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Thursday, Aug 20, 2026

Whistleblower who revealed Hunter Biden's laptop fled to Switzerland

Whistleblower who revealed Hunter Biden's laptop fled to Switzerland

Whistleblower Jack Maxey gave DailyMail.com a copy of the hard drive from Hunter Biden's  abandoned laptop in the spring of 2021.

The source who distributed Hunter Biden's laptop to congressmen and media has fled the US to Switzerland, saying he fears retaliation from the Biden administration.

Jack Maxey gave DailyMail.com a copy of the hard drive from Hunter's abandoned laptop in the spring of 2021.

He also gave copies and material from it to the Washington Post, New York Times, and Senator Chuck Grassley in his role as ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee – but he claims they all sat on it for months.

For the past two weeks, Maxey has been in hiding in Zurich, working with IT experts to dig out more data from the 'laptop from hell'.

Maxey, a former co-host of ex-Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon's podcast the War Room, claims he and his colleagues have found '450 gigabytes of deleted material' including 80,000 images and videos and more than 120,000 archived emails.

He said he intends to post them all online in a searchable database in the coming weeks.

Jack Maxey gave DailyMail.com a copy of the hard drive from Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop in the spring of 2021. For the past two weeks, Maxey has been in hiding in Zurich, working with IT experts to dig out more data from the 'laptop from hell'

Hunter's laptop is brimming with evidence of apparent criminal activity by him and his associates including drug trafficking and prostitution. This photo of him grabbing a unidentified woman's hair was recovered from his laptop



Hunter abandoned his laptop at a Delaware computer store in 2019. The owner, John Mac Isaac, gave a copy to Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who passed it on to Maxey.

'I came here so that we could do a forensic examination of Hunter's laptop safely in a country that still respects human liberty and the ideals of liberal democratic principles,' he told DailyMail.com.

'I do not believe this would have been possible inside the United States. We had numerous attempts on us from trying to do things like this there.'

Hunter is seen in a photo with a crack pipe in his mouth as he sleeps. The photo was recovered from his laptop


Maxey said that after contacting DailyMail.com about the laptop last year, black suburban SUVs appeared outside his house, and former US intelligence officer friends he shared copies with told him they received strange calls.

'I showed this to a friend of mine in desperation in February because nobody would listen to me. No news organizations would take it. In fact, the very first major news organization to take it was the Daily Mail,' he said.

'Very dear friends of mine, the sharp tip of the spear, were making welfare calls to me every day, basically to see if I was still alive.'

Maxey claimed one former intelligence agency senior staffer told him soon after he received the hard drive in 2020: 'If you don't release enough of this, so that they know you can release all of it, I'm telling you brother, you're a dead man.'

Maxey took their advice in October 2020 and posted batches of emails and other files from the laptop on file sharing sites.

But after about an hour, the links were taken down.

Maxey said he believes the US government was hunting down files from the laptop posted online and flagged them to the companies.

'There were five drop boxes: two in the United States, one in New Zealand, two in the UK. All the same drop boxes in which they tell us child pornography is shared around the globe without any consequence because they can't look at it.

'These are all Five Eyes countries, English speaking countries in an intelligence sharing agreement. And they were all ripped down.

'​​So this means that our intelligence services, who still have not even acknowledged that they have Hunter Biden's laptop, were obviously diligently doing cache searches across the internet to find out if any of this stuff was being released.

'That should terrify every single decent person in the West.'

DailyMail.com has been unable to verify the claims.

Emails between Hunter and Eric Schwerin, his business partner at consultancy Rosemont Seneca, show Schwerin was working on Joe's taxes. The emails were recovered from Hunter's laptop

Maxey says he has found '450 gigabytes of erased material' including 80,000 images and videos and more than 120,000 archived emails

Emails from Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop, obtained by DailyMail.com, revealed Joe and Hunter shared bank accounts and paid each other's bills


Maxey said one reason he chose Switzerland as a hideout was because the only file sharing site that did not take down the laptop files was Swiss Transfer, a file sharing service based in the historically politically neutral country.

The former Bannon podcast co-host said he is livid at the FBI, who he believes slow-walked their investigation into Hunter and failed to enter the laptop they received from Mac Isaac into evidence for months.

According to the New York Times, files from the laptop are now part of the evidence in Hunter's federal prosecution for alleged tax fraud, money laundering and illegal foreign lobbying.

