The report said that in April 2019, an unidentified person dropped off a water-damaged MacBook Pro with the emails and other compromising material about Hunter Biden at an unidentified repair shop in Delaware, the Biden family’s home state. The report said the repair shop’s owner provided that information, but it did not give details on his identity.
A reverse image search of one of the photos in the story indicated that the shop’s owner is a man named John Paul Mac Isaac, whose social-media activity suggests he is an avid Trump supporter. His shop, called The Mac Shop, is at 21a Trolley Square in Wilmington. The Post also did not strip the metadata from photos included in the article, and a software engineer named Russel Neiss noted that the GPS information embedded in some of the images showed that the repair shop was in the same area.
The owner of the repair shop said that he wasn’t sure the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden but that the machine had a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, the report said.
The story went on to say the person who dropped off the water-damaged laptop “never paid for the service or retrieved it or a hard drive on which its contents were stored, according to the shop owner, who said he tried repeatedly to contact the client.”
The shop’s owner then contacted federal authorities about the laptop and the hard drive, the report said. The article also included a photo described as a federal court subpoena showing that the FBI seized the computer and the hard drive in December. It’s unclear why the bureau subpoenaed the hardware after the repair shop’s owner volunteered information about its existence to authorities.
The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies who recently published a book called “Active Measures” that focuses on the history of disinformation, said that the way the purported emails surfaced in the first place was dubious.
“This here is highly suspicious behaviour,” Rid tweeted after the Post’s story was published. “Especially when viewed in the context of a political campaign. Creative, anonymous, credibility-generating, somewhat plausible. Exactly how a professional would surface disinformation and potentially forgeries.”
Rid added that the emails featured in the Post’s story were published as images rather than in a file format, which “makes it harder to analyse and verify the files.”
“Note that photos, which appear to look genuine, could be there simply to add credibility to forged emails surfaced along with the photos. This would be a standard tactic in disinformation operations,” he wrote.
“Bottom line: *every individual little fact*—every email, every detail mentioned in an email—must be verified when data is surfaced in such a suspicious way, not just one piece of information, say a photo,” he added. “It appears that The New York Post did not do that here.”
Isaac did not respond to multiple phone calls and text messages seeking comment. But he later confirmed to several reporters who tracked him down at his shop that he was the source of the story. Isaac also said Trump’s impeachment was a “sham” and at one point cited the debunked right-wing conspiracy theory about the slain Democratic staffer Seth Rich.
He also couldn’t get his facts straight about the timeline of events outlined in the Post’s story for which he was the source. The Daily Beast reported that “throughout the interview, Mac Isaac switched back and forth from saying he reached out to law enforcement after viewing the files in the laptop to saying that it was actually the Federal Bureau of Investigation that contacted him.”
“At one point, Mac Isaac claimed that he was emailing someone from the FBI about the laptop,” The Daily Beast said. “At another point he claimed a special agent from the Baltimore office had contacted him after he alerted the FBI to the device’s existence. At another point, he said the FBI reached out to him for ‘help accessing his drive.'
