Several days after The New York Post published its 2020 hit story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the FBI received a flash drive containing emails and text messages from the cell phones of one of Hunter’s business partners, confirming that the content on Hunter’s computer was real and not “disinformation,” as the FBI led social media and the public to believe.
On October 23, 2020, forensic examiners with the FBI’s Computer Analysis and Response Team (CART) inventoried the flash drive, which was loaded with emails and text messages from an iPhone and two Blackberry phones he used. Hunter’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski. to communicate with the president’s son about a lucrative joint venture with Chinese nationals.
The flash drive data covered the period from early 2015 to late 2017, according to the FBI report, known as FD-302, which summarized the interview with Bobulinski.
“BOBULINSKI was aware that the emails published by the New York Post were legitimate because BOBULINSKI had copies of them and had records of the emails on his own cellular devices,” the interviewing agents wrote in their 13-page report.
The FBI said the reports about the Hunter Biden laptop were disinformation. AP
At the time, Twitter had censored the Post’s report, based in part on warnings from the FBI. And a group of 51 former intelligence officials, including members of the FBI, signed a letter suggesting the laptop was fake, even though many knew it was real.
The FBI report was buried in a 700-page document earlier this month by the House Ways and Means Committee, which received records from two IRS investigators who exposed roadblocks the Justice Department put into his years-long investigation into Hunter. Biden.
The names of the FBI agents, both working in the Washington field office, are redacted in the report. Agents provided Bobulinski’s attorney with a “Property Receipt FD-597” for the flash drive.
While Bobulinski briefed the media on what he told the FBI, this appears to be the first look at what the FBI documented about the nearly six-hour interview.
It is clear from the 302 report that the FBI knew at the time that Hunter’s laptop and the Post’s story about it were “legitimate” and not part of any Russian disinformation plot.
However, the FBI joined the US intelligence community in spreading that false narrative on Facebook, Twitter and other outlets that censored the story. The FBI crackdown unfolded from coast to coast, reportedly led by anti-Trump bosses Timothy Thibault in DC and Elvis Chan in San Francisco.
In fact, the FBI put a warning label on disparaging information about the Bidens that was not only easily verifiable, but actually verified.
“Bobulinski was aware that the emails published by the New York Post were legitimate,” the report said.AP
FBI 302 also reveals that, despite denying ever discussing business with his son, Joe Biden personally spoke with Bobulinski about his son’s Chinese joint venture, known as Sinohawk, on two occasions: May 2, 2017 , at 10:30 pm at the Beverly Hills Hilton Hotel Barra; and on May 3, 2017, at a Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles.
The report noted that Joe Biden was set to receive a cut in earnings: “HUNTER BIDEN would retain an additional 10% for the ‘big guy,’ which was a reference to JOSEPH BIDEN.”
The FBI also noted that “BOBULINSKI witnessed a large diamond gemstone given as a gift to HUNTER BIDEN by YE [JIANMING]”, one of the Chinese partners in the agreement.
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The United States has long suspected that Ye works for Chinese intelligence.
When Bobulinski told Hunter that the Wall Street Journal was interested in the “ties of the Chinese deal to the Biden family,” Hunter ordered his partner to switch to encrypted messaging on WhatsApp to continue their conversation, according to the FBI summary.
Bobulinski told agents he asked Joe Biden’s brother, Jimmy, who was also involved in the shady Beijing deal: “How are they doing this? Aren’t you afraid for Joe’s political campaign?
Bobulinski said Jimmy Biden responded flatly: “Plausible deniability.” Bobulinski understood this to mean that “financial transactions that ultimately benefited JOSEPH BIDEN and his family were negotiated and managed by members of JOSEPH BIDEN’s family, such as HUNTER BIDEN and JAMES BIDEN, to avoid direct involvement by JOSEPH BIDEN.” , according to the FBI report.
“The structure gave JOSEPH BIDEN the ability to plausibly deny his involvement and knowledge of the transactions, while still benefiting indirectly.”
But then the FBI knew all this. Bobulinski wasn’t telling them anything they didn’t already know. Or he should have known.
The FBI had already verified the authenticity of the laptop in December 2019 after the repair shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, handed it over.
Furthermore, they knew that the China-related messages it contained were not fake because they would have matched communications that the FBI had intercepted years earlier as part of a counterintelligence investigation of one of Hunter’s Chinese business partners.
Federal court evidence I have reviewed reveals that the agency had begun monitoring the communications of Patrick Ho, then an executive at CEFC China Energy, in 2017.
CEFC officials were involved in the Sinohawk venture, which was detailed in emails found on Bobulinski’s laptop and phones.
Agents suspected Ho was secretly working for Chinese intelligence services. Ho was later convicted of money laundering and bribery and served time in federal prison before being sent back to China.
During the same 2017-2018 period, the FBI also tracked bank records showing wire transfers and other transactions between Ho and China-based CEFC and Hunter and Jimmy Biden. Many of these financial records appear on Hunter’s laptop.
Therefore, the FBI had obtained key China-related content found on Hunter Biden’s laptop more than two years before taking possession of the laptop, as part of a national security investigation. But he threw it all into a black hole.
Investigators never brought Bobulinski, a potentially star witness, for another interview and never brought him before Hunter Biden’s grand jury. Because?
Paul Sperry is a senior reporter for RealClearInvestigations. Follow him on X: @paulsperry_
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Source: vtt.edu.vn