Among the files on the laptop are a raft of emails and documents showing Hunter's dealings with Burisma, a Ukrainian gas firm that became the center of Trump's first impeachment in December 2019.

The then-president was accused of pushing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce investigations into the Bidens and Burisma for alleged corruption.

Maxey claims that had the FBI come forward in 2020 with the emails showing the details of Hunter's work for Burisma, Trump would have been vindicated.

'The FBI had this on the ninth of December 2019,' he said. 'I suppose the first person betrayed was a sitting US president in an impeachment hearing, when the FBI had the exculpatory evidence in their hands to have that end instantly, and they did nothing.

'The second group of people to be betrayed were all of the Democratic candidates in the spring primaries that year,' he added.

'The American people were utterly betrayed, because I guarantee you that Joe Biden couldn't run for dog catcher if the American people knew about this laptop.'

In emails from the hard drive Hunter and his business partners make apparent references to Joe's involvement in a multi-million-dollar deal with Chinese government-linked oil giant CEFC.

Maxey railed against the Senate Judiciary Committee and its GOP ranking member Chuck Grassley (pictured) for failing to respond to his offer of the laptop last year

A shocking photo obtained from Hunter's laptop shows his badly damaged and worn down teeth - also known as 'meth mouth' -  as he sits in a dentist chair

In October 2020 Maxey posted batches of emails and other files from the laptop on file sharing sites. But after about an hour, the links were taken down. This photo is from Hunter's laptop


One infamous May 2017 email by Hunter's partner James Gilliar, he suggests 10% of the equity in the deal would go to 'the big guy' – a phrase consistently used throughout Hunter's communications to refer to his father.

Other emails show that Joe and Hunter shared a bank account and paid each other's bills.

Maxey also railed against the Senate Judiciary Committee and its GOP ranking member Chuck Grassley for failing to respond to his offer of the laptop last year.

'I have a lot of admiration for Chuck Grassley – or I did,' Maxey said.

'I wrote a very reasoned, rational, respectful letter to Chuck Grassley and delivered him a copy of the laptop that arrived on the eighth of July, I have the signed receipts.

'I never heard a word back from the Senate Judiciary Committee even once.'

Weeks before the New York Post first published material from the laptop in October 2020, Grassley co-wrote a report with Senator Ron Johnson publishing bank documents obtained by his committee evidencing millions of dollars sent by the Chinese to Hunter and his uncle, Joe's brother Jim Biden.

Grassley pointed to more documents showing the flow of funds from CEFC to Hunter and Jim in a speech to congress this week.

Maxey also gave a copy of the hard drive to the Washington Post in June 2021. The paper took nine months to authenticate it, publishing its first story announcing the validity of the laptop this week.

The paper hired experts using similar techniques to the top cyber forensics experts DailyMail.com used to validate the laptop last spring.

Maxey also gave hundreds of documents from the laptop to the New York Times, which finally admitted it was real in a story two weeks ago.

He claimed that even Fox News, which has covered stories arising from the laptop extensively, declined to take a full copy of the hard drive from him, receiving only batches of certain documents instead.

'If you have an honest press, who are willing to report the bad stories, and uncover the corruption, then we as voters are more informed about who we should have in elected office. And they failed us miserably,' Maxey said.


Extracts from one email published show how Hunter Biden was to be paid $850,000 in part of his arrangement  with a Chinese firm

Jen Psaki referred to Hunter's laptop as Russian disinformation in 2020, when a group of former intelligence officials labeled it as such

In the prior months, both newspapers prominently reported claims the laptop was Russian disinformation.

More than 50 top former intelligence officials wrote an open letter casting doubt on the laptop's provenance in October 2020, claiming it 'has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.'

Signatories included former CIA directors or acting directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta and Gen. Michael Hayden, and former National Intelligence Director James Clapper.

'They essentially declared in their 'best opinion' – you notice how they always use weasel words – that this is a fabrication of elves in the basement of the Kremlin,' Maxey said.

'Still to this day, I can't understand how Panetta, Clapper, Haden and Brennan declared it to be a fabrication.'

Maxey believes the 'cover-up' of Hunter's laptop is a bipartisan problem and said he wants to see an entire new congress to investigate it in open hearings.

'We have an election coming up in the fall. And my prayer is that every member of the United States House and Senate who are running for office this year get replaced – Republicans and Democrats. We need to take back the country,' he said.

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