Nearly 18 Months Later, WaPo Finally Confirms Hunter Biden Laptop Story

The Washington Post published two articles Wednesday in which it claimed to have authenticated thousands of emails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, roughly 17 months after a key email was verified by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Post published a story Wednesday detailing Hunter Biden’s financial ties to the Chinese energy company CEFC China Energy, and used the emails found in Biden’s laptop as one of its sources for the investigation. The publication also ran an additional story explaining how it managed to authenticate 22,000 emails found in the laptop’s hard drive.

The Post enlisted Johns Hopkins University security researcher and cryptographist Matthew Green, as well as Jake Williams, a forensics expert and former National Security Agency employee, to authenticate emails found on the laptop. The two researchers were able to verify 22,000 emails by matching their contents with cryptographic signatures in their metadata.

The stories come roughly 17 months after the Daily Caller News Foundation proved the contents of the laptop could be authenticated by verifying an email from an account used by Burisma adviser Vadym Pozharsky to Hunter Biden, in which Pozharsky thanked the president’s son for “inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.” The email was described by The New York Post as the “smoking-gun” in their report detailing the alleged ties between the Biden family and Ukrainian gas giant Burisma.

Robert Graham, the founder of the cybersecurity firm Errata Security and cyber expert, authenticated the email by testing its contents against its DKIM signature, a unique cryptographic sign found in the email’s metadata.

“Of course, committing criminal hacking doesn’t make true information any less true, so no matter how illegitimately they gathered emails, the contents are provably legitimate,” Graham told the DCNF.

The Post previously downplayed the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, running a story in October 2020 stating the New York Post’s story on the emails “did not markedly advance what is already known about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, other than to suggest that at one point he gave Vadym Pozharskyi, a Ukrainian business colleague, ‘an opportunity’ to meet his father.”

The Post did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

The New York Times also ran a story on March 17 in which it claimed to have authenticated certain contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.