On a fateful night in April 2019, John Paul Mac Isaac was working at his store, The Mac Shop in Wilmington, Del., when a customer walked in who would upend his life. In his forthcoming book, “American Injustice: My Battle to Expose the Truth,” Isaac will tell his story — and here, in an exclusive first look, he describes the moment he met Hunter Biden.
It was a Friday night, 10 minutes before the shop’s closing time. I was checking out a website about CNC machines and woodworking. I had no intention of working late; I was ready to go out after a long and busy week. But then bright, cool LED headlights bounced off the counter from the front window. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. My vision of leaving the shop quickly faded as the door chime sounded. As was usual for this time of day, I thought: “What kind of person expects quality service right before closing time?”
I struggled not to roll my eyes when in stumbled a man clutching three MacBook Pros. He was about my height, six feet tall, but a little heavier. He wore casual clothing — dark blue and gray. Alcohol fumes preceded him. He slid the three laptops onto the bar counter as he fumbled for a seat.
“I’m glad you’re still open,” he said. “I just came from the cigar bar, and they told me about your shop, but I had to hurry because you close at seven.”
He looked older than me but had a surprisingly high-pitched voice. An air of entitlement radiated off him.
“Great,” I thought. “Another one who thinks the world revolves around them.”
To him I said cordially, “You made it just in time.”
“I need the data recovered off these, but they all have liquid damage and won’t turn on,” he said.
“Well, let’s get you checked in and see what’s going on.” One of the computers had a Beau Biden Foundation sticker covering the Apple logo, but I wasn’t sure at first whom I was talking to. I opened my customer relationship management software (CRM) and asked him for his first name.
“Hunter,” he said.
I then asked him for his last name. He paused and looked at me funny, as if I were from another country and how dare I not know who he was?
“Ah, Biden,” he responded, with a sarcastic edge.
I collected his phone number and email, and fed them into the system. Once the paperwork was started, I paused and remembered that this guy had lost his brother, Beau, about two or three years earlier, and I felt a little bad for him. Maybe the Mac with the sticker belonged to his now-deceased brother, and it would bring closure to have access to those memories trapped inside.
On any other night, especially a Friday — being that I was very single — I would have collected the machines and looked at them the next day. For some reason, maybe misplaced compassion, I decided to check them over then and there. One at a time, I performed a quick inspection of the machines. The 15-inch laptop was a complete write-off. It had extensive liquid damage, and because the drive was soldered to the logic board, data recovery was beyond my capability. (If a Mac can’t power on, you won’t be able to access the drive and get to the data.)
The 13-inch 2015 MacBook Pro was in slightly better shape. It could boot up, but the keyboard was unresponsive. I pulled out an external keyboard and asked for permission to log in.
Hunter started laughing.
“My password is f–ked up. Don’t be offended!” he said, before announcing that it was “analf–k69” or something to that extent. His inebriated condition made it difficult to understand is speech. My eyes widened a bit, and I told him that maybe it would be best if he tried to log in himself.
“Hey, you fixed it!” he stated, slurring slightly. I asked if he had an external keyboard that he could use to get around the failure of his internal keyboard, and he just looked at me blankly.
“Here, you can borrow this one to perform the recovery yourself,” I told him. “That way I don’t have to check it in and bill you. Just bring it back when you’re done.”
It would have been less work for me that way, and again, I felt bad for this guy.
I pulled the blinds and locked the door to avoid any more interruptions, then grabbed an Amstel Light from the fridge and planted myself in front of the recovery Mac.
Here’s where things started to get interesting.
The previous recovered window was open on the left, and I was waiting for the hundreds of files on the original to populate to the right. Scrolling down, I started to see files that didn’t align. I started to individually drag and drop the files to the recovery folder. It took only a few files before I noticed pornography appearing in the right column.
This is a vocational hazard; I’d gotten rather used to and gave it no mind. I was a little amazed by the sheer quantity though, and by the boldness of leaving porn files on one’s desktop. Again, it was nothing I hadn’t seen before, so I kept dragging and dropping. It generally is well-known what people do on and with their computers. The industry as a whole tries not to think about it — it’s gross. But I was hired to do a job, and I was going to do it.
“Oh s–t,” I thought, pausing. The preview image in the right column was clearly displaying the customer. He was wrapped in a red scarf and wearing what looked like a jock strap. I couldn’t help but chuckle.
“How embarrassing!” I thought. “Who on God’s earth would feel comfortable with this lying around on their desktop?”
But I shook it off and continued down the list of files. It didn’t take long before another one appeared, and then another. Hunter, with his salt-and-pepper stubble, stared into the camera attempting to look cool while taking a naked selfie. Gross.
“How many of these does he have?” I wondered. It wasn’t just him alone either. Although it looked like he was having a love affair with himself, there also were photos with women. I decided I’d had enough, that I was no longer going to preview the data. I would just go by the file name and hope for the best. And I tried to work out how to keep a straight face when he returned for the recovery data.
I continued copying files until I got to one titled “income.pdf.” I likely wouldn’t even have noticed it if it hadn’t been tagged with a purple dot. On a Mac, you can apply tags, or color codes, to files as an organizational aid. It seemed odd that someone who clearly had zero organizational skills would bother tagging this one file purple. It was begging to be clicked open. So I did.
It was an email from January 16, 2017, saved as a PDF. At the top were the years 2013, 2014, and 2015. Next to each year was the amount of taxable income earned: $833,000+ in 2013, $847,000+ amended to $1,247,000+ in 2014, $2,478,000+ in 2015. I was blown away. All that money and this asshole couldn’t spring for a backup drive!
I read on. Amounts that I could never even have imagined earning were broken down by the year. Then I read, “Since you couldn’t have lived on $550,000 a year, you ‘borrowed’ some money from RSB in advance of payments.” I was speechless. This guy couldn’t live on more than ten times what I earned every year?
The whole document seemed shady. I saw that a lot of money had exchanged hands, and it didn’t seem like it had been recorded lawfully. But what did I know? Plus, it was none of my business. It wasn’t my job to judge — just to transfer and verify. So I kept transferring data until I hit a rather large file. The file was about half transferred when the screen went blank. Dammit, the battery had run out.
I decided to call it a night and go home to rest my eyes. About a hundred gigabytes were left to go, and I felt confident that I could knock it out the next day. I let the MacBook charge overnight and went home — but not before thoroughly washing my hands.
https://nypost.com/2022/05/06/mac-sh...-hunter-biden/
