U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Manchester-Boston Regional Airport, Sunday, Oct. 25, 2020, in Londonderry, N.H. AP
Looking to undermine Democratic rival Joe Biden, President Donald Trump's campaign is pushing a familiar line of attack: unverified allegations about Biden's son and his foreign business ties. But reporting in the New York Post, and the emergence of a man who says he worked with Hunter Biden, have raised more questions than answers, including about the authenticity of emails at the center of the story.
The origins of renewed allegations trace back to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who has repeatedly pushed unfounded claims about the Bidens. Even if the emails in the Post are legitimate, they don't validate Trump and Giuliani's claims that Biden's actions were influenced by his son's business dealings.
A look at the development:
HOW DID BIDEN'S SON BECOME A CAMPAIGN ISSUE?
Hunter Biden joined the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma in 2014, around the time his father, then U.S. vice president, was helping conduct the Obama administration's foreign policy with Ukraine.
Senate Republicans said in a recent report that the appointment may have posed a conflict of interest, but they did not present evidence that the hiring influenced U.S. policies.
Trump and his supporters, meanwhile, have advanced a widely discredited theory that Biden pushed for the firing of Ukraine's top prosecutor to protect his son and Burisma from investigation. Biden did indeed press for the prosecutor's firing, but that's because he was reflecting the official position of not only the Obama administration but many Western countries and because the prosecutor was perceived as soft on corruption.
WHAT DOES THE NEW YORK POST SAY?
The main email highlighted by the Post is an April 2015 message that it said was sent to Hunter Biden by Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to Burisma's board. In it, he thanks the younger Biden ''for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent (sic) some time together. It's realty (sic) an honor and pleasure.''
The wording makes it unclear if he actually met Joe Biden. The Biden campaign said in a statement that it had reviewed Biden's schedules from the time and that no meeting as described by the newspaper took place.
HOW DID THE POST OBTAIN THE EMAILS?
It's a tangled saga. The Post says it received a copy of a hard drive containing the messages from Giuliani, who has pushed the idea that Ukraine was trying to interfere with the 2016 election and that the younger Biden may have enriched himself by selling his access to his father.
The Post says the emails were part of a trove of data recovered from a laptop that was dropped off at a computer repair shop in Delaware in April 2019. It says the customer, whom the owner could not definitively identify as Hunter Biden, never paid for the service or retrieved it, and says the owner made a copy of the hard drive that he provided to Giuliani's lawyer.
The owner of the Wilmington shop declined to comment to The Associated Press, but in news media interviews he has said he contacted the FBI through an intermediary and provided agents with a copy of the hard drive's contents.
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