Did Rudy Giuliani Just Cop To Possessing Child Pornography?

What could possibly go wrong?

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Let’s play along here for a minute and pretend that everything we’re hearing from the New York Post and Rudy Giuliani about Vice President Biden and his son Hunter is 100 percent truthful and not an obvious Russian interference op embraced by a demented grifter and his craven enablers. Just for the sake of argument.

Hunter Biden, a California resident, hopped a plane back to Delaware so he could get drunk and drop off a waterlogged laptop at a repair shop in Wilmington. After which he promptly forgot all about the device, which happened to be full of incriminating emails and videos. Sure, Jan.

Noting that the laptop had a sticker on it from the Beau Biden Foundation, the store owner, who is legally blind, decided he’d better investigate the contents of the hard drive. At which point he discovered incriminating emails from a Ukrainian businessman at the infamous Burisma natural gas company thanking Hunter Biden for setting up a meeting with his father, and also, perhaps videos of Hunter Biden having sex and smoking crack. You bet!

So “in fear for his life” the store owner contacted Rudy Giuliani, the cyber guru who accidentally posted a video of himself cracking racist jokes last week, and Steve Bannon, who was recently indicted for defrauding a charity. Then Rudy and his illustrious compadre Robert Costello, last seen trying to undermine Michael Cohen’s cooperation agreement using Garth Brooks lyrics, “authenticated” the hard drive — although they won’t say how and they won’t allow anyone else to examine it.

“Bob checked everything out, made sure that the document was authentic. He then … authenticated the hard drive with a number of different tests he performed,” Giuliani told Fox’s Mark Levin. “And then he got a copy of it from the gentleman. And then he began cataloging it. And then he brought it to my attention.” Just embrace the crazy.

The FBI has had this computer since 2019, and no arrests have occurred — or even revelations of impropriety by either the Vice President or his son, which would surely have helped Donald Trump’s case during the impeachment hearing. But upon closer examination, it appears that there is child pornography on “Hunter Biden’s” hard drive, conveniently reinforcing the lunatic Q-anon theory that Democrats are a cabal of satanic pedophiles. (Incidentally, planting illicit images on its enemies computers is a common Russian FSB tactic.)

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On Fox Business this morning, Senator Ron Johnson warned darkly that the FBI agent who signed the supposed subpoena works on child pornography cases (or he did back in 2012), so the obvious inference is that the FBI is hot on Hunter Biden’s trail for kiddie porn. Maria Bartiromo furrowed her brow in credulous concern. Let’s all be like Maria Bartiromo!

Then Giuliani’s buddy Chanel Rion of One America News Network assured us that something filthy is about to drop.

While Trump ally Wayne Allyn Root tweeted that “My sources- as high up as it gets- watched videos on Hunter’s laptops TODAY. Just told me point blank…no rumor…they saw Hunter raping & torturing little Chinese children.” And if you can’t trust a wingnut talkshow host, who can ya trust!

Meanwhile, Fox itself passed on this story (oh, hey, that’s Bartiromo’s shop!) because it didn’t meet the standards of the network that relentlessly flogged the Seth Rich conspiracy. And the author of the piece at the New York Post refused to put his byline on it because of glaring credibility problems.

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But anyway, let’s just accept all of this as gospel truth for the moment.

We just have one question.

What the hell was Rudy Giuliani doing with child pornography? Mere possession of sexually exploitative images of children is a crime, and the law imposes an affirmative obligation on anyone who comes across child pornography, even accidentally, to alert law enforcement immediately. And yet the former mayor and federal prosecutor claims to have had a copy of Biden’s hard drive in his possession for weeks now, long enough to shop the story to Fox and the NY Post.

“I sleep with it at night,” he told The Daily Beast.

So when was he going to get rid of this contraband? For that matter, when were Steve Bannon and Robert Costello going to get around to fulfilling their legal obligation to report this crime? Is the blind computer repairman going to be charged with distribution of child pornography because he made multiple copies of “Hunter Biden’s” hard drive and passed them on to third parties?

Let’s take a wild shot in the dark that no one reported coming into possession of child pornography because it did not exist. There was no kiddie porn, and probably no laptop.

There’s just a steaming pile of bullshit, and no one should swallow any of it.


Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.