Lawyers representing Hunter Biden have sent legal notices to 14 individuals to preserve their records surrounding their involvement in the publication of materials from a laptop that belonged to President Joe Biden’s son.
According to the Washington Post, Biden’s lawyers issued letters to at least 14 individuals demanding they retain their records. One of those individuals is Delaware computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac.
In October 2020, the New York Post published the contents of a laptop that Hunter Biden allegedly abandoned at Mac Isaac’s computer repair shop in 2019. Mac Isaac said Hunter Biden left the laptop at his shop in April 2019 and did not return to collect it after 90 days. Mac Isaac considered the laptop abandoned.
Mac Isaac decided to inspect the contents of the laptop and shared the laptop materials with the FBI in 2019. He also shared the contents with then-President Donald Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, believing the materials on the laptop to be pertinent to Trump’s defense in an impeachment case at the time.
Giuliani is among the list of individuals who received the Biden legal team’s notice to preserve records relating to the laptop controversy, Axios reported. Other letter recipients include former Trump political strategist Steve Bannon and Trump adviser Roger Stone.
A copy of the letter Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe David Lowell sent to Mac Isaac asks for him to preserve records as far back as January 2008, including all records and communications relating to Hunter Biden, members of the Biden family, various Biden family businesses, and all materials concerning the laptop that Hunter Biden left at the Delaware computer repair shop.
Biden’s Legal Claims
These legal notices to Mac Isaac and Trump’s advisers come about a week after Hunter Biden’s legal team sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, requesting it investigate whether any laws were broken when the materials on Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop were published.
“We write on behalf of our client, Robert Hunter Biden, to request an investigation into the following 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,” Lowell’s letter to the DOJ reads.
Lowell claimed Mac Isaac unlawfully accessed Hunter Biden’s personal data and unlawfully shared that data with other individuals. Lowell said Hunter Biden did not consent to Mac Isaac sharing the laptop materials or individuals who received copies of the laptop materials, like Bannon and Giuliani.
L0well raised further allegations that the materials on the laptop could be manipulated, citing a Washington Post claim that they received a copy of the laptop’s hard drive but could not verify over 99 percent of the materials in that copy.
Possible Retaliation
Hunter Biden’s legal team sent these legal notices and requests for DOJ investigations after Republicans have repeatedly raised questions about the laptop since 2020.
The New York Post’s original reporting on the laptop detailed several business deals with which Hunter Biden was involved. The New York Post reported that emails found on the laptop dating back to March or April of 2015 indicated that Hunter introduced his father, who was the vice president at the time, to one of his business partners at the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma. Those revelations came about just weeks before the 2020 election after Biden had claimed throughout the 2020 campaign cycle that “I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”
Burisma had been a subject of particular controversy in President Donald Trump’s 2019 impeachment case after he spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about Joe Biden’s alleged involvement in the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor. Trump may have been referring to a Ukrainian prosecutor named Viktor Shokin, who was allegedly investigating Burisma at the time he was removed from office in 2016.
After winning control of the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans said they would investigate the Biden family business dealings for signs President Biden is “compromised or swayed by foreign dollars and influence.” A November Republican House Oversight Committee report indicates Burisma is a focus area for their investigations.
Even before Lowell sent his letter to the DOJ, Mac Isaac had filed a $75,000 lawsuit against Hunter Biden. According to Mac Isaac’s lawyer, Brian Della Rocca, a private investigator served Hunter Biden with a copy of the lawsuit on Jan. 27, just days before Lowell’s request for the DOJ to investigate Mac Isaac and the other individuals involved in the laptop controversy.
“John Paul received Hunter Biden’s consent to access his laptop when Hunter Biden signed off on the work authorization while at The Mac Shop on April 12, 2019,” Della Rocca wrote to the DOJ. “Pursuant to the work order, signed by Hunter, when he failed to retrieve his laptop and the hard drive to which the data was recovered more than 90 days later, it became abandoned property so John Paul could dispose of it as he saw fit.”
NTD reached out to lawyers for Hunter Biden and John Paul Mac Isaac but did not receive a response before this article’s publication.