The judge overseeing a criminal case in Delaware involving President Joe Biden’s son Hunter unsealed information on Monday about warrants the Department of Justice used to obtain the first son’s data.
Judge Maryellen Noreika ordered four warrants unsealed in response to a request from an independent journalist. The warrants revealed the specific dates on which the government obtained various types of data belonging to Hunter Biden. They also effectively confirmed widely reported details about the first son’s infamous laptop falling into the hands of federal investigators.
Special counsel David Weiss has been overseeing the prosecutions of Hunter Biden in the Delaware case and in a tax-related case in California, and he was leading the government’s investigations when the warrants were issued.
One of the warrants noted that Weiss’s team in 2019 searched Hunter Biden’s Apple MacBook Pro, which Weiss has confirmed Hunter Biden left at a computer store. The laptop and its hard drive were later disseminated to various operatives and media outlets in 2020, causing a vast trove of Hunter Biden’s personal information to come into the public eye. The first son has never acknowledged the authenticity of the information and has claimed through lawsuits that it was manipulated.
The following are the dates that investigators executed the warrants and the items that they were approved by a judge to retrieve:
- Aug. 30, 2019: The government executed a warrant to search a hard drive containing information associated with Hunter Biden’s Apple iCloud account.
- Dec. 13, 2019: The government executed a warrant to search an Apple MacBook Pro laptop and a Western Digital external hard drive.
- July 11, 2020: The government executed a warrant for Apple iCloud backup account data for four devices, an Apple iPhone X, an Apple iPhone 6S, an Apple iPad Pro, and an Apple iPhone XR.
- Dec. 7, 2023: The government wrote that it reviewed “digital evidence” with this warrant but that “no physical evidence was seized.”
The first warrant obligated Apple to disclose to the government all of Hunter Biden’s iCloud data since Jan. 1, 2014, that related to tax evasion, failure to file or pay tax returns, and filing false returns. The second and third warrants had similar scopes.
The fourth contained no attachments and was vague. That warrant was issued on Dec. 4, 2023, and executed three days later on Dec. 7, the same day Hunter Biden was indicted in California on nine tax-related charges.
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After an unsuccessful attempt to strike a plea deal, Weiss first indicted the president’s son on Sept. 15, 2023, in Delaware over allegations he lied on a federal gun form about his drug addiction so that he could purchase a revolver.
Hunter Biden has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges in both cases and is now awaiting trials. The trial in California is scheduled for June, while the one in Delaware has not yet been scheduled.
