A central figure has contradicted himself about his actions and motivations, raising questions about his account.
Wilmington, Delaware — President Trump and his allies have launched a late effort to again tarnish Joe Biden by tying him to his son Hunter Biden’s overseas business interests, publicizing emails and photos supposedly from a laptop alleged to have been abandoned by the younger Biden and timing their release in a manner reminiscent of Russia’s efforts to dump damaging material about Hillary Clinton in 2016. Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, said his own attorney, Robert Costello, obtained the material from the owner of a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, after Hunter Biden allegedly left it there for months. Giuliani provided the material to the New York Post on Sunday, and the Post began running stories about the supposed documents this week. But the owner of the computer store, John Paul MacIsaac, was unable and unwilling to answer key questions about how the laptop supposedly arrived in his store, and eventually, how the data was shared with Giuliani. CBS News interviewed MacIsaac for almost two hours on Wednesday and throughout the interview he contradicted himself about his motivations, raising questions about the truthfulness of one of the central figures in the story. MacIsaac told CBS News he first turned over the hard drive to the FBI last December during the president’s, and provided a copy of its contents to Costello after becoming frustrated by the Senate trial in January. MacIsaac refused to provide key details about his interactions with Giuliani. The Post’s first story ricocheted across major social media platforms on Wednesday before Facebook and Twitter moved to block its distribution, seemingly wary of allowing the dissemination of the kind of misinformation that spread across their networks in the run-up to the 2016 election. Mr. Trump seized on the Post story and the ensuing tech crackdown to paint Biden as corrupt and the media as complicit before a massive crowd of supporters in Iowa on Wednesday night. Giuliani apparently held the information for months and released it less than three weeks before the election. Giuliani has long been involved in efforts by the president and his allies to highlight Hunter Biden’s work overseas to damage Joe Biden and boost Mr. Trump’s reelection campaign, and in 2019 met with a Ukrainian lawmaker who has been an «active Russian agent» by the U.S. government. CBS News has not seen or corroborated the data supposedly on the hard drive, and Giuliani has declined to allow other news outlets to review the information. In a story published Wednesday,20 days before the election, the Post said it included a trove of Hunter Biden’s emails and photos, some of which it published. The Post story trumpeted a «smoking-gun email» allegedly showing Hunter Biden had arranged for a meeting in 2015 between his father and an adviser to the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. Hunter Biden was a member of the board. A photo of the alleged email published by the Post shows it was written by Vadym Pozharskyi, the Burisma adviser, and reads, in part: «thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.» The Post presents this line as evidence that Pozharskyi met with Joe Biden, who was spearheading the Obama administration’s policy toward Ukraine. If true, it could contradict Biden’s that he «never discussed» his son’s foreign business interests with him. But a spokesman for the Biden campaign said a review of Biden’s schedule for the period in question showed no such meeting with Pozharskyi, and several of Biden’s top advisers who worked closely with him on Ukraine policy have publicly said they’ve never heard of him. While they did not rule out the possibility that Biden and Pozharskyi interacted briefly on the sidelines of an event, they said a formal meeting did not happen.
