By John Solomon

Updated: June 25, 2023 - 2:13am

Months before 51 intelligence experts, the news media and Joe Biden himself suggested without evidence the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, the FBI had authenticated the device as belonging to the first son and prosecutors had expressed confidence its contents had not been manipulated, according to a contemporaneous IRS investigative memo.

The October 2020 memo was penned by IRS Supervisory Criminal Investigative Agent Gary Shapley, now a whistleblower, and provided a chronology of how the FBI validated the laptop as having belonged to Hunter Biden as early as November 2019 and by spring 2020 was exploiting and analyzing its emails, text messages and photos.

“We have no reason to believe there is anything fabricated nefariously on the computer and or hard drive,” the contemporaneous memo stated. “There are emails and other items that corroborate the items on the laptop and hard drive.”

Shapley told Congress in a transcribed interview released Thursday by the House Ways and Means Committee that after extensive analysis by FBI computer teams that federal prosecutors personally expressed confidence that the laptop was Hunter Biden’s and unadulterated.

“The whole discussion was about: Can we rely on this information on the laptop, is it Hunter Biden's? And their opinion was, it was, and it was not manipulated in any way,” Shapley testified.

A congressional lawyer then asked: “It was reliable evidence?”

The agent replied: “That is correct.”

The IRS memo and testimony also provide the most damning evidence yet that an extensive campaign in fall 2020 to dismiss the laptop as disinformation by news media, intelligence experts led by ex-acting CIA Director Mike Morell, Big Tech and Joe Biden himself had no basis in fact or evidence.

For a while, Hunter Biden himself also called into question the laptop, saying he wasn't sure he dropped it off at the shop.

But the FBI, according to Shapley’s memo, had taken extensive effort a year earlier to corroborate that Hunter Biden – who agents described by the codename “Sportsman” – had in fact dropped off the laptop at the shop operated by repairman John Paul Mac Isaac.

“Financial records show Sportsman was around Wilmington DE shop at a cigar shop on the same day,” the memo states. “Other intelligence shows Sportsman was in the area. Computershop calls Sportsman to tell him to bring in an external hard drive to put recovered data on to.

“Sportsman returned to the shop with the external hard drive,” the memo also states. “Phone records show shop called Sportsman and sportsman called the shop around this time.

Shapley said it didn’t take long for federal agents to corroborate the laptop belonged to President Biden’s son and contained evidence of crimes.

“The FBI verified its authenticity in November of 2019 by matching the device number against Hunter Biden's Apple iCloud ID,” he explained.

“When the FBI took possession of the device in December 2019, they notified the IRS that it likely contained evidence of tax crimes,” Shapley also stated, while also noting the IRS drafted the search warrant to take formal possession of the device.

Morell has admitted in testimony to the House Judiciary Committee that he organized the letter from the 51 intel experts after being contacted by Biden confidante Antony Blinken, now secretary of State.

Morell said his motive was to help Joe Biden win the 2020 election by giving the Democrat nominee a “talking point” to dismiss the laptop in his final debate with Donald Trump in October 2020.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/fbi-validated-hunter-biden-laptop-months-experts-falsely-claimed

They are hooded cyber criminals in dark basements trying to crack your bank account PIN. They are insidious Russians stealing elections from offshore IP addresses. These are typically how we think of hackers, but Ryan Montgomery, also dubbed 0day, is different. He is what’s called a white hat hacker, or ethical hacker.

The 29-year-old cyber prodigy from Pennsylvania went from causing mischief online to helping authorities dismantle child predator networks. This stepping from the shadows into the light was spurred on by a text message he received from a distressed friend in 2020; but his journey into cyberspace began much earlier. Montgomery began hacking almost in the womb: in the days of Napster and AOL, at age 11.

The web landscape looked far different then. You couldn’t just Google it and go from “zero to hero” mastering cyber skills like today. “It was chat rooms and just who you knew,” Montgomery told The Epoch Times. “Asking questions, and not just asking questions but asking the right questions.” It was having the “mindset of a hacker,” he added, “where you want to take something apart and put it back together and make it do something it wasn’t supposed to do.”

Ultimately, hackers look beyond the graphical user interface, or GUI, to figure out how to exploit a system or software. Where your average user sees only the tools displayed on AOL, for instance, hackers spot less obvious things like peer-to-peer connections, presenting IP addresses ripe to be exploited or attacked. Some have hailed Montgomery the world’s number one hacker.

But his heart was good. He would use his tech-savvy skillset to protect businesses by creating his own cybersecurity firm with his partners. Getting a text from said friend in late 2020, a switch flipped in his brain. And with unbridled fervor, he set about clandestinely dogging a depraved network preying on children. The hacker would have justice.

Montgomery stared at his phone in shock, and felt sick to the stomach. He was at a friend’s house when he got the text and probably would have lost his lunch, were it not still morning. “PLEASE! This is an all-pedo site sharing videos of little girls, talking about how they raped and abused children,” it read. It continued, “Felt sick after reading that stuff on his website. These people all need to be found!” There was a link to the website “Rapey.co.”

There were screenshots of three children in bathing suits with wording of the darkest carnality. “Who wants to gangbang these little sluts?” the title went. “I got dibs on the one in the middle,” read the description, next to which there was a tag, “Pick One for Yourself.” The phrases “making her scream” and “gently grooming her” were somehow exceeded in their vileness by the declaration, “I need someone who wants to impregnate my little 16-year-old.”

In that instant, Montgomery was triggered to take immediate action the most effective way he knew how. Leaving his friend’s house, he got on the website and found a way to exfiltrate data en mass, collecting usernames, incriminating threads, and descriptions of acts beyond the pale. Day in and day out, he worked, until he had a compelling stockpile of evidence. He did not lift photos from the site, as he knew that was illicit material.

With this ample ammunition in hand, he contacted NCMEC, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, via their child pornography cyber tipline and sent over the damning database. “I never heard anything from them,” Montgomery told the newspaper, though he found it “ironic” what recently came out in a press release. Shortly after his hacking, there were arrests.

“[F]rom around September to December 2020, Christopher William Kuehner, 38, was a prominent member of the website Rapey.su,” read a Department of Homeland Security press statement, dated January 2023. “Kuehner repeatedly induced and enticed minor girls to produce child sexual abuse material for both him and the other members of the website. … Kuehner faces a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison when sentenced on April 25.”

Three other individuals—Jacob Royce Mullins, 20; Kyle William Leishear, 43; and Matthew Martin, 25—also pleaded guilty to their roles in the child exploitation operation.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/white-hat-hacker-uses-cyber-skills-to-dismantle-child-predator-network-bring-sickos-to-justice_5343647.html