Hunter Biden and his lawyer Abbe Lowell (L) depart a House Oversight Committee meeting on January 10, 2024. (Credit: Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)
Hunter Biden suggested that he would have never dropped off his laptop at a small Delaware computer repair business, but documents bearing his signature appear to contradict this claim.
Hunter Biden insisted that he would have taken his broken computer to a standard Apple store for repair work when asked by Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz during the first son’s Wednesday interview with legislators on the House Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. However, a receipt for work done by The Mac Shop — the small repair store in Delaware that turned over the laptop’s contents to the FBI in 2019 — bears a signature that resembles Hunter Biden’s signature on other unearthed documents.
An enhanced image of the 2019 receipt issued by The Mac Store displaying Hunter Biden’s signature. (Screenshot, Image via New York Post)
An enhanced image of Hunter Biden’s DocuSign signature affixed to a 2017 business agreement relating to Oneida Holdings. (Screenshot, Image via Republican Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley)
Wayne A. Barnes, a retired former FBI counterintelligence agent with extensive experience analyzing signatures, previously told Just The News that the signature affixed to the laptop repair receipt matches the signature affixed to other documents signed by Hunter Biden.
“Did you ever drop off a laptop at a repair shop?” Gaetz asked the first son, according to the transcript of the Wednesday interview that lawmakers released Thursday.
“I dropped a laptop off at the Apple repair shop that was literally three blocks from my office in Washington, D.C. If I was ever going to repair one, I would have walked up the street and dropped it there,” Hunter Biden replied, clarifying that he was talking about “the Apple store in Georgetown.”
“My question is about Delaware. Did you ever drop off a laptop in Delaware?” Gaetz then asked.
“The largest Apple store in America is the — the highest grossing and largest Apple store in America is at the Christiana Mall. If I was going to drop off a laptop — I don’t ever remember doing that, but if I was going to drop off a laptop, I would have gone to the Apple store, which was seven minutes from my parents’ home there,” the first son replied.
Hunter Biden then stated that he has no recollection of leaving his computer at a repair shop in Delaware, before going on to assert that the laptop’s archived contents included some fabricated material, including an allegedly fake conversation between him and a Secret Service agent in a Los Angeles hotel.
“There are many different things in there that are either — that are either fabricated, hacked, stolen or manipulated 100%,” Hunter Biden told the lawmakers regarding his laptop. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has acknowledged the legitimacy of the laptop’s data and alleged in court filings that Hunter Biden did leave his laptop at The Mac Store, while Internal Revenue Service whistleblower Gary Shapley testified in May 2023 that the FBI knew the data to be authentic as early as November 2019.
The FBI subsequently advised social media platforms that the laptop data could be a foreign influence operation, prompting social media companies to effectively censor the New York Post’s initial 2020 story on their platforms. Fifty-one former U.S. intelligence officials also signed an open letter characterizing the laptop and its contents as inauthentic and a potential Russian intelligence ploy.
In the “NPR Public Editor” newsletter written by Poynter’s Kelly McBride, a senior NPR editor explained that the outlet was declining to cover the laptop story ahead of the 2020 election because it “[did not] want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 3/01/2024) (Archive) (Transcript, 2/28/2024)