CHICAGO: The whistleblower who sent the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop to members of Congress, triggering a congressional investigation in October 2019, says he has fled to Switzerland to escape surveillance by “bad actors” and members of the FBI.
During an interview on the
conservative cable TV channel Newsmax on Thursday, Jack Maxey said he posted many of the files from Biden’s computer online, but that the documents were “taken down” by US intelligence agencies.
Allegations of influence-peddling by Joe Biden’s son to secure lucrative contracts poses a political threat to the president’s ability to hold on to Congress during the midterm elections in November.
Conservative critics have alleged since 2018 that Hunter Biden, the president’s second son, partnered with his uncle James Biden to exploit Joe Biden’s political influence to win multimillion-dollar contracts in Ukraine and China.
The allegations gained momentum when Hunter Biden’s personal laptop fell into the hands of Republican congressmen. He took the laptop to a Delaware computer repair store in April 2019 — the same month his father officially launched his bid for the presidency — but forgot to pick it up. After being abandoned, the laptop legally became the property of the store’s owner, who took its contents, including thousands of Hunter Biden’s personal emails, and turned them over to Republican activists, who quickly called for an investigation.
One of the conservative activists who got a copy of the laptop’s hard drive was Maxey, who co-hosted the podcast “The War Room” with Steve Bannon, a former campaign adviser to Donald Trump.
The initial emails released from the laptop, according to several published accounts, include lurid details of a decadent lifestyle, as well as information pertaining to Hunter Biden’s contracts in China and Ukraine.
In 2014, for example, Hunter Biden joined Ukraine’s state-owned natural gas company Burisma as a $1 million-per-year consultant. Less than a month after his then-vice president father visited Ukraine and met Burisma executives in April that year, the lucrative contracts began rolling in.
A top US diplomat stationed in Kyiv warned in a classified email sent to the State Department in 2016 that Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine, while his father was still vice president, “undercut” anti-corruption efforts in the country. That email, dated Nov. 22, 2016, was written by George Kent, who at the time was the deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in Ukraine.
Republicans in Congress introduced a resolution on Oct. 15, 2019, that provided specific details culled from the laptop and demanded an investigation into Hunter Biden’s Ukraine dealings.
Maxey said he fled to Switzerland recently after fearing he was being surveilled by “bad actors” and the FBI. He told British tabloid The Daily Mail that he feared retaliation. Maxey told the newspaper he plans to post all of the data from the laptop, which includes more than 80,000 files, 1.7 gigabytes of data and 8,000 emails, online in the coming weeks.
Maxey said he posted the files on another site but they were quickly taken down by “US intelligence agencies,” implicating the Biden administration in covering up the scandal.
“We chose five different drop boxes around the world. One in New Zealand, two in the United States, two in the United Kingdom,” Maxey told Newsmax, adding that his objective “is to expose the truth.”
He added: “In each case, the material that we put on there, and it was a relatively small amount, 8,000 emails, they were taken down in under 70 minutes. I would say that the vast majority were taken down in under 15 minutes.”
Dalia Al-Aqidi, a conservative columnist and senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, said: “This issue has been largely covered up in the liberal media and social media platforms to minimize its negative effect on the 2020 presidential elections.
“Nobody cares about Hunter Biden’s personal life nor his lifestyle as a private citizen; however, the issue is much more complicated than that. Americans deserve to know what role President Biden had played in his son’s business and what services were offered by Hunter in order to get paid thousands of dollars. Did he offer access to his father, and did the president benefit from his son’s deals? A transparent and bipartisan investigation is due now. Better late than never.”
Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California’s 50th District told Arab News last week that the Hunter Biden controversy is “the most consequential political scandal since Watergate, and it deserves an investigation in Congress no less robust and no less bipartisan than that one.”
Maxey suggested he feared he could be killed, telling Newsmax he was being followed by “black SUVs.” He said he feels less vulnerable to harassment in Switzerland and has friends there who could help him release the documents.
“I’m constantly reminded that I’m American and plenty of better men than me are taking dirt naps. I’m going to keep my oath to defend the constitution against all enemies. Foreign and domestic,” he said.