John Paul Mac Isaac, the American patriot who gave Hunter Biden’s laptop to the FBI and then to Rudy Giuliani, a former aide to President Trump, is headed toward bankruptcy if he doesn’t get back on his feet. And soon.
The owner of the store where a drunk Biden left the machine, Isaac received unwelcome attention not only from the leftist media after the New York Post broke the laptop story, but also from crackpots who threatened his life and called him a Russian agent. To this day, they still do.
In an interview with Breitbart, Isaac explained Biden’s dropping the laptop off at his store and never returning for it, and then his surprise in finding incriminating data: documents linking the soon-to-be presidential candidate’s son to the Biden-Burisma influence peddling scheme.
Data Recovery
The man who opened the store in 2010 and worked overtime to accommodate customers told the website that Biden was three sheets to the wind when he arrived with three machines on April 12, 2019.
It was 13 days before Joe Biden announced his presidential candidacy.
“The smell preceded him,” Isaac said. “He had balance problems. Speech problems.”
Biden readily gave up his name, and when Isaac noticed the Beau Biden sticker on the machine, he assumed the president’s surviving son “was looking to get memories of his dead brother off the laptop. So I felt sorry for the guy and helped him recover the data of one of the laptops without charging him. I just gave him a keyboard to use because keys were missing on that laptop’s keyboard. He recovered that one himself in the shop.”
Isaac said one laptop was beyond hope. He recovered the data from another while Biden waited, and kept one because the data recovery was more difficult.
Isaac contacted Biden the next day to say he should buy a one-terabyte external hard drive and drop it off to Isaac. Isaac stored the data on his store’s secure server, he told Breitbart, and would transfer the data to the external hard drive.
Biden — drunk again — dropped off the hard drive on April 17.
Isaac explained that data recovery involves looking at some files to ensure that they aren’t corrupt and that the data are, in fact, being recovered:
The first time I spot-checked, I chose the biggest file, which was a video file, and it was video of him [Hunter] engaged in acts, multiple acts, that looked compromising and gross but embarrassing above all. But at this point, there were no red flags. His dad [Joe Biden] had not announced his candidacy yet. To me, then, this was just a drunk guy with some nasty stuff on his computer. It was not a political concern at that time.
But then, Isaac saw something else. He spotted a file called “invoice.” More spot-checking “revealed a lot of money exchanging hands: $2.5 million from Burisma, a statement that said you obviously can’t survive off of $550,000 a year. It just seemed really fishy and it seemed like an awful lot of money and a lot of clever ways to disguise and hide that money.”
“This is when I started to get a little concerned,” Isaac said.
Biden Senior had not yet announced his candidacy:
I didn’t feel like I had anything to fear yet. It was gross and embarrassing, but this was still just a guy. It wasn’t until I’m making multiple attempts to get him to pick it up and his dad announces his run for president [on April 25, 2019] that I have a bigger fear. What I knew is that somewhere out there is signed paperwork in Hunter’s possession that says I was allowed to look and recover data from this laptop. I could only imagine now that there was someone on Joe Biden’s staff, Secret Service maybe, who’s responsible for wrangling in old Biden family electronic devices.
Isaac repeatedly called Hunter Biden to pick up the machine, but he never answered.
When the Biden-Burisma scandal began growing that May, Isaac said, “I’m starting to really get concerned that there might be something on this drive”:
Part of me was curious but another part of me said “I need to get this laptop out of here.” The whole time, hanging over my head is this document out there [in Hunter’s possession] giving me the okay to look at this drive.
As the summer progressed I became more concerned. Then it’s mid-July and after several more attempts to get him to pick it up, it became my property. After those 90 days, when it was legally my property, curiosity killed the cat and I went into the laptop.
Because Biden didn’t pick up the laptop before 90 days, it became Isaac’s property. That’s when Isaac began digging into contents more deeply:
I went in because I was concerned there was activity related to Burisma. That was all I focused my attention on. I ignored the porn and everything that was salacious. I wanted to see if I was sitting on something that was potentially criminal and part of a criminal investigation. What I saw I would describe as sinister, a blatant pay-for-play scheme, and appeared to be very shady.
Fearing for his physical safety, Isaac went to the FBI, but approached the bureau through his father in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
But he was also worried that the FBI wasn’t a safe recipient because of its role in the Russia Collusion scandal that turned out to be a hoax, and so wanted to get the hard drive to Giuliani. For its part, the FBI in Albuquerque wanted nothing to do with it. It just about threw Isaac’s father out the office.
Sixteen months passed.
“I wanted to do this right, through the correct channels,” Isaac said:
I tried the Justice Department. I tried congress. Now it’s August of 2020, I’ve been sitting on this for more than a year, and I decided it was time to go to the president, directly to his attorney. So I came out of the shadows and emailed Giuliani directly.
Giuliani’s lawyer, Bob Costello, replied. He passed a copy of the hard drive to the Post, which published its first story and highlighted emails related to Biden-Burisma on October 14, 2020. The election was weeks away.
Problem is, the Post forgot to smudge Isaac’s name in an image that illustrated the story:
I wake up the next morning and my phone is blowing up. The Post forgot to blur out my shop’s name in one of the images they published. So within an hour, everyone knew who I was. Then, within an hour, I watched Twitter and mainstream media block and repress the story.
Isaac received police protection, and the story remained under the public radar because Twitter and the leftist media refused to report.
But once the story went viral, Isaac received a farrago of nasty emails and phone messages.
“I’d answer the phone and hear terrible things,” he told Breitbart:
I had to file a terroristic threat report with the police. Not so many emails or texts, but a lot of stuff about how ‘Putin thanks me for my service’ or how I’m a Russian stooge or how I’m a hacker who’s going to go to prison.
That’s what I didn’t get, why people were calling me a criminal. I had 20 or 30 voice mails the first day with people saying “I hope you get blown up in prison” and “I hope you rot in jail,” and I’m just scratching my head…. I went to the FBI. If I’d done something wrong, they would have come after me.
It wasn’t until later that I realized this was because of Twitter. Twitter had labeled me a hacker by labeling the material ‘hacked material.’ So people identified me as a hacker who had hacked Hunter’s computer and stole his data and broke the law.
Isaac closed his store two-and-a-half weeks later.
“Bankruptcy is possible,” he said. “I could lose my house. I’m not there yet and I hope not to lose my house. A friend finally convinced me to let her open a GiveSendGo account to help me out.”
For money, he’s collecting trash for $20 an hour.
And he’s still receiving hate messages:
Every day I wake up to someone posting a new thing about me being a Russian stooge…. Putin invading Ukraine has created a groundswell of attacks against me. You know, “Putin thanks you for your service” or “If you’re still out of money go to Putin, he paid you before.” That’s daily.
Worst part is, the leftist media sat on the story. They enthusiastically peddled Joe Biden’s lie that the laptop was “Russian disinformation.”
Only last week, with Biden safely in the White House, did the pro-Biden New York Times confess. The laptop and emails thereon were real.
