A fake 'intelligence staffer' crafted the groundwork for the Trump conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden

It's unclear why President Donald Trump and his allies have chosen to attack Vice President Joe Biden's last living son as a key tenet to the 2020 reelection instead of focusing on his opponent himself. But according to a well-researched NBC News report by Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny, the "documents," actually came from a fake person that never existed using a profile photo created by an artificial intelligence face generator.

Months ago, there was a fake "intelligence" document about Hunter Biden that popped up online along with tons of "files" from a supposed laptop. None of it was real and it has all been dismissed by Trump's own associates as fake. But now it's being revealed that the company behind the effort was a fake "intelligence firm" called Typhoon Investigations, researchers and public documents revealed.

"The author of the document, a self-identified Swiss security analyst named Martin Aspen, is a fabricated identity, according to analysis by disinformation researchers, who also concluded that Aspen's profile picture was created with an artificial intelligence face generator," NBC News reported. "The intelligence firm that Aspen lists as his previous employer told NBC News that no one by that name had ever worked for their company, and no one by that name lives in Switzerland, according to public records and social media searches."

One of the people who first posted the document was a blogger named Christopher Balding, who revealed that he wrote parts of the document and admitted that Aspen doesn't exist.

"Despite the document's questionable authorship and anonymous sourcing, its claims that Hunter Biden has a problematic connection to the Communist Party of China have been used by people who oppose the Chinese government, as well as by far-right influencers, to baselessly accuse candidate Joe Biden of being beholden to the Chinese government," reported NBC.

Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon have been coordinating on an ongoing and desperate effort to tie Biden to his son's international lobbying and consulting firm with some sort of allegation of ethics violations. While none of the reports have turned out to be true, it ultimately got Trump impeached because he tried to bribe the president of Ukraine into endorsing the fake scandal.

"The fake intelligence document," NBC said, "preceded the leak by months and helped lay the groundwork among right-wing media for what would become a failed October surprise: a viral pile-on of conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden."

Read the full report at NBC News.