Before the Laptop

In the summer of 2019, a man named Rudy Giuliani sat down to lunch at Cipriani on 57th Street in Manhattan with a well-connected businessman named Vitaly Pruss. Lev Parnas, who by then had become Giuliani's fixer, translator, and shadow, was at the table.

Pruss knew things. He had a long history with Giuliani, more than fifteen years, and he was close to the owner of Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy company whose name had become the organizing principle of an entire political operation. He had, he said, accompanied me on trips. To Moscow. To Kazakhstan. He described what happened on those trips the way a man describes an asset being prepared. They fed him drugs and alcohol and women, Pruss told Giuliani, and the FSB had recorded all of it. And it was in Kazakhstan, Pruss said, when they got hold of the laptop and a hard drive.

Giuliani's response, as Parnas later documented it, was two words.

"We got him."

That moment is worth pausing on, not because of what it says about me, though it says something, but because of what was already in motion by the time those words were spoken.

By the summer of 2019, Giuliani had already made multiple trips to Ukraine. He had already met with disgraced former prosecutor Viktor Shokin, a man whose visa to enter the United States had been rejected by the State Department on corruption grounds, over Skype because that was the only way to reach him. He had already sat across from Ukraine's then-prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko at his Park Avenue offices and made a deal: Lutsenko would provide dirt on the Bidens, and Giuliani would help destroy the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was blocking Lutsenko's access to senior Trump officials because she was an anti-corruption stalwart and he was not. Giuliani had already handed a packet of documents to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the State Department's own inspector general would later characterize as disinformation, documents whose ideas, the New York Times would report, mirrored almost exactly a seven-page dossier written by a Russian-linked Ukrainian prosecutor who had been investigated by Ukraine's national anti-corruption bureau for ties to Russian military intelligence.

He had already formed what the participants called the BLT Team, named for the restaurant on the second floor of the Trump International Hotel in Washington where they met several times a week: Giuliani, Parnas, Igor Fruman, John Solomon, Joe DiGenova, Victoria Toensing, with Congressman Devin Nunes's top investigator Derek Harvey attending as Nunes's proxy. Solomon, a journalist at The Hill, had already sent a draft of a smear article about Ambassador Yovanovitch to Parnas, Toensing, and DiGenova for review before he published it. The article ran. The State Department called its central allegation an outright fabrication.

Parnas had already traveled to Ukraine multiple times with the explicit purpose, documented in his own timeline, of trying to retrieve my laptop from FSB-connected sources.

All of this had already happened when Giuliani heard about the Kazakhstan recordings and said we got him.

The sequence is the argument.

The story of the laptop, as it was sold to the American public, ran in one direction: a damaged man left a computer at a repair shop and what was found on it revealed a criminal enterprise. Discovery to exposure to consequence. A straight line from evidence to conclusion.

The actual sequence ran in the opposite direction. The conclusion came first, and the conclusion was that Joe Biden was corrupt, his son was the proof, and the 2020 election would be decided on that basis. Everything that followed was a search for evidence to fit a conclusion that had already been written. The organic evidence was insufficient, so they supplemented it. The supplemental evidence was also insufficient, so they fabricated. When the fabrication was challenged, the apparatus of the Justice Department was used to launder it back into legitimacy.

Every step of it is in the public record.

In March 2019, Donald Trump gathered close advisors for a private meeting to discuss the prospect of facing Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Axios had reported that Biden was the Democrat Trump most feared. A Politico poll showed Biden beating Trump by seventeen points. The Mueller report was about to land, and whatever Attorney General Barr would do to spin it, the underlying reality of Russian interference in 2016 was about to be confirmed in 448 pages. Trump needed a counter-narrative. He needed Biden to be as dirty as he was. He needed a son, and into the space where that need was waiting there walked a machine that had been assembling itself for months.

Konstantin Kulyk was a deputy Ukrainian prosecutor who had been indicted three times on corruption charges and who, in a Ukrainian security clearance form, had admitted ties to a warlord in eastern Ukraine believed to work for Russian intelligence services. Ambassador Yovanovitch, in her first meeting with prosecutor general Lutsenko, had given him a list of corrupt prosecutors she wanted dismissed. Kulyk was on it. In response, Kulyk wrote a seven-page dossier in English accusing me of corruption. A senior Ukrainian law enforcement official told the New York Times that the dossier was Kulyk's way of reaching officials in Washington, meaning Giuliani, who had been blocked by Lutsenko's difficult relationship with the American embassy. The dossier was a door-opening mechanism. It was also, by the assessment of the State Department's inspector general, disinformation routed through channels with documented ties to Russian intelligence.

Giuliani carried it to Pompeo anyway.

John Solomon published its allegations in The Hill anyway, sending his draft to the BLT Team for review before it ran.

Laundering the narrative into the Times through Vogel was, as one participant later noted, a mini PR coup. Ken Vogel published a version of its claims on May 1, 2019, relying on interviews with Giuliani, with Kulyk, and with a Ukrainian political consultant named Andrii Telizhenko, who the US Treasury Department would later sanction as a Russian-linked asset partnered with Kremlin operative Andrii Derkach as part of a disinformation campaign against Joe Biden.

