By Ken Dilanian - NBC News
WASHINGTON - Federal investigators are looking into whether emails allegedly describing the activities of Joe Biden and his son Hunter, found on a laptop in a Delaware repair shop,
are linked to a foreign intelligence operation
, they told NBC. News two people familiar with the investigation.
The FBI confiscated the laptop and a hard drive via a grand jury subpoena.
Later that document was published by the New York Post newspaper.
The FBI has declined to comment.
The Post, a conservative tabloid, has published a series of reports based on emails that it claims to have obtained from Rudy Giuliani, attorney for President Donald Trump.
The first story highlighted what it defined as an "irrefutable email" that suggested a meeting between Biden and a representative of Burisma Holdings
, a Ukrainian company with which Hunter Biden, his son, was related to work.
Biden's campaign says there is no evidence the meeting happened, and the report was met with skepticism.
[Trump repeatedly attacked the son of his rival Joe Biden for his foreign affairs. He now gives you an answer]
Hunter Biden's attorney, George Mesires, said in a statement: “We have no idea where this came from, and we certainly cannot credit anything that Rudy Giuliani provided to the New York Post, but
what I do know for sure is that this alleged meeting never happened
”.
Rudy Giuliani, an attorney for President Donald Trump and a former mayor of New York City, spoke to a group of reporters outside the West Wing of the White House on July 1, 2020. Getty Images
"The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about critical elements in this story," said Andrew Bates, spokesman for the Biden campaign, "they
certainly never mentioned that Rudy Giuliani, whose discredited conspiracy theories and his alliance with figures related to Russian intelligence
have been widely disclosed, he claimed to have this information.
[Trump lashes out at his rival Joe Biden at a political rally. Thus he attacked him]
He added: "We have reviewed Joe Biden's official hours since then and no meeting was ever held, as the New York Post alleges."
Questions have focused on the diary's version of how the emails and other materials were obtained.
The newspaper said they were found in a laptop left at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019
, and they never claimed it.
The owner of the repair shop then accessed the private material, the Post said.
The newspaper said the store owner, who has been identified as John Paul Mac Isaac, called the FBI and also an associate of Giuliani.
Mac Isaac said he believes the laptop is part of equipment left by Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son, because the computer has a label from the Beau Biden Foundation, a charity named after his late brother.
"Before handing over the equipment, the store owner made a copy of the hard drive and gave it to Robert Costello, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's attorney," the Post said, "Steve Bannon, former adviser to the president, informed the Post about the existence of the hard drive at the end of September and Giuliani provided the Post with a copy. "
It is not yet known whether the emails cited by the Post are authentic or have been tampered with.
Giuliani, who acknowledged helping to leak the material, has tried to divulge information damaging to Biden with the help of a man identified by the United States as a Russian intelligence officer.
Doubts about the provenance of the emails have caused
Facebook and Twitter to limit the spread of the story, prompting harsh criticism from Republicans.
In an interview published by the informational website Daily Beast, Mac Isaac, the owner of the repair shop, did not answer several important questions.
"Throughout the interview,
Mac Isaac went from saying he approached authorities after viewing the files on the laptop to saying that he was actually contacted by the FBI
," says Daily Beast.
NBC News has reached out to Isaac but has not received a response.
The Post published a grand jury subpoena for the laptop and hard drive.
The document was issued by a federal prosecutor who already had the serial numbers of the devices when they were ordered to be delivered, in early December 2019, indicating that the federal police were aware of the specific devices they wanted to examine.
“Other material taken from the computer,” the Post said, “includes
an obscene 12-minute video that appears to show Hunter, who admitted to having struggled with addiction problems, smoking crack while participating in a sexual act
with an unidentified woman, in addition to many other sexually explicit images ”.
Many commentators have said that it is hard to believe that Hunter Biden left a laptop full of incriminating information at a repair shop.
Some have speculated that the material
could have been hacked from Hunter Biden's accounts and seeded it on the laptop
to offer a plausible explanation for how the material was made public.
In January, Russian hackers were reported to have breached Burisma Holdings' networks.