By Andrew Kerr
Emails from a computer allegedly owned by Hunter Biden could be “absolutely verified beyond a shadow of a doubt” if the metadata for the files were made available to review, a cybersecurity expert told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani reportedly provided the New York Post with a copy of the hard drive the emails originated from. But he has refused to release metadata information for messages the Post described as “smoking-gun” evidence that Hunter Biden introduced a Burisma executive to his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, in 2015.
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Giuliani told Daily Caller White House correspondent Christian Datoc during an exclusive interview Thursday that questions surrounding the metadata for the files he provided to the Post were “pettifogging nonsense” pushed by the “liberal press.”
The founder of the cybersecurity firm Errata Security, Robert Graham, told the DNCF that it was anything but nonsense for reporters to ask to review metadata information for the supposedly incriminating emails he’s promoting.
“The fact that these emails can be absolutely verified, beyond a shadow of a doubt, but that Rudy refuses to do so, is important,” Graham said. “Once you produce the original emails, with all the metadata, nobody can claim they are fake.”
Graham explained that emails sent from Gmail accounts, such as the messages reportedly sent from Vadym Pozharsky, an advisor to Burisma’s board of directors, to Hunter Biden in 2015, are each provided a unique DKIM signature from Gmail’s servers that can be used to verify definitively whether the subject, sender, recipients, date, and body of the messages are legitimate.
By testing the content of the Hunter Biden emails against their DKIM signatures, which should be present in the metadata Giuliani has yet to release, experts could determine beyond a shadow of a doubt whether any aspect of the message as reported has been altered, Graham explained.
According to the Post, Giuliani obtained the hard drive with Hunter Biden’s emails, text messages, and photos from a Delaware computer repair shop owner who had received it in April 2019 from an unidentified customer who then never came back to retrieve the computer. The computer contained a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation on it, according to the Post.
Hunter Biden has not denied the authenticity of the emails being reported by the Post, but the DCNF has not verified the messages. Joe Biden’s presidential campaign has said the alleged meeting between him, his son, and Pozharsky never took place.
Giuliani’s known association with a Ukrainian lawmaker who was sanctioned by the Treasury Department in August due to Russian ties has led critics to question whether foreign actors had any involvement in the dissemination of the alleged Hunter Biden emails.
The FBI is currently investigating whether a foreign intelligence operation is at all connected to the release of the emails, according to The Associated Press and NBC News.
Graham said email metadata would “probably not” provide any indication whether or not hacking has anything to do with their release.
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