Miranda Devine: Habitual liar Hunter Biden used Tucker Carlson’s platform to lie some more about his ‘laptop from hell’
For Hunter and Joe Biden, lying becomes so habitual they eventually lose grip on reality. Joe had power so people were inclined to believe his fabrications. Hunter is a former crack addict, deadbeat dad and pardoned felon so the only people he can get to swallow his lies are podcasters hungry for views.
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Hence his newfound fame, this week courtesy of Tucker Carlson.
The degenerate former first son shapeshifts to suit the proclivities of each interviewer, so he played to Carlson’s newfound paranoia about Israel, insinuating “Netanyahu” or “Mossad” were involved in hacking/stealing/fabricating his laptop/cloud, even though he previously blamed Russia.
My colleague Steven Nelson has already listed some of the flagrant lies in the interview. Garrett Ziegler of nonprofit Marco Polo is set to release a video listing 100 lies.
It’s a tiresome but necessary task to ensure Hunter doesn’t rewrite history as delusion with the help of his new media friends.
Hunter’s central lie is that he never took three waterlogged laptops for repair at John Paul Mac Isaac’s computer repair store in Wilmington, Del.
“I have literally zero recollection or memory of ever dropping off a laptop at John Paul Mac Isaac’s,” Hunter told Carlson.
Overwhelming evidence
Then he embarked on a meandering mélange of half-expressed falsehoods, throwing up Ukrainian, Russian and Chinese names, and, for Carlson’s benefit, the name of an Israeli-American “[Yaacov] Apelbaum.” More on him later.
“There is no such thing as a laptop. The laptop that [Mac Isaac] eventually turns over . . . to the FBI, the thing that [he] claims that he got off of a device was a hard drive . . . What he finds through this guy Apelbaum is Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Bob Costello . . .
“There’s no possible way all of the information that was eventually labeled as my laptop came from one laptop. It’s way too large . . . They hacked my cloud . . . There’s the Netanyahu side, the Israeli side. There is a Russian Ukrainian side of it. And then there are the US actors that include Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Miles Guo and a whole bunch of — Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman and all of these guys.”
Carlson’s response to this incomprehensible nonsense is: “I agree.”
By lying about the provenance of the laptop, Hunter hopes to cast doubt on the evidence of corruption it contains.
But the chain of custody is rock solid and documented.
Hunter’s signature is on the repair receipt (“Quote #7469”) for $85 from Mac Isaac’s store, for “Attempt data recovery from 3 macbook pros.”
The FBI seized the laptop on Dec. 9, 2019, after Mac Issac contacted them. Two agents arrived at his store with a subpoena signed by Delaware Assistant US attorney Lesley Wolf, whose boss David Weiss was running a money-laundering and tax fraud investigation of Hunter that had been launched by the IRS. The agents gave Mac Isaac a receipt for the laptop and a hard drive.
The FBI geo-located Hunter’s cellphone to track him to the Sikar Cigar Lounge in Wilmington, just around the corner from Mac Isaac’s store on April 12, 2019, right before he dropped off the laptops at 6:50 p.m., according to DOJ filings and forensic evidence introduced by prosecutors in Hunter’s 2024 federal gun trial in Delaware. Prosecutors used financial transaction history and location logs to corroborate Mac Isaac’s timeline. Mac Isaac is legally blind, but he can see up close. He recognized Hunter when he told him his name and smelled booze and cigar smoke on him.
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Tucker’s flip-flop
The FBI’s Computer Analysis and Response Team verified the authenticity and ownership of the laptop, assessed that “it was not manipulated in any way,” and deemed it fit for use as evidence in court, according to IRS Agent Gary Shapley’s 2023 testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee. Federal court filings at Hunter’s Delaware trial validated Shapley’s testimony.
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The silver MacBook Pro 13 was displayed to the jury in the Wilmington courtroom on June 4, 2024 by prosecutor Derek Hines before he showed it to his first witness, FBI Agent Erika Jensen, who confirmed it was Hunter’s laptop from the serial number on the back. I was in court that day. Hunter and his lawyers were there, too, and did not object to the use of his laptop. The jury in the Bidens’ hometown took three hours to find Hunter guilty on all three felony charges,
Pretrial court filings for Hunter’s September 2024 tax fraud felony trial in California show prosecutors intended to use the laptop as evidence but Hunter pleaded guilty to all nine charges on the first day of the trial before the jury was selected. Three months later his father gave him a retrospective presidential pardon covering all offenses committed from Jan 1, 2014, the start of the Ukraine grift.
It’s inexplicable that Carlson went along with Hunter’s deceptions. When he was at Fox News, he was among the most cogent and well-informed prosecutors of the case after this newspaper broke the story on Oct. 14, 2020, three weeks before the election.
He invited me on his Fox show for seven of the next eight days to present evidence from the laptop that showed Joe Biden had participated in his family’s influence- peddling scheme during his vice presidency. Hunter, Joe’s brother Jim, and partners made tens of millions of dollars monetizing Joe’s power in corrupt countries where he was pointman for the Obama administration.
Back then, Carlson railed against the Dirty 51 coverup, Big Tech censorship and the media blackout on the story.
Corruption whitewashed
But now he has joined the Bidens in casting doubt on the provenance of the laptop.
“The official story comes out about how . . . you left a couple of laptops in a laptop repair store,” he told Hunter.
“But the story did not make sense. Meanwhile, we get approached by Israelis connected to Benjamin Netanyahu who are shopping this stuff to me at Fox News . . . The laptop is real . . . But the way that it entered the bloodstream of the American media was not real.”
Neither Hunter nor Carlson explains how “Netanyahu” was involved, but the chain of custody shows no Israeli input. Hunter was always losing his devices.
The one Israeli name Hunter tossed out was Apelbaum, an Israeli-American “computer guy” who met with Mac Isaac on October 18, 2020, four days after The Post broke the story, when he was besieged by media and scared for his life.
Mac Isaac told me that a friend of his father’s, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson, introduced Apelbaum as his “computer guy” who could help confirm that the laptop was legitimate.
After meeting Mac Isaac, Apelbaum contacted Carlson in late October to give him a file from the laptop. Apelbaum did not reply to my questions, so I don’t know why he wanted to contact Carlson who was already airing the story every night. Apelbaum recently won a defamation lawsuit against someone who called him an Israeli spy.
The pity is that by placing doubt on the origins of the laptop, the Biden corruption that Mac Isaac risked so much to expose is whitewashed.
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Carlson once cared about that.
