A cybersecurity expert said he confirmed the authenticity of an email sent to Hunter Biden about a purported meeting between his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, and a top official at Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company where the younger Biden held a lucrative position on the board.
The Daily Caller News Foundation reported on Thursday that Rudy Giuliani, a personal lawyer to President Trump, gave the outlet a copy of Biden’s alleged laptop, and it asked Robert Graham, founder of the cybersecurity firm Errata Security, to examine what was described as the “smoking gun” email first reported by the New York Post earlier this month and its metadata.
Graham, who has been cited by other outlets such as the Washington Post and the Associated Press, said he used cryptographic signature found in the email’s metadata to validate that Vadym Pozharsky, an adviser to Burisma’s board of directors, emailed Biden in the spring of 2015 thanking him for “inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.”
Graham said he used the DomainKeys Identified Mail, or DKIM signature within the email to verify with a private key on Google’s servers that the sender, recipient, subject, date, and body of the email were unchanged from when it was originally sent.
The only way the email could have been faked is if someone hacked into Google’s servers, found the private key, and used it to reverse engineer the email’s DKIM signature, Graham, said.
“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 said.
Joe Biden’s presidential campaign has denied that such a meeting took place based on “Biden’s official schedules from the time” but only as it was described in the New York Post. Politico then reported that former Biden senior advisers “said that while there was never an official meeting, it’s technically conceivable that Pozharskyi would have approached Biden on the sidelines of some broader U.S.-Ukraine event.”
Amos Hochstein, was a longtime adviser to Biden on Ukrainian affairs, insisted to TIME that the meeting “never” took place.
If the meeting had occurred, it would contradict previous statements from Joe Biden, who has repeatedly said he never spoke to any of his family members or relatives about their private business affairs. It also would have taken place months before Biden pressed then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, who was dismissed in March 2016, who appeared to be sitting on a dormant investigation into Burisma.
The New York Post published a series of stories about the contents of the laptop and hard drive that purportedly belongs to Hunter Biden beginning in mid-October. The laptop was dropped off at a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, last year but was never claimed back by the owner.
John Paul Mac Isaac, the computer repair shop owner, said he gave the materials to the FBI but also made a copy and gave it to Giuliani, who shared the information with the New York Post. While GOP lawmakers in Congress have said they have worked to authenticate materials separately obtained from a former Hunter Biden business associate, Tony Bobulinski, the Daily Caller News Foundation appears to be the first news outlet to have an expert say they authenticated some of the materials from the laptop associated with Hunter Biden.
“So as I blogged before, the emails contained DKIM information, which the original reporters could and should have verified. So I eventually got a copy of the email and run DKIM verification on it. It passed,” he said in a Thursday evening tweet, starting a thread explaining his authentication process in more detail.
Trump and his allies have used the Hunter Biden story as a political weapon in the final days of the 2020 election cycle, raising concerns that Joe Biden was aware and involved of his family’s foreign business dealings, presenting possible corruption and national security issues. Biden denies that he was aware of anything his family was doing in that regard, but Bobulinski claims this is untrue and has given evidence to the FBI to back that up.
James Rosen, a reporter with the Sinclair Broadcast Group, reported on Thursday that a Justice Department official said the FBI opened the inquiry into allegations of money laundering in 2019 into Hunter Biden and his associates and that inquiry remains active.
An FBI spokesperson told the Washington Examiner: “We have no comment, in keeping with our standard practice of neither confirming nor denying the existence of an investigation.”
A DOJ representative did not return a request for comment as of press time.
Neither Biden nor his son Hunter has disputed the authenticity of the emails obtained from the laptop and hard drive associated with the younger Biden.
Democrats, including House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, and former intelligence officials have claimed the Hunter Biden laptop story is part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
A federal law enforcement officer confirmed to the Washington Examiner last week that the Justice Department and FBI do not believe the Hunter Biden laptop was connected to a Russia disinformation effort, siding with Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe.
