In April 2019, a very drunk man with a MacBook walked into the Mac Shop in Wilmington, Delaware.
The MacBook was inoperative - it was flooded with water.
Workshop owner John Paul Mack Isaac took him in for repairs and soon reanimated.
To his surprise, no one came for the MacBook - not a week later, not a month later.
When the 90 days prescribed by law expired, and no one paid for the repair, the computer became the property of the workshop and Mac Isaac decided to take a look at what was on his hard drive.
There was a bomb that exploded a year and a half later, three weeks before the US presidential election.
Mac Isaac prudently made a copy of the MacBook hard drive and only then called the FBI.
When the feds took the computer away from him, Mac Isaac contacted Robert Costello, a lawyer for Trump's friend and attorney Rudy Giuliani, and gave him a copy.
On October 11, 2020, Giuliani sent out the information received from Isaac to reporters from various publications.
Only one of them - the New York Post tabloid - was bold enough to publish this data three days later.
The hard drive of a MacBook, forgotten by someone (the client's identity remained unidentified) in a computer workshop in Wilmington, contained thousands of emails, presumably from Hunter Biden - the son of US presidential candidate Joe Biden - as well as many photographs, including compromising character.
The photo was not published by The New York Post, but, according to information leaked to the media, we are talking about child porn.
However, even a few letters, presumably from Biden Jr., were enough to cause a political earthquake in Washington and cast doubt on his father's electoral prospects.
In American culture, there is the concept of a smoking gun.
This is some kind of irrefutable evidence that can completely change the course of the investigation.
If someone was taken at the crime scene with a weapon from which smoke still rises, then nothing especially needs to be proved.
Such a “smoking gun” was an e-mail signed with the name of Vadim Pozharsky, an advisor to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which included the phrase: “Thank you for inviting me to Washington and giving me the opportunity to meet with your father and spending a little time together.” this letter is written in bad English).
Thus, the letter may indicate that Hunter Biden organized a meeting in 2015 between his father and one of the top managers from the Burisma board, whose board included Biden Jr.
Many spoke about the corrupt ties of the Biden family with the Ukrainian oligarchs, especially US President Donald Trump himself.
It was they who were investigated by Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who at the end of 2019 made loud statements about a grandiose corruption scheme, with the help of which billions of US dollars could be laundered in Ukraine.
But each time, Biden Sr. categorically denied that he had anything to do with his son's activity in Ukraine.
Well, Hunter was doing some business there - and Sleepy Joe had no idea about it.
And then suddenly letters appear, stating that the former US vice-president not only "had an idea", but could also personally meet with murky Ukrainian top managers in Washington.
So he lied to the American people.
And we are not talking about some kind of formal meeting at which the then second person in the States, on duty, shakes the hand of a native who came to bow and pats him on the shoulder with the words: "We appreciate your commitment to democracy."
A few months after this conversation, Biden Sr. and top manager of Burisma Pozharsky, Biden could use his influence to get Viktor Shokin to be fired from the post of Prosecutor General of Ukraine.
By the way, Biden never denied this, but claimed that he insisted on the dismissal of Shokin, because he was "corrupt."
However, it is known that Shokin was investigating the case related to the machinations of Burisma - and now, with evidence of meetings between Biden Sr. and the management of this company, the terrible accusation of "conflict of interest" for every American politician hung over Sleepy Joe like a sword of Damocles.
That one, if you remember, was suspended on a very thin thread that threatened to break off at any moment.
The publication of The New York Post could have blown up the Internet ... if not for the information blockade immediately imposed by two tech giants - Facebook and Twitter.
When users tried to share a link to an article in the Post, photographs from it - or even just click on the link - Twitter reported: "The request could not be fulfilled because the link was identified as potentially malicious."
The administration referred to the 2018 rule prohibiting the distribution of content "obtained by hacking."
To objections that Isaac did not hack into a MacBook left by an unknown client - he had already become his property, the management of the social network said that the decision to block the article was made due to "the lack of authoritative sources of information origin."
But for some reason, no one was in a hurry to block the fabrications that Trump was Putin's agent or rumors that the president was about to die from COVID-19 in a military hospital.
Denied access to the article to his users and Facebook.
"The material requires fact-checking," said Andy Stone, director of public relations for the network giant.
"In the meantime, we will reduce the distribution of this article on our platform."
But in today's information society it is very difficult to hide an awl in a sack.
Despite the fact that Trump's main enemies - CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post - simply ignored the sensational information, other media started talking about it.
