Associates of a dissident Chinese billionaire made cryptic posts about ‘three hard disks’ about Hunter Biden which would cause ‘a big money and sex scandal’ almost two weeks before their release, it emerged Friday.
The online post – which mentioned ‘videos and dossiers’ – appeared to anticipate the release of the cache of potentially damaging information about Joe Biden’s son that first appeared in the New York Post this week.
The posts raise new questions about the origins of the information about Joe Biden’s son that has rocked the presidential election with details of Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine; demands for more than $30 million in China; selfies including one with an apparent crack pipe; and a claim that the laptop contains a ‘sex and drugs’ video of the 50-year-old father of five.
The initial posting of the rumor came from a Chinese-language YouTube channel, Ding Gang, which is linked to fugitive Chinese dissident Guo Wengui.
It shows a man on the YouTube channel making the cryptic prediction on September 25, the Daily Beast reported – long before the first publication of the material on October 14.
In it he spoke about ‘three disks’ which he claimed had been sent by the politburo of the Chinese Communist Party to the U.S. Department of Justice and to Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker.
The Chinese-language stream was picked up by a Twitter account called Himalaya Global, which tweeted: ‘Bombshell… 3 hard disk drives of videos and dossier of Hunter Biden’s connections with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have been sent to Nancy Pelosi and DOJ. Big money and sex scandal! may come out soon.’
Both Ding and Himalaya Global are linked to Wengui, who is a billionaire who is advised by former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon.
Celebration: This was Guo Wengui and Rudy Giuliani in a tweet posted on the day the New York Post said the president’s attorney passed the newspaper a copy of Hunter Biden’s hard drive
Steve Bannon was with fugitive Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui when Bannon was arrested in August. Now a Chinese-language channel linked to Guo is said to have offered a cryptic prediction which linked Hunter Biden ‘disks’ to a scandal about sex and money
In hot water: Hunter Biden’s laptop contained emails about his business dealings, sexually explicit pictures and footage of him apparently smoking crack
Bannon was identified by the Post as the person to first alert the newspaper to the existence of a cache of information about Hunter.
Bannon was aboard Wengui’s mega-yacht when he was arrested in August and the two men joined forces this summer in New York to declare the New Federal State of China, planning to overthrow the Communist Party.
WHO’S WHO IN TANGLED WEB OF CHINESE LINKS TO HUNTER’S LAPTOP
STEVE BANNON
Named in original New York Post story as the person who told paper about Hunter’s hard drive in ‘late September.’ The former Trump aide had spent the summer on the superyacht of exiled – and fugitive – Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui. Bannon was arrested aboard on fraud charges in August. He has been advising Guo since 2018 and now runs a ‘war room’ podcast on which Guo has appeared
GUO WENGUI
Became a billionaire in China, apparently through real estate, but fled in 2014 claiming senior Communist officials were targeting him because he was a threat to them. 50-year-old is wanted in China for fraud, but has also faced claims he is a Chinese double agent. In June he and Bannon declared the New Federal State of China, backed by what he says is $100m of his cash, to overthrow Communism. Guo funds media outlet GNews to amplify attacks on Communist leaders. Linked outlets include Voice of Guo, Himalaya Global and Chinese-language Ding Gang. Smoked cigars with Rudy Giuliani on the same day the president’s personal attorney gave the Hunter hard drive to the New York Post
HIMALAYA GLOBAL
Group which amplifies Guo’s New Federal State of China, with presence in Australia and Canada as well as U.S. On Septembner 28, it tweeted translation of Ding Gang’s claims that the Chinese Communist Party (CCCP) had three of Hunter’s laptops and they would cause a ‘big money and sex scandal.’ That was 12 days before Rudy Giuliani gave it to the New York Post
DING GANG
Chinese-language channel linked to Guo which uses the name of a senior Communist official to spread anti-Communist material and which first made the claim that disks from Hunter’s laptop would cause a scandal
CCCP
Central Chinese Communist Party Guo’s sworn enemy who he wants to see removed as country’s rulers. The Hunter emails do not directly link him to known party members, although becoming rich in China without being a member is difficult. Bannon and Guo have used their podcast and online channels to claim it created the coronavirus as a bio weapon
The tweet on Himalaya Global included an English translation for the clip about the dissemination of the hard drives.
