Nine months after Maxey sat with Post reporters to explain the contents of the hard drive, the paper reported its own independent authentication of 22,000 emails in March of 2022. These included communications regarding a deal with a Chinese energy company that earned Hunter $5 million, and his work with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm that paid him $83,333 per month to sit on its board. His father later boasted in public that he'd threatened to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee to Ukraine unless the central government in Kyiv fired the prosecutor investigating Burisma. At roughly the same time The Washington Post authenticated these emails, The New York Times also verified communications found on Hunter Biden's computer.
So, have America's two most prestigious newsprint organizations at last acknowledged that they were wrong to believe former intelligence officials who claimed the New York Post's October 2020 reporting on the Biden laptop was Russian disinformation? Of course not. They were and remain proud of their role in helping push Trump out of Washington. According to one survey, one out of six Biden voters said that had they known about Hunter's laptop in time, they wouldn't have voted for his father.
What concerned the prestige press wasn't that they'd missed a big story--or that they'd participated in a campaign run by U.S. intelligence services to prevent American voters from learning about the extent of the Bidens' political and moral corruption. Rather, they were worried that an even bigger story about the Bidens might be coming down the road. Maxey says he called the Post in March to say he was taking the hard drive to Switzerland to meet with a cyber expert named Vincent Kaufmann who told him he thought he could retrieve material deleted from the laptop.
The Times published its story two days after Maxey landed in Zurich, and the Post published its own "investigation" two weeks later, pronouncing some of the emails genuine while claiming it was hard to tell with others. As a longtime platform for U.S. intelligence operations--and owned by the same man, Jeff Bezos, who owns the cloud computing technology that Amazon Web Services uses to store the CIA's information--the Post wanted to help the White House get ahead of potential problems.
Maxey says that after he saw two dozen images of young girls, he told Kaufmann not to look at any more. "I don't know how many he looked at," says Maxey. "He was disturbed by what he saw and that no one would do anything about it. He's a moral person with an incredible skillset but has no life experience. He's a 31-year-old guy with a bag of chocolate bars or a Diet Coke in one hand and a computer mouse in the other." Tablet tried to reach Kaufmann for comment, but did not hear back.
Kaufmann began posting some of the material on 4Chan, the anonymous posting board where the messaging operation QAnon started. Users copied the images and text and seeded it on social media platforms like Twitter. Maxey says he never would have released it. "From day one I told Vincent that we can't release any of this material."
Maxey says he also saw information on the laptop that has direct implications for U.S. national security. According to Maxey, this material includes documents relating to Pentagon cyber programs and others regarding former FBI Director Louis Freeh. According to a previously released email on Hunter's laptop, Freeh worked with him to help a Romanian tycoon evade bribery charges. In April 2016, according to an earlier trove of emails, Freeh deposited $100,000 in a trust fund for two of Joe Biden's grandchildren.
"Vincent thought the media was covering for the Bidens," says Maxey. "Which is true. He also thought I was shielding them. He couldn't understand why nothing was happening. He couldn't believe people wouldn't protect children, so he felt he needed to deal with it." Maxey says that since Kaufmann posted the material online, he's spoken with "several sheriffs who have reached out to help, and it looks like we can resolve this."
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