As Jim Geraghty writes this morning, the series of demand letters just issued by Hunter Biden’s legal team to the DOJ, IRS, and Delaware attorney general in the case regarding his infamous laptop — letters demanding that Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, et al. be criminally investigated for “accessing and disseminating his personal data” — seems like a bizarrely poor strategy. Appealing nakedly to one’s friends in authority to criminally investigate one’s enemies is still a bridge too far in legal ethics, as well as a losing play politically for his father’s administration.
And even more notably, as Jim points out, what made the letters such a “bold” (if you’re the Washington Post) or “politically self-defeating” (if you are us) strategy is that in writing them Biden’s attorneys implicitly acknowledged that the laptop and the data taken from it was indeed Hunter Biden’s. This is something that we have all known for years now, but which was important to have formally nailed down.
Well not so fast, because Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell is walking that back: “These letters do not confirm Mac Isaac’s [the repair shop owner who took custody of it originally] or others’ versions of a so-called laptop. They address their conduct of seeking, manipulating, and disseminating what they allege to be Mr. Biden’s personal data, wherever they claim to have gotten it.”
That is quite a neat theory of the case, indeed. If the data is his (spoiler: it is) then it defies belief to deny the reality of the laptop, unless the claim is that Hunter Biden was hacked remotely. Lowell is twisting himself into a comical knot on this because he wants to focus on the narrow argument that people like Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Mac Isaac, and others committed crimes by spreading the material to others, as an invasion of Biden’s privacy.
Were this standard to hold up as grounds for investigation and prosecution, then Lowell would be helping criminalize the entire mainstream media, whose job is often to deal with private documents and materials they have received from all manner of sources. Since I assume that it was not his intent to shutter the New York Times, it’s safe to say that these letters are rhetorical bluster. But they are mildly insulting as well, beyond the new updated insistence that “no sir, that’s not my client’s laptop.” Hunter Biden’s sleazy backroom dealings with foreign influencers using the heft of his family’s name, particularly in conjunction with his rampant drug abuse, were matters of national concern. This is/was a wildly reckless man who nevertheless was in a position of significant influence due to his political connections and who used it rather transparently to line his own pockets, and perhaps others’ besides. The real premise behind the decision to censor or bury the New York Post’s original story, and the implied one behind Biden’s new legal demands, is that we did not deserve to know about this.