It suggested that as well as compromising material, it included information about the coronavirus ‘and biochemical weapons’ and claimed that sending it to both the the DOJ and Pelosi was a hedge by members of the ruling Communist party in Beijing on who would win the election.
‘They are betting on both sides,’ the broadcaster is translated as saying.
The DOJ and the Speaker’s Office have not commented on the claims.
It is also the first time that Chinese government interests have been suggested to have Hunter’s material.
The Washington Post reported that in December national security adviser Robert O’Brien warned President Trump that U.S. intelligence had flagged Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine, where he was seeking to obtain information to prove his theories of Biden ‘corruption.’
Intercepted communications showed Giuliani was dealing with people tied to Russian intelligence, according to the report.
There is no direct evidence in the stream that would prove that Guo had any sort of knowledge of the Hunter laptop – but there have also been claims that a poster on an online forum dedicated to Donald Trump similarly claimed that material about Biden would be released this week.
And on October 11, the day the Post says Giuliani handed over a copy of Hunter’s hard drive to the New York Post, a pro-Guo Twitter account posted images of the fugitive billionaire smiling and smoking cigars with Giuliani.
The new detail came as Giuliani promised there was more to come from the hard drive in a new interview with the Daily Caller, where he revealed his attorney has been in possession of the information for months.
‘By the time 10 days is out, you’ll have the whole thing,’ he said.
‘We’re going to be in control of putting it out and we’re going to catch them in lies,’ the former New York Mayor said.
However he raised more questions over how the laptop came into the public domain.
Hunter is claimed to have left the laptop, and two others, at an independent Mac shop in Wlimington, DE, on April 11 2019.
The computer shop owner, John Paul MacIsaac said this week that a man came into his store who said he was Hunter, but after 90 days failed to pick up the laptops.
MacIsaac said he made copies of the hard drive and provided it to the FBI and to a lawyer for Giuliani, MacIsaac said. MacIsaac was adamant that he had made only one copy, which he had kept for himself before giving it to the FBI.
He says he gave it to the FBI in December – a subpoena provided by Giuliani is dated December 19.
But on Friday Giuliani offered a marginally different version of events, saying that MacIsaac, 44, in fact made four copies and tried to give them to other Republicans as well as to Robert Costello, Giuliani’s attorney.
‘He gave it to the FBI first,’ Giuliani said of the computer store owner. ‘And he waited four or five months. He held on to forged copies of it. He gave two to friends of his in case he was killed.
‘He waited about four months, five months, I’m not sure because my lawyer’s the one who talked to him about this.’
Giuliani says it was also offered to other Republican operatives and said that that either the turned it down, or that his attorney responded first.
He said it contained ‘horrible, disgusting’ photos that proved it was Hunter’s information.
Handed over: This is the receipt showing when a man who called himself Hunter Biden left the laptop and how if he failed to pick it up it would be treated as ‘abandoned’
John Paul MacIsaac, 44, a former Genius Bar worker who runs his own Mac store in Wilmington, DE, revealed that he had passed the laptop to both the FBI and Rudy Giuliani John Paul Mac Isaac on his facebook page – identified as the owner of the Mac shop in DE where Hunter Biden’s laptop was allegedly taken for repair and subsequently turned over to FBI
Giuliani says the information on the hard drive proves Joe Biden is ‘corrupt.’ The former mob prosecutor described Hunter Biden as his father’s ‘bag-man,’ based on information on the hard drive.
Giuliani told NewsMax Thursday the president did not know about the information.
