A now-retired U.S. intelligence officer says a spy agency sought his assistance in attempting to get a copy of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Retired Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer’s version of events to Just the News was confirmed by three other people who were either approached by him or by the intelligence agency, the outlet Monday.
“They said the agency’s interest was to analyze the hard drive contents for any evidence or patterns of how foreign adversaries were seeking to compromise prominent Americans or their families,” Just The News noted further, adding that “Shaffer provided details about the approach during an appearance Friday on the Just the News television show on Real America’s Voice.”
“A three-letter agency came to me and said, ‘Hey, we’ve heard that you have access to a copy of the Hunter Biden hard drive. Could we get a copy?'” Shaffer said during the interview.
“And I said, like, ‘Do you know what’s on there? I mean, we’re talking about everything from child porn, to, you know, all these issues regarding the president,'” he added.
“And they said, ‘We don’t care. … We want to either confirm or refute it. We want to act factual. We don’t have a political dog in the fight,” he continued.
“What our concern is, is that if there’s compromising information on that hard drive, this is before the election, the president could be compromised to the level of owing either China or Ukraine something. And this is what this three-letter agency was concerned about,” Schaffer added.
Just the News continued:
A U.S. official directly familiar with the effort confirmed the request to Just the News, saying the intelligence community wanted to know if anything on the hard drive had been hacked, whether the Biden family was compromised, and whether there were any patterns about how foreign adversaries were seeking to compromise prominent Americans.
The agency abandoned the request when it became apparent there were multiple versions of the hard drive floating around and could not ascertain chain of custody, the official said.
The laptop was initially turned over to the FBI in late 2019 by a lawyer representing John Paul Mac Isaac, then a computer repairman in Wilmington, Del., after Hunter Biden allegedly abandoned it. That attorney also confirmed that Schaffer approached him in October 2020, around the time some of the contents of the laptop were being reported by the New York Post.
Shaffer said he was still attempting to get a copy of the Hunter Biden laptop in late October 2020 when he was asked to stand down by an official from the spy agency that some believe was the Defense Intelligence Agency, which Schaffer was long associated with.
“They were in meetings with me when we were trying to negotiate getting a copy of the hard drive,” he said. “And in the end, their leadership said, ‘Stop, don’t touch it. We don’t want to know.'”
Just last week, a ranking FBI cyber official said during testimony before a House committee that he has no idea where Hunter Biden’s laptop the bureau reportedly confiscated in 2019 is currently located.
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