Like a sleeping giant awoken from its stupor, Hunter Biden’s legal team snapped into action on Wednesday as it filed a flurry of warnings and requests related to the infamous laptop that the First Son allegedly abandoned at a Wilmington, Delaware repair shop in 2018.
The younger Biden has hired one of the top criminal defense attorneys for embattled politicians, Abbe Lowell. It was Lowell who steered former First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner clear of criminal liability in the multiple probes that flared throughout the Trump administration.
Perhaps the thinking here was what worked for one prince will surely do for another. Lowell has also represented former House Speaker Jim Wright, former House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, Charles Keating of the Keating 5, and others.
The aggressive burst of activity in the last twenty-four hours has included a cease-and-desist letter to FOX News’ Tucker Carlson over reporting rumors of a $50,000 monthly rental payment Hunter was said to have paid his father for use of the same family estate where classified documents were discovered earlier this year. The letter calls for a retraction of the claim as well.
Also, Hunter’s legal team now call for an investigation into John Paul Mac Isaac, the computer repair shop owner who turned the laptop over to Rudolph Giuliani in 2020, who in turn sent it to the FBI. Surrogates for the younger Biden told CBS that Isaac is a “questionable character.”
Biden’s attorneys called on the Delaware attorney general to launch a criminal probe of whether disclosing the laptop violated state law. Isaac maintains that it was abandoned property discovered to contain evidence of crimes. Not that a request on behalf of a Biden would carry much weight in Delaware or anything … Hunter’s late brother Beau previously served as the state’s attorney general.
In 2021, Hunter Biden told CBS the laptop “could have” been his, but that he didn’t quite remember.
The legal actions mark the first official acknowledgements that the laptop is indeed Hunter’s.
Similar to the origins of the “Russia-gate” investigation, the furor behind the latest defense strategy is based not on the material itself, but rather how it came to the public’s knowledge. In 2016, a hack of the DNC’s server revealed then chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s campaign to knee-cap Bernie Sanders and favor Hillary Clinton doing into the Democratic Party Convention.
Absent from the resulting hysteria then was any substantive response to what the DNC was doing behind closed doors. This time, the Russians have already been ruled out – though not for lack of trying. When news of the laptop story broke before the election in 2020, 60 current and former intelligence officials wrote a letter claiming it to be a Russian disinformation campaign.
That claim, which Twitter used as a pretext to censor a New York Post story about the laptop’s contents, has been subsequently debunked, but none of those officials have apologized.
Slowed from the beginning of the 118th Congress by the House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s struggle to get a full grasp on the gavel, and then the revelations of mishandled classified documents by President Joe Biden, congressional probes of Hunter Biden and a range of other questions have yet to fully get off the ground.
With the defense now playing offense, investigators will have to move quickly to regain control of the narrative and the agenda.