TRUMP ALLIES LAUNCH ASSAULT ON HUNTER BIDEN
Emails allegedly belonging to Biden’s son released
WASHINGTON
President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and his former top adviser Stephen Bannon, who have attracted the scrutiny of U.S. authorities for their political dealings in recent months, helped make public private materials purported to belong to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son in an attempt to swing support to Trump.
The Washington Post was unable to verify the authenticity of the alleged emails and other correspondence that the New York Post published Wednesday and said had come from the younger Biden’s computer and hard drive.
Neither Giuliani nor Bannon responded to multiple requests to review the hard drive and other materials for verification, nor did they respond to phone calls and emails on Wednesday seeking interviews.
An attorney for Giuliani responded to an email on which he was copied to ask what outlet the reporter represented. There were no further replies.
The New York Post, which is owned by conservative media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, said its report was based on materials it said it heard about from Bannon and were provided by Giuliani. The material, which it described as a “massive trove of data” that included video, was the subject of several stories published Wednesday.
Since late last year, Giuliani has said, he has met multiple times with Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach. Derkach was sanctioned in September by the U.S. Treasury for being an active Russian agent interfering in the 2020 campaign, which Derkach has denied. Bannon recently pleaded not guilty to federal money-laundering and fraud charges.
The report Wednesday did not markedly advance what is already known about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, other than to suggest that at one point he gave Vadym Pozharskyi, a Ukrainian business colleague, “an opportunity” to meet his father. The Biden campaign said the vice president’s schedule indicated no such meeting.
“We have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place,” Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said.
“The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story,” he added. “They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani — whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported — claimed to have such materials.”
Hunter Biden’s attorney, George Mesires, did not return several messages seeking comment. Pozharskyi, who works for Burisma, the Ukrainian gas firm that included Hunter Biden on its board from 2014-2019, could not be reached for comment.
The leak of the materials less than three weeks before Election Day centered on some of the same unproved allegations against Biden that led to Trump’s impeachment late last year after he pressured Ukrainian authorities to investigate the former vice president.
Although reminiscent of the 2016 race — when Russian intelligence operatives hacked and released hundreds of emails from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager through WikiLeaks — Wednesday’s report was met with skepticism, particularly from social media companies that sought to limit the spread of the news.
Several intelligence experts also were skeptical of the report — and the stated origins of the hard drive purported to belong to Biden’s son — saying that it had the characteristics of a carefully planned information operation designed to affect an American election.
Thomas Rid, author of “Active Measures,” a book about disinformation, said hacking, forging and leaking information selectively are among the most effective disinformation methods, and raised suspicions about the material the New York Post published.
“Usually when emails are leaked, what investigators look for is the actual email file and we don’t have that here,” Rid said, raising alarms that the emails do not include metadata, which can be used to verify the date, sender, and recipient. When an email is presented without the metadata, he said, “then you become suspicious.”
Efforts to tarnish Hunter Biden and by extension his father have been a focus of Trump’s campaign over the past year and a half. The president and his allies have derided not only Hunter Biden’s business dealings, but also his struggles with substance abuse.