House Republicans are using a WhatsApp screenshot as evidence of a President Biden bribery scheme, but Hunter Biden and his lawyer say the evidence is fake.
NBC News reported on a letter from Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell to Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee:
IRS Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley told the committee under oath that, as an investigator for the IRS, he obtained messages Hunter Biden sent on the WhatsApp platform, including one in 2017 that he read demanding payment from a Chinese businessman named Henry Zhao.
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Lowell writes that the screenshots of the message as tweeted by Smith, “both include a photo of Mr. Biden not from 2017 but from the White House Easter Egg roll in April 2022 (long after the purported message was sent); both images portray the message in a blue bubble, when WhatsApp messages are in green; one image super-imposed the Chinese flag for the contact ID, when surely that was not how a text or contact was kept; and one purports to be a screenshot with the ‘. . .’ of someone composing a text (as in Apple’s iMessage) when that does not happen on WhatsApp.”
He writes, “In short, the images you circulated online are complete fakes.”
The points that Lowell brings up are basic red flags that should have jumped out congressional investigators. Republicans claim that the evidence is real, but they have not commented on steps that they have taken to authenticate the screenshots.
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If the screenshots are not real, that means that there was no Biden bribery scheme.
The people that House Republicans are calling whistleblowers don’t fit the definition of a whistleblower, and many of them have paid by Donald Trump and his associates.
One of the supposed whistleblowers has been found in the past to have lied during their congressional testimony.
Republicans seem determined to pursue impeachment against President Biden, but their evidence could already be falling apart.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association