Joe Biden signed off on aggressive Hunter Biden legal strategy as GOP probed role in family biz: Keep doing it
WASHINGTON — President Biden gave his emphatic endorsement to an aggressive legal strategy adopted by his son Hunter’s lawyer Abbe Lowell shortly before House Republicans launched their investigation into the elder Biden’s role in foreign business dealings, according to a new book.“Let me talk to Abbe,” the president told his son in December 2022, according to the forthcoming tome “War” by Bob Woodward.“I love what you are doing.Keep doing it.
Keep doing it,” Joe Biden reportedly told Lowell, the high-priced attorney hired the same month by the disgraced first son.Lowell was in the process of launching an attack on Republicans who disseminated files from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop that linked Joe Biden to business relationships in China and Ukraine — as the new House GOP majority prepared to investigate further.At the time, federal officials had not yet publicly confirmed the authenticity of the laptop, casting doubt on the veracity of the files, which Joe Biden claimed in 2020 were Russian disinformation, and the importance of their contents — giving an opening to Lowell to further sow doubt.About a month after the presidential phone call, Lowell on Feb.1 wrote letters to the Justice Department and Delaware’s attorney general asking for criminal investigations of computer repairman John Paul Mac Isaac, who gave files from Hunter’s laptop to the FBI.Lowell carefully refrained from confirming the authenticity of the damning files by alluding to possible “manipulation” of those records — while seeking criminal inquiries into whether laws were broken that protect certain personal information and that forbid the distribution of stolen property.The same day, Lowell sought criminal investigations of former President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, Giuliani’s attorney Robert Costello and former Trump White House adviser Stephen Bannon for their roles in disseminating the files — and attempted to challenge the n...