Fox News drew readers' attention to the surprising lack of reaction from Biden and his staff.
For two days, Biden and his team remained mysteriously silent, not trying to refute the information in the Post.
After all, if these letters and photographs are forgery and libel, then the most logical thing that the defendants should have done was to declare libel and file a lawsuit.
“Obviously, at least one of the hundreds of lawyers currently working for Biden’s campaign could immediately write a letter of“ intent to sue, ”writes Fox News columnist Jonathan Turley.
And he adds: “There is a huge difference between the world of law and the world of politics.
It lies in the fact that in the world of politics there is no protection of the right to remain silent.
In politics, scandals can be dealt with, but not by silence. "
Two days later, Biden's headquarters issued an indistinct whine, trying to justify themselves by the fact that in the official schedule of Vice President Biden for 2015 there are no records of a meeting with a Ukrainian top manager.
And a little later, The New York Times, who woke up, published an article in which the record, which had already creaked before the squeak, was repeated: allegedly all the information that Giuliani operated on was planted on him by Ukrainians associated with Russian intelligence (well, emails in the MacBook, of course, were written in the Kremlin ).
On Friday, the CBS reporter finally got to the "hero" of the scandal, which has sometimes appeared in public lately, and asked Sleepy Joe Biden to comment on the information in The New York Post - by this time the newspaper had published several more excerpts from the letters. in which it was argued that Hunter Biden could organize meetings of major Chinese businessmen with the Obama administration in the White House - not for thanks, of course, but for generous "donations" to the account of the Biden family firms (the fee was about $ 10 million per meeting).
Sleepy Joe suddenly stopped being sleepy, lost his temper and scolded the reporter for pouring water on the "smear campaign" of Republicans who want to "smear him in the mud" and asks him "stupid questions."
"It won't work," writes New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin.
"Good journalists cannot be intimidated, and the voter is likely to sense something amiss."
Plus, says Goodwin, Biden should have known by now that there are no stupid questions - there are stupid answers.
Sooner or later (but in any case before the election) Joe Biden will have to answer these questions.
In the meantime, his lawyers and advisers are feverishly inventing how to get Sleepy Joe out of the water, new surprising facts about the information blockade (which, by the way, managed to break through - after Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Jack Dorsey (Twitter) and Sundar Pichai (Google) was summoned to the Senate hearings, Dorsey has already admitted that the decision to block links to the article was wrong).
It turned out that the person in charge of the Ensuring Electoral Integrity 2020 program at Facebook - namely, this program has banned the linking of an article in the Post as "malicious content" - is Anna Makanju, who was previously a special political adviser for Europe. and Eurasia on Vice President Biden's team.
Makanju, born in the USSR to a mixed family (her father was Nigerian, her mother was Ukrainian), was also the director for Russia at the National Security Council in the Obama administration and the chief of staff for European and NATO policy at the office of the US Secretary of Defense.
After retiring from the upper echelons of Washington politics after the change of administrations in 2016, Makanju did not immediately find a job at Facebook.
She was a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a supposedly non-partisan think tank that actually served the Obama-Biden team.
It is believed that Makanju did not lose ties with the homeland of her maternal ancestors and was the very person who advised Vice President Biden on all the "delicate moments" of communication with a kind of Ukrainian business, primarily with Burisma.
Coincidence or not, Burisma has donated $ 300,000 to the Atlantic Council over three years (starting in 2016).
“One of the Facebook executives currently blocking all evidence of Hunter and Joe Biden’s corruption in Ukraine is the same person who coordinated corruption between the Biden family and Ukraine,” concludes the influential conservative website The American Thinker.
Well, the contents of the MacBook, which came to the owner of the repair shop in Delaware, promises to be a full-fledged "October surprise" - this is how the US calls an unexpected event that happened on the eve of the presidential election and can change the course of events.
In October 2016, such a surprise came when FBI Director James Comey announced the reopening of the Hillary Clinton mail server case, which is believed to have cost Hillary several million wavering votes.
Attempts by the Internet giants to block information about the corruption of the Biden clan indicate that Trump's enemies are desperately afraid of a repetition of history four years ago.
Only the scandal that unfolded around this conspiracy of silence can do Biden and the liberal media desperately drowning for him a disservice.
* "Atlantic Council" (Atlantic Council of the United States) - an organization whose activities are recognized as undesirable on the territory of the Russian Federation by the decision of the Prosecutor General's Office of 25.07.2019.
The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.