Hunter Biden attends a Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony honoring 17 recipients, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, July 7, 2022. (Saul Loeb/AFP)
Sarah Burris is a long-time veteran of political campaigns, having worked as a fundraiser and media director across the United States. She transitioned into reporting while working for Rock the Vote, Future Majority and Wiretap Magazine, covering the Millennial Generation's perspective during the presidential elections. As a political writer, Burris has had bylines at CNN, Salon.com, BNR, and AlterNet and serves as a senior digital editor for RawStory.com.
Former Republican Rep. Denver Riggleman (VA) has joined the legal team for Hunter Biden, similar to what he did for the Jan. 6 committee in exploring the tech pieces of the conspiracies that the GOP has pushed for the past three years.
Speaking to CNN's Jim Acosta on Sunday, Riggleman explained he has been working on the "technical and analytical report compared to phone forensics" as it pertains to the infamous laptop. "And I've been tracking data over the past two years."
He explained that a big reason he wanted to take on the role is "I hate bullies." Another point he realized is that many of the people pushing the Hunter Biden conspiracy theories are the same people pushing Jan. 6 conspiracies, like Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Peter Navarro, and others.
"There are some things I can't talk about, unlike the grifters. I have to have transparency and verification to stand up in a court of law, but I can tell you this," Riggleman continued. "What we want to look at first is the data out there purported to be Hunter Biden's laptop, and we wanted to see if there was any forensic format, and make sure there was no forensic validity to it and Jim, there was none. Jim, if you're looking at 4chan or from a site like MarcoPolo, you have to have forensic validity. And I am shocked that anybody in Congress would use that data, or any journalist would use those sources because [of] what we found out. We do have the data, we have the 1s and 0s. We do have the facts based on the 1s and 0s that we have found that it's the very same folks. We have videos. We have them self-identifying and manipulating the data. We have people like Steve Bannon using words like 'editorial creativity,' and we have specific instances of fabrication and manipulation of the data.
He went on to say that Congress should know that whatever data is in the public domain "has no relation to any forensic copy attached to a Hunter Biden laptop. And it looks like, to us, that most of the data is curated. It's almost like a mixtape of multiple data sources that's gone through the hands of 30 or 40 people."
Giuliani didn't say the person's name but claimed she was the late wife of a former CEO of Burisma, who also died of mysterious circumstances. According to the Fox website, the person who made the tapes was male, and Giuliani claimed that the tapes were made by that dead CEO. The only problem is that the man Giuliani referenced died in 2011, before either Biden was involved. Now Giuliani is claiming that the "wife" of that CEO, who had the tapes, was killed.
"A lot of the things they say are not validated and ridiculous, and we've found cases of fabricating data," Riggleman said of the far-right.
"Witnesses turn up missing or dead, and sometimes the data disappears into the twilight, and people can't spell words correctly or actually go through how a laptop was broken down into these types of notes. And there's no background information when it comes to what the WhatsApp message is or what the forensic validity of that is," said Riggleman. "So, that's my job to break that kind of stuff down. But for me, what individuals need to realize out there is that the truth does matter, and when you have an invasion of privacy like this, is this amount of data that's been stolen or pilfered, and the impressive ecosystem for someone to make money it's an abomination."
Riggleman explained that it's already well known that Hunter Biden did very bad things, was addicted to drugs, and did many other things. To make something up to use for an election, he called it unacceptable.
"The thing is, if it's just a flank to an election, that's an awful thing that you want to use," he continued. "So, I'll say this, for any type of whistleblower, you've got to have proof. You've got to have validity. And now that we know that there's even text messages that were made up, and I think Jim, May 24, 25 and 26 of 2018, we had text messages that were actually made up. Fabricated between a United States Secret Service agent and were reported by the New York Post, which said they had forensic validity. That was just BS."
He went on to say that it's possible that the IRS agents perhaps "weren't trained properly" or "they're credulous idiots, other liars, or their grifters or some kind of combination of all of that."
Still what bothers him is that it's the same people peddling the same claims, and he says they're lies just the same as the other conspiracy theories they invented.