The Daily Beast issued an apology to the Delaware repairman who first obtained Hunter Biden’s laptop after previously reporting the computer had been “stolen.”
John Paul Mac Isaac came to own Biden’s laptop after the president’s son abandoned it in his repair shop, the Mac Shop, in April 2019. The repair shop owner recently filed a defamation suit against the Daily Beast, CNN, Politico and Democratic California Rep. Adam Schiff seeking at least $1 million in compensatory and an unspecified amount in punitive damages.
The Daily Beast’s article “The Seeds of Hunter Biden’s Current Legal Woes Were Found on His Laptop,” included an Editor’s Note as of Friday apologizing to Mac Isaac and correcting their initial reporting.
“An earlier version of this story mistakenly referred to Hunter Biden’s laptop as ‘stolen.’ We have removed that word, and we apologize to Mr. Mac Isaac for the error.”
The outlet claimed the laptop was “purloined” in the article “FBI Examining Hunter’s Laptop as Foreign Op, Contradicting Trump’s Intel Czar.”
After Biden abandoned the computer at his repair shop, Mac Isaac contacted former President Donald Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani and handed the hard drive to the FBI. The New York Post then obtained information about the hard drive from Giuliani and published a story detailing the emails showing Biden’s foreign business dealings with Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, where he served on the Board of Directors.
(Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)
Mac Isaac’s suit alleges that the outlets reporting on the laptop led to the closing of his business after people attacked it with excrement, eggs and food, the New York Post reported. He also received countless death threats and hate mail accusing him of being a hacker, thief and criminal. (RELATED: ‘The News Was Fake’: Rep. Jim Jordan Takes Shots At The Media For Disavowing Hunter Biden’s Laptop)
He also alleges that Schiff, who serves as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and CNN immediately defamed him in an interview two days following the New York Post’s publication, according to the New York Post. Schiff told the network’s host Wolf Blitzer that the Kremlin was behind the laptop story in order to “smear [President] Joe Biden.”
Mac Isaac accused CNN of posting a “false and defamatory story” which alleged that he worked alongside the Russians in an attempt to “undermine democracy,” the New York Post reported.
Twitter initially locked the personal accounts of the New York Post and former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany for posting the article on Biden’s laptop. News outlets widely disregarded the story as disinformation, but it has recently been confirmed by the New York Times and the Washington Post nearly a year and a half after the Daily Caller News Foundation verified the authenticity of the laptop’s contents.
The Times reported on a “cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop” in a March 17 editorial. The Washington Post then published details on Biden’s business dealings with Chinese energy company CEFC China Energy, then ran an additional story explaining how they authenticated 22,000 emails from the hard drive.