Let's assume you are correct, and everything on that laptop hard drive is real. Guess what - folks got into that drive and messed with the evidence! If they had been TRYING to get Hunter off the hook they couldn't have done a better job!!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-biden-laptop-data-examined/ Thousands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures from Google and other technology companies, say two security experts who examined the data at the request of The Washington Post.
The verifiable emails are a small fraction of 217 gigabytes of data provided to The Post on a portable hard drive by Republican activist Jack Maxey. He said the contents of the portable drive originated from Hunter Biden’s MacBook Pro, which Hunter reportedly dropped off at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Del., in April 2019 and never reclaimed.
. . .
Thousands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures from Google and other technology companies, say two security experts who examined the data at the request of The Washington Post.
The verifiable emails are a small fraction of 217 gigabytes of data provided to The Post on a portable hard drive by Republican activist Jack Maxey. He said the contents of the portable drive originated from Hunter Biden’s MacBook Pro, which Hunter reportedly dropped off at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Del., in April 2019 and never reclaimed.
. . .
Most of the data obtained by The Post lacks cryptographic features that would help experts make a reliable determination of authenticity, especially in a case where the original computer and its hard drive are not available for forensic examination. Other factors, such as emails that were only partially downloaded, also stymied the security experts’ efforts to verify content.
. . .
In their examinations, Green and Williams found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.
Maxey had alerted The Washington Post to this issue in advance, saying that others had accessed the data to examine its contents and make copies of files. But the lack of what experts call a “clean chain of custody” undermined Green’s and Williams’s ability to determine the authenticity of most of the drive’s contents.
. . .
Analysis was made significantly more difficult, both experts said, because the data had been handled repeatedly in a manner that deleted logs and other files that forensic experts use to establish a file’s authenticity.
Let me just draw your attention to that last sentence: "handled repeatedly in a manner that deleted logs and other files that forensic experts use to establish a file’s authenticity."
Again: "handled repeatedly in a manner that deleted logs and other files that forensic experts use to establish a file’s authenticity."
Whatever good evidence had once been on that drive, it's tainted now. The drive has been repeatedly modified since it was dropped off.
Also, note this: most of the data "lacks cryptographic features that would help experts make a reliable determination of authenticity." How much you wanna bet that the most apparently damning emails don't have the cryptographic checksums needed to establish authenticity?
BTW, in the original versions of the story, THREE laptops were dropped off. Now they only speak of one laptop. What happened to the other two? Surely they would have been useful in establishing authenticity or lack thereof. Curious disappearing evidence, wouldn't you say??