'I found Hunter's emails - and I feared I would be MURDERED': Trump voter reveals he is the Mac repairer with Biden's secrets - but can't say if he went to FBI or they came to him and won't say how Rudy Giuliani ended up with a copy
The computer shop owner who provided Hunter Biden's laptop to the FBI and Rudy Giulilani is a 44-year-old Trump voter, it emerged Wednesday, hours after pictures and emails from it sent shockwaves through Washington.
John Paul MacIsaac confirmed that he had handed the laptop to the FBI late last year, claiming to the Daily Beast that he was 'just a guy who had something he wanted [taken] out of this shop,' after realizing he had the Democratic candidate's sons pictures and emails.
The younger Biden left three damaged Apple laptops at MacIsaac's shop in Wilmington, DE, in April 2019 but never returned or paid the $85 bill for recovering the data from them.
On Wednesday their contents began to be revealed by the New York Post after being given to the newspaper by Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer.
The emails appeared to show that Hunter Biden introduced his father to his business partner in Ukraine - but that was denied rapidly by the Biden campaign, who said that no such meeting was found in his schedules from 2015, when the email suggested it happened.
But MacIsaac created new confusion and questions over how the laptop's content ended up with the FBI and with Giuliani.
On a tape recording of his lengthy interview with the Daily Beast's reporter, he equivocated over how he and the FBI came to be in touch in fall 2019.
I had Hunter's emails: John Paul MacIsaac, 44, a former Genius Bar worker who runs his own Mac store in Wilmington, DE, revealed that he had passed the laptop to both the FBI and Rudy Giuliani - but offered contradictory accounts of his dealings with law enforcement
How it got there: MacIsaac offers data recovery services at his store in Wilmington, DE, and Hunter Biden simply walked in with three damaged laptops. Two had water damage and one had a sticky keyboard. But he never returned to retrieve them
In hot water: Hunter Biden's laptop also contained sexually explicit pictures and footage of him apparently smoking crack, the New York Post reported
Biden in bed: A photo of the former vice-president's son apparently asleep is among the pictures Giuliani released. It shows him with a pipe of the type used to smoke crack or marijuana in his mouth
He said first that he had got in touch with the FBI but also said: 'They approached me.'
Asked repeatedly for clarity, he said 'no comment,' and said that he had asked a trusted friend who was 'better at this press and spy stuff' for advice.
'I was afraid, I reached out to some people that I trusted, that could possibly get me in touch with the FBI,' he said. 'Then they showed up.'
The people were not political, he said, but declined to comment on how he came to know them.
Before the FBI came he made a copy to 'protect myself,' he said, but said he was not aware that there were any other copies.
And he repeatedly declined to comment on how he came to be in touch with Giuliani, whose own personal lawyer Robert Costello says he obtained the laptop's contents from MacIsaac.
'I don't feel comfortable clearing anything up right now,' he said.
But MacIsaac, a former lead 'genius' at a nearby Apple Store who is single, did tell how he came to have the laptop.
He said that he has an unnamed 'medical condition' which meant he did not recognize Hunter when he came into his store in April 2019, but that when he asked for his customer's name he thought 'that sounds familiar.'
'I got him checked into the system. First name, Hunter. Last name, there was a long pause - Biden. Oh,' he said. 'I have had a handful of famous people come in here that I don't recognize. Sabrina - the older sister on Cosby - Le Beauf, she comes in here sometimes.'
The MacBook Pro also had a Beau Biden sticker on it, he said. His account varied slightly from that reported by the New York Post, which said he could not 'positively identify' Hunter Biden.
The laptop had suffered water damage, and MacIsaac was able to retrieve the data from it and image the contents it on to a separate hard drive.
In the course of doing that, he said that he saw its contents, saying that the 'it was a mess.'
'I would have been responsible for dragging and dropping the contents on to a hard drive,' he said. There was 'personal information,' he said.
Information on Hunter Biden's laptop has 'to be possessed by the Chinese government,' said Donald Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who said it included 1,000 photographs
Man at center of the Hunter scandal: John Paul MacIsaac is an Apple technician who also assembled and ran a Boeing 737 simulator at a local art space for many years
Scottish heritage: MacIsaac is enthusiastic about his family's origins in Scotland and posed in MacIsaac tartan at a Highland Games in Colorado
But he said 'no comment' when asked whether or how he knew that the emails concerned Hunter's dealings with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy giant whose board the vice-president's son joined in 2014.
He said he had tried to contact the younger Biden 'repeatedly,' to no avail.
And he said that during the summer he started to be concerned about the hard drive with Hunter's secrets being in his shop.
'Middle of summer, I started to get concerned because you see stuff in the papers and the news and online and I thought I recognize that name,' he said, in reference to Hunter Biden, as questions over his links to Ukraine came to be at the heart of the impeachment saga.
Then he said he reached out to a trusted friend who offered him advice.
But his account then became unclear as he equivocated on how he and the FBI came to be in touch.
Regardless, two agents from the FBI - possibly from its Baltimore office - came to pick up the laptop on December 9, he said, bringing with them a subpoena for it - although that document is dated December 19.
He said that the next day, they phoned him to ask for help getting the laptop to work and he told them which power cord to get.
MacIsaac said that he next heard from them in the New Year.
'One of the agents called me up three weeks later,' he said, saying that the agent warned him not to speak to anyone who came asking him for the laptop and instead to 'stall.'
Asked who that would be, MacIsaac told the Daily Beast the FBI said: 'Biden, anybody representing Hunter.'
MacIsaac said he had acted to pass on the laptop to Giuliani because he feared being killed because of what was in his possession saying: 'I'm pretty vocal about not wanting to get murdered.'
'Did you genuinely think Joe Biden would put your life in danger?' he was asked.
'People that work for him, sure,' he replied.
He referenced the murder of Seth Rich, a Democratic political staffer whose death in Washington D.C. in 2016 remains unsolved but was at the center of debunked conspiracy theories that it was because he played a role in the leaking of Hillary Clinton's emails.
Rich's family have repeatedly spoken of the pain the bogus claims have caused and are suing people - including Fox News - who they say spread the lies.
But MacIsaac said of answering questions from reporters: 'I'd prefer this to getting shot jogging in the morning.'
Asked who he thought would kill him, he said: 'Epstein didn't really hang himself, this guy got shot jogging.
'I think that it's not the government as an entire entity but I think there's a history in this country of people with political motives doing horrible things. I don't want to be on the receiving end of that.'
MacIsaac said he was 'not political' although his social media shows that he voted for Trump in 2016 and posted: 'So, I decided to go on Facebook today for the first time in a while. Apparently, I am an a**hole, stupid, racist, sexist, and a d**k that hates his country. And that's just from my friends.
'Come on people, we are Stronger Together...... What, too soon?'
But asked if he was concerned about the possibility of Biden winning the election he said: ''As long as he doesn't have a vendetta.'
