So let me get this straight. You are saying that
the computer repair man has signed the chain of custody form--a civilian who has no training or knowledge of chain of custody rules, and who is not part of law enforcement? He's the first one who signed it?
OK, maybe. But not being a sworn official, how do you know he isn't lying when he says that nothing had been added to the files?
Oh, yeah, we have to
assume he isn't lying. We have to
assume he never put anything on the computer after he broke into it (even though a computer expert said that no one broke into the computer). We have to
assume neither he nor anyone else copied information from the computer or possibly downloaded info into the computer before it was handed over to the authorities.
But the authorities don't know that for a fact.Here's some breaking news from April 12, 2022:
When the New York Post first reported in October 2020 that it had obtained the contents of a laptop computer allegedly owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter, there was an immediate roadblock faced by any other news outlet that hoped to corroborate the reporting, as many did: The newspaper wasn’t sharing what it obtained. ...
Now, a new voice has joined those raising questions about the validity of the material that’s alleged to have been on Hunter Biden’s laptop: the guy who recovered that data in the first place.
Last month, The Washington Post was able to publish a report based on a copy of material that we obtained from a Republican activist named Jack Maxey who’d gotten it from Giuliani. We had multiple experts examine the contents of a hard drive that purported to contain the laptop’s contents, validating tens of thousands of emails as likely to be legitimate. But an enormous amount of the material on the drive couldn’t be validated as legitimate, in part because of the game of telephone that the material had undergone by the time it reached us. ...
One expert likened it to a crime scene that was littered with fast-food wrappers thanks to the first police who’d arrived on the scene. That’s meant as an indictment, but it’s also generous. The first people on the scene weren’t police, in this case; they were (to extend the analogy) people aiming to obtain an indictment against a particular person.
There is still an unlittered crime scene out there. The owner of the store where Hunter Biden allegedly dropped the laptop off for repairs three years ago turned the computer over to the FBI when issued a subpoena to do so. In an interview with the right-wing media outlet “Real America’s Voice,” the owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, explained how relieved he was when the FBI came to get the laptop.
“I thought everything was great when they took it," he said, “because that was what I wanted the whole time was just to get this stuff out of my shop, have the FBI — have a paper trail that afforded me some protection, both physically and legally.”
This was a theme of the interview, as it has been with past interviews with Mac Isaac: his insistences that he thought he was somehow in danger for having the laptop in his possession. If you’re wondering how he then was able to pass the material to Giuliani, the answer is that he nonetheless kept a copy of the material from the laptop “in case he was ever thrown under the bus as a result of what he knew,” his attorney told The Washington Post. In this particular tale, this is low on the scale of things that don’t entirely make sense.
It’s important to explain how Mac Isaac created the backup in the first place. The laptop he obtained repeatedly shut down as he tried to recover its data. So, instead of simply copying the entire hard drive to another device, he did so piecemeal, copying individual files and folders one at a time. In doing so, he claims that he saw material that he found alarming.
“I saw some content that was disturbing and then also raised some red flags,” Mac Isaac explained to “Real America’s Voice.” Later asked to explain what had alarmed him, he said that he saw “criminality … related to foreign business dealings, to potential money laundering and, more importantly, national security issues and concerns.” That, he explained, was “what caused me to do a deep dive into the laptop once it became my property.”
Here, again, the timeline is iffy. Delaware law indicates that he could assume ownership of the laptop after a year. But he obtained the laptop in April 2019 (at the same time that conservative media was beginning to focus on Hunter Biden’s relationship with a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma) and gave it to the FBI that December. He said that he was alarmed by the failure of the laptop to come up during Trump’s first impeachment investigation. That effort ended in February 2020, before a year had passed.
What Mac Isaac said next, though, is what was most noteworthy. When he did his “deep dive,” he said, he “saw a lot of photos” — but “did not see a lot of photos that are being reported to [have been] seen.”
“I do know that there have been multiple attempts over the past year-and-a-half to insert questionable material into the laptop as in, not physically, but passing off this misinformation or disinformation as coming from the laptop,” he said. “And that is a major concern of mine because I have fought tooth and nail to protect the integrity of this drive and to jeopardize that is going to mean that everything that I sacrificed will be for nothing.”
In other words, Mac Isaac says that he has seen claims about what the laptop contains that don’t actually reflect what he saw on the laptop at the outset. Or, presumably, sees now, as one of the few people that might still have an unlittered copy of its contents.
(Bold emphasis mine.)
So the contents of the laptop are from a copy that he made from the laptop. So if he wanted to, he could have added content to it, and even the original hard drive (although it would have been difficult).
But more than that, much of what the media is reporting (especially the conservative media that you believe) is stuff that has been added to copies of his original copy.
But it still comes down to how trustworthy is Mr. Mac Issac. A man who felt compelled to give Rudy Guilliani, Donald Trump's personal lawyer and opponent of Joseph Biden for the presidency, a copy of Hunter Biden's files. Obviously a man who won't let his political leanings influence his judgement on who has a right to see Hunter's material. (Not!)
Tell me, William: if the first person in the chain of custody provided a copy (or a sample, in your case) to one side of a litigation over the arson, who would that person be perceived? Would revealing it make anyone question whether he was biased, and perhaps question his testimony in court?
I am not saying the Mr. Mac Issac did or did not add anything to the files he provided to the FBI. He may very well be perfectly honest. But I am saying it is not beyond a reasonable doubt that Mac Issac could have tampered with the files that he had. And certainly, with even Mac Issac saying there is a lot of misinformation out there about what is on the laptop, that what you say is on there is may be doubtful, too.
