For years, our federal government has quietly operated a protect-Biden racket. The public, however, has only recently — and haphazardly — learned of the lengths federal law enforcement officials and government employees have gone to safeguard the Biden family secrets. Here are eight times our government squelched scandals.
1. Censoring the Hunter Biden Laptop Story
The most recent and most well-known example of the feds protecting the Biden family stems from efforts by intelligence agencies to squelch news coverage of the New York Post’s reporting that Hunter Biden “introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.” The Post discovered that detail, and many more implicating Joe Biden in a pay-to-play scandal, in a cache of emails and text messages recovered from a laptop Hunter had abandoned at a Delaware computer repair store.
Before the New York Post broke the story on Oct. 14, 2022, about Joe Biden’s knowledge of and potential involvement in his son’s business dealings, the FBI warned Facebook that it “should be on high alert.” “[W]e thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election,” the FBI said, adding that “we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump similar to that so just be vigilant.”
Based on that warning, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg explained that “when the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story on Oct. 14, 2020, Facebook treated the story as potentially misinformation, important misinformation for five to seven days while the tech giant’s team could determine whether it was false.”
Federal law enforcement agencies likewise warned Twitter in the lead-up to the 2020 general election “that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October.” Twitter’s then-head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, further acknowledged that in meetings with federal law enforcement agencies, he learned “that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.” According to a letter Twitter’s lawyer sent to the Federal Election Commission, the tech giant explained it was “the prior warnings of a hack-and-leak operation and doubts about the provenance of the materials republished in the N.Y. Post articles,” that led its Site Integrity Team to preliminarily determine “the materials could have been obtained through hacking.”
Of course, the Hunter Biden laptop was not part of a “hack-and-leak operation,” and it wasn’t “Russian propaganda” or “important misinformation” — and the FBI knew that fact because it had seized the laptop from the computer repair store nearly a year earlier, in December of 2019. But the FBI nonetheless deceived the tech giants to induce them to censor the pay-to-play scandal that likely would have cost Joe Biden the election.
2. Quietly Seizing Hunter’s Laptop from Repair Shop
While it was the FBI’s lies that prompted the tech giants to censor the New York Post’s coverage of the Biden family pay-to-play scandal, the bureau’s efforts to protect the Biden family from the damning material contained on the laptop may have also included the FBI’s seizure of the laptop from the repair store owner, John Paul Mac Isaac. Had Mac Isaac not made a copy of the hard drive before the FBI seized Hunter’s laptop in December 2019, the FBI could have kept the entire story quiet. One can’t help but wonder if the bureau’s true motivation in seizing the laptop was to protect the Biden family.
A comment by one of the agents who seized the computer suggests just such a motive. When Mac Isaac joked with the agents who seized the laptop that he’d remember to change their names when he wrote a book about the incident, according to the repair store owner, one of the agents rejoined: “It is our experience that nothing ever happens to people that don’t talk about these things.”
3. Seizing and Returning Hunter’s Second Laptop
Another Biden-clean-up mission may have taken place two months later when, in February 2020, the Drug Enforcement Administration raided the office of Hunter Biden’s former psychiatrist, Keith Ablow. In executing the search warrant, the DEA seized from Ablow’s safe a second laptop that belonged to Hunter. Even though Hunter was under investigation at the time, the government returned the laptop to his lawyer.
At the time of the DEA search, no mention was made of the Hunter Biden laptop. Instead, the limited public coverage of the raid consisted of reports that the DEA claimed the execution of the search warrant was part of an “ongoing investigation” and references to Ablow’s medical license being recovered in May of 2019 for alleged “inappropriate sexual activity with patients and illegally giving prescriptions to employees.”
That the DEA waited nine months before searching Ablow’s office for evidence and that the government never charged Ablow for any crimes seems rather suspect, especially given the raid only followed the FBI’s seizure of Hunter Biden’s first laptop. But even if there were nothing nefarious about the raid, returning the laptop, while Hunter Biden remained under federal investigation, fits the pattern of the feds protecting the Biden family.
4. Downplaying or Ignoring Intelligence Threats to Provide Plausible Deniability
The Delaware laptop contained hordes of compromising information on both Hunter Biden and his father. Beyond that scandalous material, the laptop also included another significant revelation: that Hunter Biden believed the Russians had stolen another laptop that contained material ripe for blackmailing the Biden family.
As The Federalist reported exclusively in August of 2021, a lawyer for Mac Isaac confirmed the laptop Hunter had abandoned at the Delaware repair shop contained a video in which the Biden son recounted the story of his stolen laptop. In the video, Hunter spoke of how he almost overdosed during the summer of 2018 while partying in Las Vegas with his drug dealer and two other guys. Also present “was this Russian 35-year-old, really nice, pure brunette,” Hunter explained. Soon after coming to, Hunter discovered his laptop was missing.
“I think he’s the one that stole my computer,” Hunter is heard on the tape explaining. “I think the three of them, the three guys that were like a little group. The dealer and his two guys, I took them everywhere,” Hunter explained. “They have videos of me doing this. They have videos of me doing crazy f-cking sex, f-cking, you know,” Hunter added. “My computer, I had taken tons of like, just left like that cam on,” Hunter continued, “and somebody stole it during that period of time.”
When asked whether he worried the Russian thieves would try to “blackmail” him, Hunter said, “Yeah, in some way, yeah,” noting his father is “running for president,” and that “I talk about it all the time.”
It is difficult to overstate the national security risk that would exist if the Russians had possession of a laptop filled with not just personal information about Hunter Biden, but communications implicating his father in a pay-to-play scandal. And the FBI, had it properly processed the laptop upon subpoenaing it from Mac Isaac, would have known of that risk and, at a minimum, provided Joe Biden a defensive briefing.
