by Andrew Kerr
Joe Biden’s presidential campaign said Wednesday that the former vice president did not meet with his son, Hunter Biden, and a top executive of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma in 2015 as alleged in a report by the New York Post.
The Post published a copy of an email on Wednesday that was allegedly sent by Vadym Pozharsky, an advisor to Burisma’s board of directors, to Hunter Biden in April 2015 thanking the younger Biden “for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together.” The email was part of what the Post called a “massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer” that was dropped off at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019.
“[W]e have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place,” Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates told Politico.
New: Biden campaign responds to NY Post story. “The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story…moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.” pic.twitter.com/yB2N5mvsXb
— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) October 14, 2020
The owner of the computer repair shop did not positively identify who dropped the computer off, according to the Post. After nobody came to pick up the laptop after it was serviced, the owner reported the laptop to the FBI and made a copy of the contents in its hard drive before turning it over to authorities in December 2019.
The repair shop owner then gave that copy to a lawyer for former New York Mayor Rudi Giuliani. The Post obtained a copy of the computer’s hard drive in late September from Giuliani after first being informed of its existence in late September by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.
The Biden campaign noted Giuliani’s known association with Andrii Derkach, a now-sanctioned Ukrainian lawmaker with ties to Russia. Giuliani said in September he worked with Derkach to dig up dirt on the Bidens’ activities in Ukraine.
“The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story,” Bates said. “They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani — whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported — claimed to have such materials.”
“Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing,” Bates said.
The contents of the laptop’s hard drive are currently under investigation by the Senate Homeland Security Committee, according to Fox News.
“Although we consider those communications to be confidential, because the individual in this instance spoke with the media about his contact with the committee, we can confirm receipt of his email complaint, have been in contact with the whistleblower, and are in the process of validating the information he provided,” Committee Chairman Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told Fox News.
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Andrew Kerr is a reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Joe Biden” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
