Hunter Biden appears to have launched his first real counteroffensive against Fox News and Trumpworld. This week, Bryan Sullivan, a lawyer representing President Joe Biden’s son, dispatched letters to Fox News and Tucker Carlson demanding an on-air retraction from the host for accusing the first family of participating in a money laundering scheme, according to The Washington Post. Another of Biden’s attorneys, Abbe Lowell, has also sent letters to the Delaware attorney general and the Justice Department calling for investigations into those responsible for extracting, disseminating, and promoting material from Biden’s laptop, the contents of which were leaked to the press in 2020.
In identical statements sent to NBC, CBS, and The Washington Post, an anonymous “person familiar with the first son’s strategy” promoted this pivot to a more aggressive legal tactic in dramatic terms: “This marks a new approach by Hunter Biden and his team. He is not going to sit quietly by as questionable characters continue to violate his rights and media organizations peddling in lies try to defame him.”
The letters specifically requested that the Justice Department’s national security division probe the “individuals for whom there is considerable reason to believe violated various federal laws in accessing, copying, manipulating, and/or disseminating Mr. Biden’s personal computer data,” per NBC News.
“The actions described above more than merit a full investigation and, depending on the resulting facts, may merit prosecution under various statutes,” read the letters to state and federal authorities. “It is not a common thing for a private person and his counsel to seek someone else being investigated, but the actions and motives here require it.”
Conservative media personalities and Republican lawmakers have been obsessing over Biden’s laptop ever since materials from it first appeared in the New York Post more than two years ago. The right-wing fever around Biden has escalated to the halls of Congress, where the new Republican House majority has opened an investigation into the president’s family. They’ve called on the Treasury Department to share financial information pertaining to the Biden family and requested testimony from Twitter executives over the company’s communications with the Biden team around the laptop story (namely a request that Twitter remove nude pictures of Biden that were leaked from his laptop). Until now, Biden has kept a relatively low profile as his father starts his third year in the White House.
Of interest to Biden’s lawyers are Trump ally Steve Bannon, who claimed he was in possession of Biden’s hard drive in October 2020, and Rudy Giuliani, who, shortly before the 2020 election, provided the New York Post with files that appeared to have stemmed from a laptop Biden dropped off at a Delaware repair shop. (On his podcast, Giuliani responded to the Biden lawyer by calling the threats “unethical” and “frivolous.”)
The owner of the computer repair store, John Paul Mac Isaac, who has become a minor conservative celebrity for purportedly serving as the catalyst to the scandal, was also mentioned in the letters. Biden’s lawyers believe he may have violated state laws by accessing files on the laptop. “These unlawful actions caused the widespread publication, manipulation, and exploitation of Mr. Biden’s most personal information,” Lowell wrote, per The Post, adding that Mac Isaac had no reason “to review the contents of any [financial] files” to repair Biden’s laptop. “Mr. Biden did not consent to Mr. Mac Isaac gaining access to the content of those files in April 2019 or at any other time.”
In a Wednesday statement to The Post, Mac Isaac’s attorney, Brian Della Rocca, brushed off Lowell’s letters. “The only thing I see is a privileged person hiring yet another high-priced attorney to redirect attention away from his own unlawful actions,” Della Rocca said.
As for Fox News, Sullivan wrote that Carlson must retract a story he aired falsely claiming that Biden sent his father $50,000 in monthly housing payments, which supposedly served as a stream for illicit funds. (In fact, according to The Post, Hunter Biden spent $49,910 every three months on office space in Washington.)
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