REVIEW: 'Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide'

[Happy New Year]

In the spring of 2019, in between bouts of crack smoking and trysts
with prostitutes, living out of hotels and stinking of smoke and
booze, Hunter Biden made a strangely lucid decision. He got in a
car, drove to a computer service shop, and dropped off his laptop
for repair. The next day, he returned to give the clerk an external
hard drive so that the contents could be extracted. Then he never
came back.


Devine's gripping account of the Biden family's sleazy business
dealings, gleaned from the contents of Hunter's hard drive, picks up
where the New York Post‘s stellar pre-election reporting left off.

Many of the details have been reported before in bits and pieces.
Devine weaves them together with new direct reporting on
correspondence and documents pulled from the laptop and puts them in
context with what was happening at the time with Joe Biden's vice
presidency and presidential run.

The book is a devastating chronicle of political corruption. From
Ukraine to Mexico to China, Hunter Biden's private correspondence
shows how he and his family leveraged his father's position to win
high-paying, low-work gigs with shady foreign actors—and how Joe's
official actions at times directly benefited his family's financial
backers.

At best, Joe Biden comes off as a hapless father who facilitates his
son's clearly unethical moneymaking schemes. At worst, and as some
of Hunter's texts and emails suggest, Joe was a knowing participant
and beneficiary of the family business.

The fact that Hunter's market value was derived from his father's
position seemed to be a source of resentment for the younger Biden,
even as he continued to cash in on the name. Hunter complained in
texts to his daughter that he had financially supported the Biden
clan for three decades and that "pop" takes a cut of "half [my]
salary." Financial records and correspondence reported on by Devine
indicate that money from Hunter's business accounts was used to
cover Joe's AT&T bill and home maintenance expenses and that a
portion of at least one major China deal was earmarked for the elder
Biden.


He sent long, passive-aggressive missives to his father.

"Your vision of me being a hapless degenerate drunken crackhead is
so unbelievably hurtful," Hunter lashed out at Joe in a series of
texts in July 2019. "For twenty years [it] has felt like you just
needed me to go to my bedroom and be quiet while the grownups talk."

"I love you all. But I don't receive any respect," Hunter complained
in an email to his daughter.

Unlike Fredo, Hunter would be shielded from the consequences of his
destructive acts. So would the Biden family. After the computer
repairman turned over the abandoned hard drive to the FBI (and then
to Rudy Giuliani, who passed it to the New York Post), the legacy
press and social media companies mounted an all-out suppression
campaign against the Post‘s reporting, ensuring that the story was
snuffed out before the election.

The lack of consequences was interestingly predicted by Hunter's
lawyer, George Mesires, in a 2018 text message found on the laptop.
Mesires sought to reassure the younger Biden that news of his
Chinese deals would be brushed away by most of the press.

"At the end of the day," Mesires told Hunter, "I think people will
jadedly say ‘this is how the world works.'"

by Miranda Devine
Post Hill Press, 224 pp., $28.00


https://freebeacon.com/culture/review-laptop-from-hell-hunter-
biden-big-tech-and-the-dirty-secrets-the-president-tried-to-hide/