Did Hunter Biden sell the contents of classified documents found in Joe Biden's garage to the highest bidder?

That's the hunch of New York Post columnist and 'Laptop from Hell' author, Miranda Devine, who threw that out there in a recent column, citing a few things that made her think so.

The Daily Wire has a useful summary:

Stoking concerns about the potential misuse of classified information, the New York Post’s Miranda Devine wrote a column this week about an email dated April 12, 2014, sent to Hunter Biden’s then-business partner with 22 detailed points with “research” about the situation in Ukraine. The business partner, Devon Archer, was sentenced in 2022 to more than a year in prison after being convicted in a fraud scheme in which Hunter Biden was not implicated.

There are a number of reasons why this particular email drew attention. One is how it is written and the attention to detail. The email discusses such matters as Russia’s “destabilization campaign,” United States sanctions, and United Kingdom energy policy. A source told CNN the classified documents found at Biden’s private academic office, among other unclassified papers, contained U.S. intelligence memos and briefing materials on Iran, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.

Another factor is the timing. One week after the email was sent, Joe Biden, who was vice president at the time, met with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Also around that time, Hunter Biden and Archer were hired to sit on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, which is repeatedly named in the email.

Devine noted that Hunter typically wrote emails in disjointed, subliterate gibberish, making the smooth policy paper style of these transmitted documents to clients quite unusual.

The thing is, that's not the only time he did it.

Devine didn't mention it, but back in 2021, she wrote a column about some other policy documents that Hunter Biden was transmitting to clients from his laptop, in 2011 -- again, written in that smooth policy-paper style that's not like his normal style.

These look even more like they could have been classified. Here's Devine's 2021 column (emphasis mine):

Hunter Biden boasted he could provide intelligence on the shady Russian oligarch whose Greenwich Village townhouse was raided by the FBI on Tuesday.

The president’s son said he could provide Alcoa, a giant US aluminium firm, with knowledge about the “elite networks” connected to Oleg Deripaska in a proposal from his company Rosemont Seneca, emails on Hunter’s laptop show.

...

Included in the proposal, was a “list of elites of similar rank in Russia, map of OD’s [Deripaska’s] networks based on frequency of interaction with selected elites and countries.”

In a June 8, 2011, email forwarded to Hunter, Cruise’s colleague at Alcoa, Pei Cheng, wrote to Cruise: “I don’t believe the data analysis is worth the full $55,000. I think the most valuable piece for us would be the list of Russian elites connected to OD [Deripaska] that would not otherwise be on Government Affairs team’s radar, including various Russian Committee Heads, Union leaders or Ministers.”

Hunter Biden in 2011 offered to “provide Alcoa with statistical analysis of political and corporate risks, elite networks associated with Oleg Deripaska (OD), Russian CEO of Basic Element company and United company RUSAL,” reveal documents on the laptop he abandoned at a MacBook repair shop in Delaware in April 2019. RUSAL is a Russian aluminum company.

Information that would not otherwise be on the Alcoa client's radar? Does that sound like it could be ... classified?

Draw your own conclusions.

One other thing: I did a search and found no evidence that Hunter and Deripaska knew each other, so it appears the knowledge he was selling came from someone, or something, else -- like a classified document.

The column has some comical back and forth dickering about the price of the document, with Hunter being perfectly willing to sell his report for a cut-rate price to Alcoa. 

That Hunter would have so much information about Deripaska, the very guy the FBI chief of counterintelligence was busted the other day for involvement with, is interesting, too.

Back in 2011, before Deripaska was put on the U.S. Treasury's 2018 sanctions list, the FBI was heavily involved with him over a 2009-2011 bid to rescue Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who was captured by Iran and held hostage. Deripaska, according to RT News, citing western news reports, said he was approached by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and asked to bankroll a rescue effort of Levinson, which Deripaska said he spent $20 million doing, apparently to get himself a U.S. visa, until the whole thing was kibboshed by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Levinson apparently died waiting.

Let's just say the involvement between Deripaska and the FBI seems to have been intense and gone back for years, which might explain why there were a lot of classified documents around for Joe Biden to mishandle on the man, and maybe even for Hunter to sell.

One wonders about what might be in the Biden papers dating from his days as senator which the University of Delaware says it won't open to the public, much to the dismay of Biden sexual-assault accuser, Tara Reade. Was classified stuff in that stack, too, and was it also rewritten and sold?

The most intriguing exclamation around the exchange with Alcoa, which seemed to reject Hunter's offer based on price considerations, and came from an email to Hunter from one of his associates, who noted (emphasis mine):

“Not horrible feedback,” wrote Schwerin in the June 10, 2011 email. “Daniel’s guy [sic] missed the point that the price was $25k reduced from $55k.”Hunter Biden had deep connections with oligarchs close to Putin, as I detail in my upcoming book “Laptop From Hell” (out Nov. 30).

Missed the point? Really? Was the point here that it was a U.S. classified document that he was peddling at a low, low, price, something that couldn't be obtained otherwise? It's natural to wonder that, since this seems to be about the product even more than the price. It may well have been that Alcoa didn't realize it was purchasing a cribbed classified document and therefore it lowballed its price.

One wonders if this is a game that is going on with a lot of them as former government operatives, and underachieving relatives of high government officials (looking at you, Hunter) join "consulting" firms and hang out shingles. They sell stuff they purloined from their government service, write it up in their own words as their own research for private clients, and effectively sell information that is unobtainable elsewhere, owing to its privileged secrecy. Who needs to engage in espionage with a setup like that?

Is this how Hunter made his money? The curiously official-sounding emails sent by Hunter to clients may be not just one or two documents, but a full pattern of classified document-selling.

Maybe that's why Joe's classified document scandal looks increasingly likely to consume his presidency.

Image: Acaben, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0