Miranda Devine comments

Underneath the image of the New York Post cover above, Miranda Devine comments in her Devine Online email newsletter (sign up for free here) this morning:

For more than two years Joe Biden has maintained the fiction that the laptop his son Hunter abandoned at a computer repair shop in Delaware was a “Russian plant.”

Well, yesterday, Hunter finally admitted the laptop is his, only now he says his data was taken without his permission.

As his troubles bleed into his father’s classified documents scandal, the White House scrambles to keep a lid on the mess, and Joe dodges reporters, Hunter decided to raise the stakes by siccing his pricey lawyers onto his enemies.

Delaware computer repair shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, and Donald Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani, are among those he accuses of “unlawfully” accessing his laptop.

Mac Isaac was unfazed last night, since he has a copy of the work order Hunter signed authorizing him to access the laptop: “The flak is heaviest when you are over the target,” he said.

But the discovery of classified material dating from Joe’s vice presidential and Senate years, in five locations in the president’s Delaware mansion, garage, and office at the University of Pennsylvania, is dragging the president closer to the long-running investigation into Hunter’s business deals by the US attorney in Delaware.

We pointed this week to one uncharacteristically well-informed email about Ukraine written by Hunter to a business partner in 2014 which raises suspicions that he may have accessed classified material.

Whatever way he came across the information, the laptop shows he traded it for a lucrative gig on the board of Ukrainian company Burisma, while his father was V.P. After initially denying it, Joe has admitted meeting with a Burisma executive at a dinner hosted by Hunter in a private room at Cafe Milano in Georgetown in 2015.

Another troubling email on Hunter’s laptop has him offering to sell intelligence on Russian oligarchs to US aluminum company Alcoa Inc. for $55,000. He didn’t get such valuable information from a google search.

Despite the best efforts of Joe, and his cover-up merchants in the FBI and the media, a majority of voters suspect something fishy, according to a Rasmussen poll this week. It found 60% of all voters believe it is likely that information from the classified documents “was used by Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, in his foreign business deals.” Even 36% of Democrats feel that way.

It should be a simple matter for Special Counsel Robert Hur, who is investigating the president’s alleged mishandling of classified files, to clarify the issue by cross matching material on Hunter’s laptop with those classified documents.

As the new Republican House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer says: “Something bad is going on here.”

Whatever it is, the White House is doing its best to make the story go away, while Hunter and his lawyers fan the flames with their pugnacious antics.

To add to the point Byron York has made, three scandals converge on the Hunter Biden laptop. We have the Biden classified documents matter, the corrupt Biden family business, and the disparagement/suppression of the New York Post’s reporting on the laptop in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election (as revealed, to take one example, in the Twitter Files).

In the adjacent post I comment on Hunter Biden’s threatened defamation claim against Tucker Carlson and Fox News. The idea that Hunter Biden could withstand the discovery to which he would be subject in such a case is a joke. Speaking of defamation, I should like to add that Devine and the Post reporters whose work was dismissed as Russian disinformation by the Deep State 51, Politico, Joe Biden et al. have potential defamation claims of their own against those parties and others. Their potential defamation claims have vastly more merit than the all but frivolous claim Hunter Biden has threatened against Tucker Carlson and Fox News.