Lutsenko, the prosecutor general who had supplied Giuliani with the core of the disinformation, gave an interview to Bloomberg News two weeks later clarifying that he had no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden. He said it plainly. The machinery that had been set in motion did not stop.

While all of this was being assembled, there was a parallel operation aimed at the hardware itself. And here the timeline requires careful attention, because it dismantles the origin story at its foundation.

Before April 2019, before John Paul Mac Isaac claims I walked into his shop carrying three laptops he cannot identify and whose model numbers don't match the device that later appeared in an FBI subpoena, there were already other devices in circulation. During one of my drug trips in Las Vegas, a laptop was taken. It was never recovered. It has not been seen since. In February 2019, two months before Mac Isaac's story begins, I left a laptop and other belongings at the Massachusetts facility of a therapist named Keith Ablow. Ablow is a former Fox News contributor. He is a man with connections to Roger Stone, the longtime Trump political operative. He had that laptop in his possession for nearly a year before the DEA seized it in a raid of his facility, an investigation unrelated to me. The question of what Keith Ablow did with that laptop during the year it sat in his possession has never been fully answered.

Parnas was in Ukraine during this same period, explicitly trying to recover what was described as my laptop from sources connected to the FSB. Giuliani was being told at Cipriani that Russian intelligence had gotten hold of my device in Kazakhstan. Multiple devices, multiple handlers, multiple political operatives, all active before the Wilmington repair shop entered anyone's story.

The laptop did not drop from the sky into a neutral technician's hands. It arrived, whatever it was and wherever it came from, into a political ecosystem that had been hunting for exactly that object for over a year.

By the time Mac Isaac sent a copy of a hard drive by Federal Express to Rudy Giuliani's attorney Robert Costello in late August 2020, the material had already passed through enough hands to make any claim of authenticity nearly impossible. Costello, who received the drive and immediately began accessing its contents without any legal authority to do so, opened files containing photographs from the final days of my brother Beau's life. He went through them. That is what this operation looked like from the inside: men with political agendas opening a dying man's private photographs because they were searching for anything that could be used.

By the time Mac Isaac's story became public in October 2020, the narrative had been running for nearly two years. The laptop did not create the story. The laptop was slotted into a story that had been built to receive it. Its value was not evidentiary. Its value was confirmatory. It was the physical object the story had always needed to point to.

And when the physical object alone was still not enough, someone manufactured the crime.

Alexander Smirnov had been an FBI informant since 2010. In early 2020, sixteen days after Trump's first impeachment, Attorney General Bill Barr tasked a US Attorney named Scott Brady with creating a formal intake process for material concerning Ukraine, specifically including anything Rudy Giuliani might provide. Brady's team searched FBI files using search terms supplied by Giuliani. The word "Burisma" appeared throughout Giuliani's materials, Brady later testified. The search surfaced a 2017 FBI report in which Smirnov had made a passing, unremarkable reference to my presence on the Burisma board.

In June 2020, FBI Pittsburgh asked Smirnov's handler to contact him about that 2017 report. Smirnov, who was in Los Angeles, took the call. What he produced in response was a Form FD-1023 memorializing a claim that Burisma executives had paid five million dollars to Joe Biden and five million dollars to me in exchange for policy protection. The allegation was specific, dramatic, and, the Justice Department would later conclude after charging Smirnov with lying to federal agents, a complete fabrication. Smirnov told investigators he had gotten the story from Burisma executives in meetings that his own phone records proved could not have taken place.

The five million dollar bribery allegation, the one that became the basis of an impeachment inquiry, the one Republican members of Congress waved at cameras, the one cited in committee reports and amplified across an entire media ecosystem for the better part of two years, was invented on a phone call. It was invented by an informant who had been specifically asked to elaborate on a two-sentence entry in a three-year-old file, inside a process Bill Barr had built for the purpose of receiving and distributing opposition research for a presidential campaign.

Call it hardball politics if you want. Call it aggressive opposition research. The documents, assembled and read in sequence, show something else. A coordinated operation involving foreign intelligence actors, compromised foreign officials, a presidential legal team operating with the explicit knowledge and direction of a sitting president, and corrupted elements of the United States Department of Justice. It was aimed at me because I was the Achilles heel, the point where the family's affection for a damaged son could be turned against the father who loved him. My addiction wasn't incidental to the design. It was the design. A father's love for a troubled son was the vulnerability they had been probing since at least December 2018, when Trump told Parnas in the White House Red Room: keep up the good work.

They sent men to Ukraine to find a laptop. They built a team that met several times a week at a hotel restaurant a few blocks from the White House to construct and distribute the story. They manufactured a bribery allegation when the organic material fell short, and they used the apparatus of federal law enforcement as a laundry operation for foreign disinformation.

Through all of it, inside the FBI, there was an agent who knew.

His name was Jonathan Buma.