Lap top or not; does it really matter? NO.
Try this:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/hunter-biden-laptop-investigation.htmlI have read most of the above cited article and have quotes below. There is nothing DEFINITIVELY criminal, YET, but a good, thorough, and unbiased investigation is needed to sort out the details and to dig into the allegations and to get to the "bottom" and end the "rumors" that are going around.
Here are a few quotes:
And imagine that, in the middle of all of this, you lose control of 217 gigabytes of your personal data: videos in which you have sex; videos in which you smoke crack; bleary-eyed selfies; selfies that document your in-progress dental work; your bank statements; your Venmo transactions; your business emails; your toxic rants at family members; analysis from your psychiatrist; your porn searches; your Social Security number; explicit photos of the many women passing through your bedrooms, photos of your kids, of your father, of life and death, despair and boredom.
Imagine revealing this kaleidoscopic archive of all your different selves to anyone else. Now imagine it’s not just anyone but the same political opposition that has already sought to destroy your father’s candidacy by improperly pressuring a foreign leader to offer up dirt about your (sketchy, for sure) business dealings. Imagine, in a country with toxic and broken politics, how explosive this collection of data might appear to your enemies in the days leading up to a presidential election, and how valuable it might become after their defeat, as they seek to overturn and then undermine the results. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call this nebulous cloud of data a “laptop.”
The first thing you need to understand about the Hunter Biden laptop, though, is that it’s not a laptop. The FBI reportedly took possession of the original — at least if you accept the version of events promoted by those who have distributed the data, which Hunter Biden and his lawyers don’t — and all we have now are copies of copies. When it first publicly surfaced, 20 days before the 2020 election, the authenticity of the material was doubted to the degree that Twitter and Facebook effectively banned the story from legitimate political discourse. Since then, mainstream news organizations, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, have come to verify that at least some of the information contained in the cache is authentic.
(...)
Hidden inside the laptop, according to those (almost exclusively on the right) who have reviewed the data or who trust the word of those who claim they have, is a corruption scandal that implicates not just Hunter but other members of the Biden family, including the president. The laptop details Hunter’s involvement with a Ukrainian natural-gas producer that paid him millions of dollars to serve on its board — the relationship at the center of Donald Trump’s first impeachment. It shows how a Chinese energy company directed millions of dollars in consulting fees to Hunter and his uncle. It reveals White House meetings and slush-fund dinners and wheeling and dealing, from Romania to Monte Carlo to Cafe Milano. Most important, these people claim the laptop contains proof that, despite his denials, Joe Biden — allegedly referred to in emails as “the big guy” — was fully aware of, and looking to profit from, his son’s business activities.
The fine print of the original signed repair order says that equipment left in the shop longer than 90 days becomes its property. In interviews, several experts on Delaware law agreed that the document would make the laptop legally Mac Isaac’s after that time, and once he took possession of the computer, nothing would legally prevent Mac Isaac from sharing its contents with the world. Even so, by his own account, Mac Isaac started to poke around before 90 days had elapsed. The very first time he looked at the desktop, he says, he noticed an intriguing file: “Income.pdf.” “That kind of stood out,” Mac Isaac says. “So I clicked.”
If you want to make an argument to justify what happened next, the “Income” file is where it all starts. The Laptop From Hell, a 224-page book based on raw material from the data dump by New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, quotes from material found on the laptop to make the case that Hunter felt like his “family’s cash cow,” the son assigned the role of rainmaker while his father and older brother devoted themselves to public service. “Beau didn’t take on these fucking responsibilities,” Hunter reportedly ranted in a 2018 voice memo. “He didn’t do any of this shit.” In a text to his daughter Naomi, who was 25 at the time, Hunter complained that he had to “pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years,” assuring her that unlike “Pop” — the family’s name for Joe — he wouldn’t take “half your salary.” In right-wing circles, these texts have been construed to suggest there was a formal revenue-sharing agreement between Joe and Hunter, though looked at in a more forgiving light, they can be read as hyperbolic bitching.
