By Andrea Widburg
Two Biden scandals are converging: (1) Joe’s illegal possession of classified documents and (2) the contents of that genuine, 100%, all-real Hunter Biden hard drive. The conversation isn’t only pictures of Hunter Biden, drug addict and “international businessman,” suspiciously close to the garage trove of classified documents; it’s also a compelling claim that, on at least one occasion, Hunter Biden sent his business partners an email that has the smell of a reworked classified briefing.
From the moment in October 2020 when the New York Post broke the news about Hunter Biden’s laptop, Miranda Devine has been all over the laptop story. She’s probably one of the few people with the breadth and depth of knowledge that allows her to suggest that one of Hunter Biden’s business emails, written while he was on Burisma’s payroll, seems awfully like a classified briefing, not a typical Hunter scribble.
In an article entitled “There’s no hiding Biden’s fright over classified document scandal,” Devine notes that many of the documents being discovered, to the extent we know anything about them, are from 2013 through 2016 and include intelligence memos and briefing materials from multiple foreign countries, including Ukraine and China. Devine explains, “That three-year period corresponds to the most frenetic influence-peddling activity overseas by his son Hunter and brother Jim Biden, who made millions of dollars from shady interests in Ukraine, China, Russia and elsewhere.”
However, just because things happen at the same time does not mean they’re related. Devine, thankfully, is too good an analyst to stop with mere temporal correlation. Instead, she assembles other pivotal facts: (1) The laptop reveals Joe’s involvement in Hunter’s business deals; (2) Hunter traveled on Air Force 2 with his Dad to countries that figure in both the stolen documents and Hunter’s deals; (3) during the key time period, Hunter lived in the Delaware mansion in which documents were found and drove the Corvette parked next to documents; and (4) during the same time period, Hunter had unlimited access to Biden’s official White House office.
What really grabs Devine is a “striking email.” The predicate for Devine’s analysis is that most people have a distinctive writing style. Hunter’s consistent writing style is terse, ungrammatical, poorly spelled, and poorly organized. That’s why it sticks out a mile when he suddenly writes an email showing none of those traits:
It was from Hunter to Archer on April 13, 2014, a week before Joe Biden visited Ukraine to meet then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and refers to “my guys upcoming travels.”
For Hunter, it was an uncharacteristically lengthy email, listing 22 points about Ukraine’s political situation, with detailed information about the upcoming election and predicting an escalation of Russia’s “destabilization campaign, which could lead to a full-scale takeover of the eastern region, most critically Donetsk.
“The strategic value is to create a land bridge for RU to Crimea. That won’t directly affect Burisma holdings but it will limit future UK exploration and utilization of offshore opportunities in particular,” Hunter wrote.
“It will also result in further destabilization of UK nationally and for whatever govt is in power. And the US will respond with even stronger sanctions. Those sanctions will threaten the tenuous support of the EU which does not have the political will to incur steep energy price increases.”
In point 22, Hunter instructed Archer to buy a “burner phone,” presumably to keep their conversations private. “Buy a cell phone from a 7/11 or CVS tmrw and ill do the same.”
It’s a prescient and very well-informed email, unlike anything else Hunter wrote in the nine years covered in the laptop, and it has the distinct flavor of an official briefing, perhaps even a classified one.
To check if Hunter copied from a website, I ran through Grammarly’s excellent plagiarism tool, one of the phrase’s Devine reprints, the one beginning “The strategic value is to create….” Grammarly returned only one match, and it was to Devine’s article. Hunter didn’t download his analysis from some online news or analysis site. Those words came from a source to which the ordinary public has no access.
Currently, there’s no proof; only suspicions. But Devine is right to be suspicious when a drug-addled man who writes in a semi-literate, marginally informed, telegraphic style suddenly bursts forth with a highly detailed, deeply knowledgeable, well-organized, and literate analysis of a complex foreign situation.
That the Democrat establishment is now desperate to rid itself of Joe Biden is obvious. Biden’s departure, however, standing alone, isn’t necessarily good for conservatives. The best outcome isn’t just Joe’s removal but also the entire corrupt Democrat establishment’s collapse. Sadly, the Democrats and the Deep State are adept at protecting their interests, even as they pull down everything else around them.