government has become politically weaponized in service of one political party — and it has no qualms about lying to entrench that party’s power.
- The Russians are so proficient at generating disinformation that not even our experts at the FBI can detect it.
Yeah, that second one sounds a little far-fetched to me.
Goldman’s smug Jack McCoy routine doesn’t cut it for anyone with an ounce of critical thinking. If there’s any truth to what he’s implying, his deep state pals can prove it, and we all know they wouldn’t face any consequences for leaking it to him directly with their names and headshots attached to the email. So Dan, put up or shut up.