‘Because they covered it up. The president didn’t know this. I didn’t know this, this part, until now, until a few weeks ago, approximately when I found out about it,’ he said.
He told Bannon’s podcast Thursday the hard drive contained 1,000 photos and said it contained 40,000 emails.
On Giuliani’s new account, he and his own attorney have had the hard disk since around May.
No Republican has come forward to say they had been offered the hard drive before or at the same time as Giuliani.
HOW HUNTER’S EMAILS EXPLODED AS TWO WORLDS COLLIDED
January 2009: Hunter Biden (right) quits lobbying because his father has become vice president, and sets up investment and advisory firm firm Rosemont Seneca with friends Christopher Heinz – John Kerry’s stepson – and Devon Archer (left), a former Kerry aide
July 2010: Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, who owns its biggest natural gas company Burisma joins the government of its president Viktor Yanukovych
February 2014: Yanukovych is deposed in a revolution which claims scores of lives and Burisma Zlochevsky is thrown out of government too
April 16: Burisma is secretly accused of money-laundering by Britain’s Serious Fraud Office. On the same day Archer meets Joe Biden at the White House. Six days later Archer joins the board of Burisma
April 28: Britain’s Serious Fraud Office freeze $23 million of Burisma’s cash, every dollar which exists in the UK’s banking system
May 12: Hunter joins the board of Burisma to improve ‘corporate governance.’ Hunter’s salary is later revealed to be $50,000-a-month. Burisma board advisor Vadym Pozharskyi who had met Hunter in Lake Como, Italy, days earlier, emails him asking to ‘use his influence’ to stop prosecutions. During the summer, the new prosecutor-general of Ukraine opens an investigation into Burisma
February 2015: Senior diplomat George Kent, on temporary assignment to Kyiv, learns of Hunter’s role. He phones a staffer at Biden’s office to it could ‘create perception of a conflict of interest.’ That month Viktor Shokin takes office as Ukraine’s prosecutor general, despite already being the subject of questions about his own links to corruption
April 17: Email from Hunter’s laptop shows Pozharskyi writing Hunter: ‘thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent some together.’
Summer: The Burisma investigation appears to become dormant
January 2016: Biden travels to Ukraine amid mounting international disgust at Shokin failing to tackle corruption. One of the concerns raised by the European Union and IMF is that he has failed to investigate Burisma. Biden tells Poroshenko he needs to go. He later boasts: ‘I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.’ Shokin in fact is finally removed from office in March after internal turmoil in Kyiv
2018: Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani starts ‘investigating’ the Bidens’ links to Ukraine, enlisting the help of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who are now indicted on fraud charges. Ukraine’s latest prosecutor general announces he will investigate Burisma early the next year
April 12, 2019: Hunter takes three damaged Macs to John Paul MacIsaac’s Apple repair shop in WIlmington, Delaware. MacIsaac puts data from one on a new hard drive
April 25: Joe Biden announces presidential run
Summer: MacIsaac claims he becomes worried that Hunter has not picked up his laptops he has seen some of what is on them, and thinks he might be killed by a Biden associate for having it in his shop
Fall: MacIsaac either contacts the FBI or is contacted by them; he has said both
December 9 or 19: The FBI pick up the laptop, but MacIsaac has made a copy for himself. They give him a grand jury subpoena to hand it over, even though he was going to anyway
Early January 2020: The FBI tell MacIsaac not to talk to anyone and to stall if a Biden representative comes to get the laptop back
February: Trump is acquitted at end of his impeachment trial
September: Steve Bannon, Trump’s ex-aide and now indicted on fraud charges, tells New York Post about existence of laptop
October 11: Giuliani gives Post the hard drive
October 14: Post publishes emails and partially-clothed pictures of Hunter from the laptop – one of them with an apparent crack pipe – and says it has an 11-minute sex-and-drugs video. Giuliani promises there is ‘more to come,’ Republican senators promise to investigate but Democrats say the former New York mayor has ‘paraded with Russian agents’