Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has called on the Justice Department watchdog to launch a probe into the FBI’s handling of a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden, son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, in an Oct. 21 letter asked Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz to investigate how the FBI handled the laptop after allegedly taking possession of it following a grand jury subpoena last December.
A whistleblower at whose computer repair business the laptop was allegedly left and never retrieved, contacted the committee one day after it released a majority staff report titled “Hunter Biden, Burisma, and Corruption: The Impact on U.S. Government Policy and Related Concerns.” Johnson said the man told committee staff that he had turned over the laptop to the FBI, prompting staff to contact the agency seeking “confirmation of certain facts in an attempt to validate the whistleblower’s claims and assertions.”
The FBI said it would not confirm or deny any information identified by committee staff, Johnson said.
“Unfortunately, the FBI still has not provided satisfactory answers even though press reports indicate that the FBI does possess the laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden,” Johnson wrote.
“The public has the right to know whether the FBI has taken steps to authenticate and, if appropriate, investigate any of the material on the laptop,” he added.
Given that the FBI has supposedly had the laptop in its possession for over 10 months, Johnson said, there are doubts about whether “all appropriate steps have been taken and procedures have been followed,” hence his request to the DOJ watchdog to probe the matter.
The New York Post was the first to break the explosive story of the alleged Hunter Biden laptop and its contents. The newspaper received a copy of a hard drive with emails, photos, and other files from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney for President Donald Trump. Giuliani received the hard drive from Robert Costello, his personal attorney. Costello obtained the hard drive from the owner of a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, the individual presumably identified in Johnson’s letter as the “whistleblower.”
The shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, claims Hunter Biden dropped off three laptops in April 2019 and requested the data be recovered from them. Mac Isaac claims Biden never returned to pick up the only laptop that was salvageable. Mac Isaac claims to have turned over the device to the FBI in December last year and provided Giuliani with a copy of the alleged subpoena the FBI used to obtain the laptop and an alleged receipt he generated for Hunter Biden.
Giuliani declined to provide a copy of the hard drive. The Epoch Times did not independently verify the authenticity of the contents or the veracity of the laptop narrative.
The New York Post reports, supposedly based on data from the laptop hard drive, suggest Hunter Biden used the influence of his father, then-Vice President Biden, to make lucrative deals with big companies from Ukraine and China.
Joe Biden said on Oct. 20 that there is “no basis” for allegations that his son profited from arranging access to his father while he served as vice president. He was responding to a question from a reporter who asked: “Wisconsin’s Republican Senator Ron Johnson put out a statement on Homeland Security letterhead saying Hunter Biden, together with other Biden family members, profited off the Biden name. Is there any legitimacy to Senator Johnson’s claims?”
“None whatsoever,” Biden replied. “This is the same garbage Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s henchman—it’s a last-ditch effort in his desperate campaign to smear me and my family. Even the man who served with him on that committee, the former nominee for the Republican Party, said there’s no basis to this, and you know, the vast majority of the intelligence people have come out and said there’s no basis at all. Ron should be ashamed of himself.”
A Biden campaign surrogate, Jenna Arnold, admitted on Oct. 18 in an interview with Fox News that nobody has said the emails are inauthentic.
Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report.
From The Epoch Times
