Months before 51 intelligence experts, the news media and Joe Biden himself suggested without evidence the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, the FBI had authenticated the device as belonging to the first son and prosecutors had expressed confidence its contents had not been manipulated, according to a contemporaneous IRS investigative memo.
The October 2020 memo was penned by IRS Supervisory Criminal Investigative Agent Gary Shapley, now a whistleblower, and provided a chronology of how the FBI validated the laptop as having belonged to Hunter Biden as early as November 2019 and by spring 2020 was exploiting and analyzing its emails, text messages and photos.
“We have no reason to believe there is anything fabricated nefariously on the computer and or hard drive,” the contemporaneous memo stated. “There are emails and other items that corroborate the items on the laptop and hard drive.”