However, according to whistleblowers, under the auspices of not interfering with the 2020 election, FBI leaders told employees, “You will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop.” The whistleblowers further claimed that “the FBI did not begin to examine the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop until after the 2020 presidential election.”
If true, to protect Joe Biden from any fallout flowing from the laptop, the FBI failed to properly assess the national security risks posed by the details on the laptop.
The FBI’s see-nothing approach also provided Joe Biden plausible deniability, such that he could claim the laptop represented Russian disinformation. In fact, at his last presidential debate, when President Donald Trump said, so the “laptop is now another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax?” Biden responded: “That’s exactly what [I] was told.”
While the intelligence community should have been providing Biden a defensive briefing on the laptop, it instead appears to have opted to protect the Democrat candidate by ignoring the national security risk.
5. Running Sham Investigations and Burying Information
The FBI did more than delay the investigation into the laptop, however, according to whistleblowers who claimed that “agents opened a sham investigation into Hunter Biden to brand reliable and verifiable derogatory evidence as ‘disinformation.’”
According to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, “multiple FBI whistleblowers, including those in senior positions,” raised “the alarm about tampering by senior FBI and Justice Department officials in politically sensitive investigations,” including “investigative activity involving derogatory information on Hunter Biden’s financial and foreign business activities.” Grassley alleged that the whistleblowers claimed Washington Field Office Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy “Thibault and other FBI officials sought to falsely portray as disinformation evidence acquired from multiple sources that provided the FBI derogatory information related to Hunter Biden’s financial and foreign business activities, even though some of that information had already been or could be verified.”
A news release issued by Grassley’s officer further claimed that “in August of 2020, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment, which was used by a team of agents at FBI headquarters to improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden’s activities was disinformation, causing investigative activity and sourcing to be shut down.” “The FBI headquarters team allegedly placed their assessment findings in a restricted access subfolder, effectively flagging sources and derogatory evidence related to Hunter Biden as disinformation while shielding the justification for such findings from scrutiny,” according to Grassley.
The whistleblowers’ charges, if accurate, indicate that the FBI went to great lengths to protect Hunter Biden, and by extension his father, at a time Hunter was reportedly already under investigation by the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office.
6. Stepping Up When Hunter’s Gun Goes Missing
In October of 2018, Hunter Biden purchased a gun, completing a “Firearms Transaction Record” that shows him responding “no” to a question on the form that asked, “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?” Notwithstanding Hunter’s very public and long-standing addiction to drugs, no charges were ever filed against the president’s son.
Beyond the government apparently looking the other way over Hunter Biden’s seeming false statement, the gun and that form feature heavily in another example of the deep-state clean-up crew.
According to Politico, on Oct. 23, 2018, Hallie Biden, Hunter’s sister-in-law-turned-lover, removed “Hunter’s gun and threw it in a trash can behind a grocery store, only to return later to find it gone.” After the manager of the grocery store called police, who launched an investigation, “a curious thing happened,” as Politico put it: “Secret Service agents approached the owner of the store where Hunter bought the gun and asked to take the paperwork involving the sale…”
“The gun store owner refused to supply the paperwork, suspecting that the Secret Service officers wanted to hide Hunter’s ownership of the missing gun in case it were to be involved in a crime,” Politico’s sources said. The store owner later provided a copy of the paper to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
While the Secret Service claims it has no record of any involvement of its agents, this story suggests agents again worked to protect the Biden family.
7. Stepping In When Ashley Biden’s Diary Shows Up
While the investigation into Hunter’s missing gun and the potentially fraudulent representation he made on the Firearm Transaction Record ended without charges, the Department of Justice brought federal charges against two individuals who attempted to sell a diary reportedly belonging to Ashley Biden. And not only did the government come down heavy on those individuals, but the FBI also raided the home and office of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe.
According to O’Keefe, “the diary was allegedly abandoned in a room that [Ashley Biden] had stayed at” and the two individuals who discovered the diary approached Project Veritas and other media outlets to sell the book. “Project Veritas gave the diary to law enforcement to ensure it could be returned to its rightful owner. We never published it,” O’Keefe said. “Now, Ms. Biden’s father’s Department of Justice, specifically the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, appears to be investigating the situation, claiming the diary was stolen. We don’t know if it was but it begs the question: In what world is the alleged theft of a diary investigated by the President’s FBI and his Department of Justice? A diary?” O’Keefe asked.
In addition to raiding O’Keefe’s home, the Biden administration’s DOJ obtained “secret warrants, orders, and a subpoena,” over the course of 16 months, to maintain “‘unchecked’ and ‘unfettered’ access to the emails and contacts of Founder and CEO James O’Keefe and seven other staff members.” Project Veritas maintains the government targeted him and his fellow journalists because of their “news-gathering activities surrounding allegations against then-candidate, Joe Biden, made by his daughter, Ashley Biden, in her diary.”
If true, it is yet another example of the men in black protecting the Bidens.
8. Keeping the Ducks in a Row and Quiet
Attorney General Merrick Garland represents the final and biggest protector of the Biden family, with the investigation into Hunter Biden continuing under the oversight of the Biden administration’s Department of Justice. Similarly, the DOJ, through the Western District of Pennsylvania’s U.S. Attorney’s Office, “is still overseeing the criminal investigation into the bankrupt health care business from which James Biden allegedly siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars to finance repairs to his beach house.”
Notwithstanding the clear conflicts of interest, Garland has ignored calls by congressional leaders to appoint a special counsel to investigate the financial dealings of the Biden family. Instead, Garland appointed Jack Smith as a special counsel to investigate Trump.
Apparently, the only thing as strong as the get-Trump attitude of the deep state is the protect-the-Bidens stance of the federal government.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
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