- Rep. Darrell Issa slammed Hunter Biden as a ‘petty criminal’ on Fox News
- Last week he sent preservation notices to multiple tech companies and White House officials for records connected to Hunter Biden’s laptop
- Republicans are up in arms over the New York Times claiming to have authenticated the hard drive more than a year after it was called ‘disinformation’
- Outlets like the New York Post and DailyMail.com were criticized for reporting on the laptop, despite it now being apparently legitimized
- Issa claimed it was a coordinated effort to help sway the election for Biden
- A GOP-led report on Hunter Biden’s business dealings found no wrongdoing on the part of President Joe Biden
Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California on Sunday accused Democrats and the mainstream media of engaging in a ‘conspiracy’ over Hunter Biden‘s laptop in a bid to help President Joe Biden win the 2020 election.
GOP lawmakers have been demanding answers after the New York Times claimed to have authenticated a hard drive purportedly belonging to the president’s only living son — more than a year after the New York Post was widely criticized for reporting on the contents of that same computer.
DailyMail.com had also authenticated the information at a time when many on the left wing were dismissing it as Russian disinformation.
Issa’s bombshell accusation comes one day after New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, the no. 3 House Republican, vowed that her party ‘will subpoena Hunter Biden’ if they win back control of Congress in November.
‘The American people absolutely deserve answers,’ Stefanik told the Post on Saturday. ‘There is no greater ethical concern or frankly conspiracy … whether this president is compromised because of his illegal ties to his family members.’
Earlier this week Issa sent preservation notices to White House aides, several tech companies and ex-intelligence officials in a bid to keep them from getting rid of documents and records tied to the Post’s original Hunter Biden story from October 2020.
‘Well one of the reasons I said the preservation letters is that those notices, if you then destroy evidence, are in fact evading Congress and suppressing evidence,’ Issa said on Fox News Sunday. ‘We’ve had that in the past. Obviously, we had that with Hillary Clinton at her attempt to destroy all the evidence of her illegal activities.’
‘But the other part of it is, that because this involves so many companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and so on, they took down the New York Post, there was clearly a conspiracy to, if you will, cover up the wrongdoing of the president and his family just before an election that he had to win and did win.’
The hard drive was given to the outlet by ex-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who obtained it from a Delaware computer repair shop where Hunter Biden reportedly dropped it off.
In addition to lewd images depicting sex acts and drug use, the laptop’s hard drive also contained a trove of emails that detailed Hunter Biden’s efforts to leverage his father’s connections as then-vice president to bolster his foreign business dealings.
Of particular interest to Republicans is the identity of a so-called ‘big guy’ who was meant to receive 10 percent of profits from a Chinese business deal. The monicker is found in an email on the hard drive to Hunter Biden from his business partner James Gilliar.
It’s not confirmed who the ‘big guy’ is, but some Republican lawmakers have speculated it to mean the president.
Tony Bobulinski, another former business partner of Hunter Biden’s, also previously pointed the finger at Joe Biden.
‘That’s one of the critical questions — perhaps the most critical question,’ Stefanik said on Saturday.
Amid backlash from Biden supporters and Democrats who called the story an effort by Russia to meddle in the presidential election, Twitter blocked users from sharing the story for more than two weeks.
Facebook said at the time that it had reduced the story’s distribution.
On Sunday Issa blasted Hunter Biden as a ‘petty criminal’ and charged tech platforms and other media outlets with ‘suppressing’ the New York Post.
‘The investigation is clearly warranted — not just because Hunter Biden seems to be a petty criminal, taking advantage of his father’s money and perhaps sharing you know, money with his father,’ Issa said.
‘It’s because if we have this kind of coordinated effort just before an election, what we have is American collusion to over — to affect the output of an election.
‘That can’t happen. We’ve got to make sure that our press is free and fair and right now, when it comes to new media, free and fair doesn’t exist. And when it comes to one of the oldest newspapers in America — the New York Post was founded in 1801 — they were suppressed.’