VSThis week, a House committee, launched by Republican representatives, devoted itself with passion to an indictment against the interference of social networks based on “the case of the laptop of Hunter Biden”. It’s a dark tale of drugs, hacked computers, corruption, politics and censorship, a soap opera whose whiffs stir the conservative media with enthusiasm, and the liberals, reluctantly.
The previous development dated from the beginning of the month, when the son of the president launched legal proceedings against, pell-mell, a repairer of computer equipment from Delaware; Rudy Giuliani, former lawyer for Donald Trump known for having confirmed the ex-tenant of the White House in his conviction that the 2020 election had been stolen from him; and various conservative figures.
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What is it exactly? In the fall of 2020, the United States is in the middle of the presidential campaign, Donald Trump warned in the summer that the only explanation for his possible defeat would be electoral fraud and Joe Biden, from his cellar due to the Covid, is asking himself as a providential, reasonable and conciliatory man. October 14, coup de theater: the conservative tabloid New York Post, one of the oldest newspapers in the country, owned by Rupert Murdoch, publishes an explosive article. In the hard copy, it’s titled ‘Biden’s Secret Emails’, with the caption: ‘Revelation: Ukrainian employee thanked Hunter Biden for giving him ‘opportunity to meet’ his vice father. -president “. On the daily’s website, the headline calls the emails “irrefutable proof”, literally “like a smoking gun”.
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According to New York Postthey prove that Hunter Biden “introduced his father, Joe Biden, then Vice President, to a Ukrainian energy company official less than a year before Biden Sr. pressured senior Ukrainian officials to they fire a prosecutor who was investigating the company”.
A copy of Hunter Biden’s hard drive
Back to the facts. For starters, emails. They were found in a laptop of the president’s son, dropped off in April 2019 at a repair shop in the state of Delaware, where the Biden family lives, and never recovered (the $85 bill was also not paid ). The FBI seized it, but the repairman had made a copy of the hard disk, provided to Rudy Giuliani, who himself passed it to the New York Post.
Then the contact. On April 17, 2015, a certain Vadym Pozharskyi, board member of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, wrote: “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC (Washington, editor’s note) and for offering to meet your father and spend some time with him. Joe Biden, then vice-president of Barack Obama, was very involved in international affairs, his specialty since he had served on the Senate committee on foreign policy from 1997 to 2009. In 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea , in Ukraine, Joe Biden urged Barack Obama to react. During the same period, Hunter Biden, his son, joined the board of directors of Burisma, a natural gas company which had been the subject of numerous investigations for corruption. He received the tidy salary of 50,000 dollars a month. In a previous email, in May 2014, Pozharskyi asked him very directly for “advice on how to use his influence” in favor of Burisma.
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Finally, the case of the prosecutor. In early 2014, Joe Biden, in a phone call to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, conditioned international aid to the fight against corruption. “You have to be white as snow, otherwise the whole world will abandon you,” he warned. But in July 2015, millions of dollars in diamonds and cash were found at two prosecutors. The UK also froze $23 million worth of Ukrainian assets after Ukraine refused to provide documents for a money laundering investigation. And for months, Ukrainian NGOs had been calling for the resignation of a prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who refused to investigate corruption cases. In October 2015, a demonstration took place in front of his home. Joe Biden did not look into Ukrainian corruption until December 2015. It was foreign pressure, exerted by the International Monetary Fund, other organizations, Europe, then the United States, which ended up pushing Parliament to dismiss Viktor Shokin. It is true that Shokin had investigated Burisma, but that was before Hunter Biden arrived. And no further investigation of the company was planned.
Sex and drug use videos
What else ? This is where it gets sordid. The hard drive also contained hideously embarrassing material about Hunter Biden’s personal life. It is common knowledge that the 50-year-old father of two has struggled with his addictions to alcohol and cocaine for years. A 12-minute video shows him including “smoking crack while having sex with a woman, as well as many other sexually explicit images”, according to the New York Post. Social media has been flooded with these videos popping up from time to time.
The scandal does not end there. When on October 14, 2020, the New York Post tweeted the link to the article, Twitter deleted it for 24 hours, thinking to prevent the spread of pirated material. Republicans have cried censorship, denouncing a liberal bias at the social network, which would have changed the outcome of the presidential election by protecting Joe Biden from the fallout of the article.
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It was visible everywhere other than Twitter, where it was only temporarily banned, but mainstream media refused to take it seriously. In their defense, the main author of the article in the New York Post had refused to sign it, believing that the checks were insufficient. Trump used it in his campaign, but the attack only caught on among his supporters. Many media outlets assumed that the computer or emails were not genuine. Those doubts have since been swept away, especially since Hunter Biden attacked those responsible for the leak. In his letter, his lawyer accuses the repairer of having caused the circulation of “hundreds of gigabits of Mr. Biden’s personal data”.
What charges for Hunter Biden?
Basically, why could Hunter Biden be worried? The wording of the e-mail does not make it possible to know if the famous meeting between Burisma and Biden took place. Moreover, the connection is simply lobbying, one of the main activities of Washington, where more than 12,000 firms were active in 2022. Hunter Biden’s choice to work with Ukraine demonstrated a serious lack of judgment. and ethics, especially with a corrupt company, and in an area for which he had no expertise. But none of this is illegal and he is not being prosecuted. On the other hand, in view of other documents, he could be accused of tax evasion.
As for Joe Biden, he assured in September 2019 that he had never spoken to his son about what he was doing in Ukraine. But two months earlier, Hunter Biden had told the New Yorker that they had talked about it, when he informed her that he was going to work for Burisma, in January 2015. “Dad said to me: ‘I hope you know what you are doing’ and I said: “Yes”, “he said. Biden therefore lied. The House of Representatives Committee on Control intends to prove much more, by investigating “the Biden family”, as indicated on its website. “Americans have a right to know whether the president’s ties to his family’s business have worked against American interests and pose a threat to national security. We haven’t finished hearing about Hunter Biden’s laptop.