Two FBI agents visited Mac Isaac’s home. He says they seemed primarily concerned with figuring out if the computer contained child pornography. Mac Isaac said he had not seen any. On December 9, 2019, according to the date on a copy of the grand-jury subpoena, the agents came to Mac Isaac’s shop and took away a MacBook, serial number FVFXC2MMHV29, along with the external drive provided for the data recovery. That same day, the House Judiciary Committee was preparing to debate two impeachment articles. Mac Isaac was thrilled — finally, Attorney General Bill Barr and the Justice Department were going to see what he had discovered.
Mac Isaac had made a copy of the laptop’s hard drive for himself as insurance. He had also set up a kind of dead man’s switch, making another copy of the drive to give to someone he trusted, with instructions to pass it along in the event of his death to President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Within a few days, he started to feel uneasy about the FBI. The agents called him up asking for assistance in getting access to the drive. Didn’t the FBI have its own tech support? He thought back to his conversation with the agents, especially a comment he recalled their making about his safety concerns, something to the effect of “Nothing happens to people who don’t talk about these things.” Was that a threat? He got back in touch with his father, and they called up an uncle, another former Air Force colonel who served on the board of a conservative nonprofit.
The tipster went on to claim to have “email proof” that Hunter and a business partner had been paid more than a million dollars in fees by Burisma and that they had used “their influence at the White House to pressure the Ukraine government to stop investigating” the company. “I feel the closer we get to the election,” Mac Isaac wrote, “the more this will be ignored.”
Costello wrote right back, telling Mac Isaac that he and Giuliani were “in position to get the information to the right places, provided the information is accurate and was obtained lawfully.” The timing was auspicious. A Republican-controlled Senate committee was working on an investigation of Hunter Biden, and Democrats were attacking the probe as a partisan smear job. The following month, the committee’s report would cite bank records to conclude that Biden and his business associates had received at least $4 million in fees from Burisma as well as millions more from other “foreign nationals with questionable backgrounds.” Trump was seeking to capitalize on the issue. His campaign soon started selling T-shirts that asked WHERE’S HUNTER?
Mac Isaac replied to Costello by sending him an image of the signed repair order and the subpoena, which seemed to indicate that the laptop was relevant to a criminal investigation.
In December 2013, not long before Hunter got involved with Burisma, he accompanied his father on a visit to Beijing aboard Air Force Two and met with a Chinese businessman who was interested in investing capital outside the country. Later on — only after his father left office, Hunter has stressed — Hunter took a 10 percent equity stake in a venture with the businessman. Toward the end of the Obama administration, Hunter began a separate set of talks with Ye Jianming, a Chinese energy magnate who, like many businessmen of his stature, had ties to the nation’s Communist Party. In 2017, Hunter and his partners formed a corporate entity to pursue business ventures with Ye’s company, including a later-scuttled $40 million investment in a natural-gas project on Monkey Island in Louisiana. A 2017 email from a representative for one of the partners (subject line: “Expectations”) was allegedly found on the laptop. It proposed a corporate structure in which Hunter would own 20 percent of the company, with another 10 percent “held by H for the big guy.” The big guy, many on the right believe, was Joe Biden.
There is little else on the laptop to suggest that Joe Biden profited from, or was even fully aware of, his son’s business activities. In 2017, the former vice-president was a private citizen, so partaking in the deal wouldn’t have been illegal, but he hadn’t foreclosed the possibility of a future presidential run, and going into business with Chinese investors connected to the Communist Party would certainly have been a political and ethical nightmare for him. That said, the “Expectations” email was not written by Hunter Biden, and that deal ended up falling apart. But the Chinese relationship still proved fruitful for the Biden family. According to a subsequent Washington Post investigation, Ye later struck an agreement that paid nearly $5 million in legal and consulting fees to entities controlled by Hunter and his uncle James Biden. At the time, Hunter was acting as an attorney for an associate of an executive at the company, who ended up being arrested at JFK airport and charged with bribing government officials in Chad and Uganda. The next year, Ye was detained by Chinese authorities, and the payments eventually stopped.