John Paul Mac Isaac was an introverted Delaware computer repair man until his life was destroyed for trying to do the right thing, with authorities thwarting or ignoring him at every turn, he said in a book released Tuesday. “‘If you see something, say something’, we’re told. I did see something, and I did say something. I was vilified for it,” he wrote.
Mac Isaac said that a boozy Hunter Biden dropped off three laptops for repair on April 12, 2019, and agreed to pay $85 to recover files from one of them, whose password was something like “analf—69.” The now-First Son came back a few days later to bring an external drive, then never responded to the call informing him that the recovery was complete.
Mac Isaac immediately saw homemade porn littering the desktop, along with financial records detailing millions of dollars in foreign transactions. He wanted nothing to do with a political scandal, but he figured it would be a moot point, as Joe Biden seemed too old to advance in the Democratic primary.
But when then-President Donald Trump was subjected to impeachment proceedings related to his allegedly pressuring Ukraine president to investigate the Biden family’s business dealings there, Mac Isaac sensed injustice. “I was sitting on evidence that could exonerate the president and justify his actions. Whether you like a person or not, everyone is entitled to a fair trial,” he wrote. And under his contract, abandoned property legally became his.
Reviewing the laptop’s contents, Mac Isaac had seen that in 2014, Hunter and his business partner Devon Archer plotted a business venture in Ukraine that overlapped with U.S. actions. They discussed buying burner phones at a 7-Eleven. On April 16, 2014, Vice President Biden met with Archer at the White House. Five days later, the vice president traveled to Ukraine. The day after that, Archer was awarded a position on the board of directors of the country’s oil and gas firm Burisma, with Hunter joining weeks later, “to the tune of $1,295,000 each,” Mac Isaac wrote. The computer’s contents also showed Hunter telling his daughter that unlike his father, he wouldn’t make her give him half the money she earned.
“You better lawyer up and don’t talk to anyone about this,” the FBI agent said, according to Mac Isaac. “The door is on the left.”
Vadym Pozharskyi, Burisma’s number-two official, wasted no time in asking for Hunter and Archer’s “advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message/signal, etc, to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions” related to an investigation into Burisma, he wrote. On April 17, Pozharskyi “thanked Hunter for the opportunity to meet his father,” he wrote.
Hunter and Archer hired a company called Blue Star Strategies “to perform the heavy lifting between Burisma and the White House,” and Blue Star began providing Burisma with sensitive executive-branch information, Mac Isaac wrote. In December 2015, Joe Biden visited Ukraine and threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees unless the prosecutor who had investigated Burisma was fired.
Mac Isaac became convinced that federal authorities needed to see what was on the hard drive, but he was concerned about bringing it to Delaware-based agents because of the Bidens’ sway. His father was a former Air Force colonel who had spent time at the CIA, so on October 9, 2019, the elder Mac Isaac flew to Albuquerque, New Mexico to deliver a copy of the drive to an FBI field office there. But the agent refused to accept it, instead grilling Mac Isaac’s father on whether the computer repairman might have broken the law, he wrote.
“I consulted with a regional legal officer, and he suggested you should get a lawyer,” the FBI agent said, according to Mac Isaac. “You better lawyer up and don’t talk to anyone about this… I don’t have anything else for you, and the door is on the left.”
In November 2019, Special Agent Joshua J. Wilson of the FBI’s Baltimore/Wilmington division contacted the Mac Isaacs. Impeachment hearings were under way in the Senate. On November 19, 2019, Wilson and another agent with the last named DeMeo visited Mac Isaac’s apartment. Mac Isaac printed out key emails and slid them to the agents, saying “This collection of emails shows preferred access to the State Department as well as the vice president’s travel schedule, all sent to private Ukrainian citizens.”
“Have you spoken with anyone else about this?” Wilson asked, according to Mac Isaac. The agents left without taking the emails — taking only the contract that showed whether Mac Isaac was the legal owner of the laptop, he wrote.
On December 9, 2019, they showed up with a subpoena to take the original laptop computer, instead of taking a cloned copy as originally discussed. On their way out, DeMeo allegedly remarked, “It is our experience that nothing ever happens to people that don’t talk about these things.”
They said they were taking the physical computer so the FBI’s top computer experts could assess it. But someone named Matt soon called with the most basic questions about how to read a Mac hard drive. And he was attempting to boot up the operating system directly, which could spoil the intact nature of the evidence. Mac Isaac said they could come back to the shop so he could show them how to recover a hard drive. DeMeo was standing in the room with Matt. “Absolutely not. We’re done; hang up,” Mac Isaac heard him say, according to the book.
“I sat back and pondered the multitude of possible reasons these FBI agents had chosen to give the laptop to someone who clearly knew very little about computers,” he wrote. The weeks passed, and Trump’s impeachment proceeded, with the laptop still unknown to the world.
Mac Isaac was just an ordinary person with no experience dealing with the media, politicians or government. With no movement from the FBI, his father tried to get it to the offices of Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Jim Jordan, but got no bite, he said.
Mac Isaac sent a tip to Sen. Ron Johnson’s office, and received back only an unsigned note that asked a few terse questions that seemed to probe into his own actions more than the substance of the laptop. Johnson’s office then leaked Mac Isaac’s identity to investigative reporter John Solomon without his consent, he claimed. When Mac Isaac pressed for a substantive conversation with a Johnson aide, the aide called and said that two National Security Administration officials were also on the line, who proceeded to take over the call and grill Mac Isaac about his own actions — such as asking if he had ever been to Russia — again with little interest in the hard drive itself, Mac Isaac claimed. (Johnson’s office did not return a request for comment from The Daily Wire.)
From Hunter’s laptop
It was not lost on Mac Isaac that the Trump impeachment trial revolved around a whistleblower whose identity had been ruthlessly shielded — with social media blocking his name and major media avoiding reporting it, even though some outlets reported that the whistleblower was a former aide to Joe Biden who would have had a clear agenda. “Why was I being made to feel so guilty by the people I was trying to help, for doing the right thing?” he wrote.
Mac Isaac ultimately took the drive to Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for Trump, as a last resort. Robert Costello, who worked for Giuliani, promptly responded to a tip and asked him to FedEx a copy of the drive on August 27, 2020. Costello immediately began going through it.
Through Giuliani, the New York Post obtained access to the laptop, leading to a story that landed on October 14, 2020. The Post neglected to redact the address of Mac Isaac’s store, leading to a glut of threats and vandalism.
Mac Isaac hoped that, with Giuliani briefing him based on the contents of the hard drive, Trump would bring the truth to America in the presidential debate. But Trump failed to clearly communicate what was on the laptop, Mac Isaac said.
To suppress the Post story, former intelligence operatives traded on their credentials to push a storyline that suggested that the kilt-wearing Scotsman with albinism was actually a Russian agent. “Did they actually think I’d come to Wilmington ten years earlier and opened up a Mac repair business as a cover, just waiting for an intoxicated Hunter to one day stumble in with a damaged laptop?” he wrote.
The day after the election, he closed down his business and left the state. “I felt like I was being punished for having done the right thing. As if the powers that be were setting an example for others who might have the same notion,” he wrote.