Laptop belonging to Joe Biden’s son linked to FBI money laundering probe

An FBI subpoena seeking Hunter Biden’s laptop and hard drive has been linked to a money laundering investigation opened in late 2019.

The computer triggered a major row last week after ending up in the hands of Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who shared its contents with the New York Post.

The laptop contents included an email which allegedly indicated that Joe Biden had been introduced by his son to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm months before the then vice-president asked government officials in Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating the company.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Now, Fox News is reporting that the FBI subpoenaed the laptop and hard drive in relation to an apparently separate probe. Whether the investigation is directly linked to Hunter Biden is unclear.

The broadcaster says that leaked files relating to the probe include a document labelled as a “Receipt for Property” with a “Case ID” code that includes the numbers “272” - the FBI’s classification for money laundering.

The document also “details the bureau’s interactions with John Paul Mac Isaac”, the owner of The Mac Shop in Delaware, says the broadcaster. Mac Isaac claims that Hunter Biden left his damaged Apple laptop at the store in April 2019 and never returned, nor paid the $85 repair bill.

Another document obtained by Fox News was a subpoena sent to Mac Isaac to testify before the US District Court in Delaware last December. The subpoena reportedly includes “what appears to be serial numbers for a laptop and hard drive taken into possession”.

According to the Daily Beast, Mac Isaac is “an avid Trump supporter” who feared he might be “murdered” because he had Biden’s laptop. Asked by reporters this week how the device came into the possession of Trump’s lawyer, Mac Isaac said that a “whole lot of players” were involved.

Meanwhile, Democratic presidential candidate Biden dismissed the reports about his son business dealings as fiction. “This is the same garbage Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s henchman. It’s a last-ditch effort in his desperate campaign to smear me and my family,” he told local Wisconsin station WISN-TV.