Hunter's Hard Drive - Let's Talk About Reality

Ever since Jack Maxey revealed that he and his technical team had succeeded in recovering large numbers of deleted files from Hunter Biden’s laptop a chorus of voices have piped up to suggest the claim is bogus. The intent of this criticism is obvious. The individuals behind the claims are very worried about what will be revealed and they want to get a running start on discrediting what could be very damaging information. We assume the words “Russian disinformation” might reappear at any moment.

Still, we thought it might be worthwhile talking to an actual technical expert on the subject and getting his take. Here are the comments of Harry Haury – who has actually seen the hard drive in question. We have quoted them verbatim.

“Let’s talk a little bit about disk drives, data capacity, and recovery of data in a forensic investigation. Many people that have worked with computers, even as technicians, understand little about how they actually work. Hard disk drives store information as individual bits across the drive using what is called a File System, Disk Operating System or is sometimes referred to as part of the Operating System. Since the early days of computing these terms have evolved and can be a bit ambiguous, but the issue has come up about how Jack Maxey and his team might have found a lot more data on Hunter Biden’s laptop than previously found and why the size of these files might appear much larger than the size of the original disk. There are many reasons that this occurs and without an exhaustive discussion I will cover the primary reasons we see this:

1) Header and descriptive information added by the extraction software:

This is a small but noticeable expansion, but almost all forensic recovery tools write out a lot of information about the drive, the files encountered and other various information that might be relevant to examining a drive.

2) Erased or deleted files:

Except for Hillary Clinton or her Tech, most people do not realize that when you erase a troublesome file it does not actually disappear. The File System usually just deletes the reference to it. The original data remains. People expert in hiding inconvenient data not only erase a file but over-right it multiple times with a Wipe Utility like BleachBit to make it impossible to recover any data. With NSA-level tools, it is possible to read down a number of layers into the disk to see what was written and overwritten, so a system has to write and rewrite over deleted data several times. Otherwise, it is possible, often to pull data from a hard drive that no one knows is there. Why is this important? It speaks to the travesty of the FBI and NSA never fully investigating the original laptop and its contents, at least not publicly. But it is completely plausible that the copy of the hard drive Jack Maxey has contains numerous deleted files that could be recovered.

3) Compressed and archived files are smaller than they would be in their native format.

Archived and compressed files can often reduce the file size by as much as 90%. What this means is that after extraction a 50-gigabyte compressed file might take up as much as 500 gigabytes. While not familiar with Maxey’s extraction, the claim that he has a tremendously expanded number of emails and text messages is completely believable if his copy was a bit-by-bit sector-by-sector copy or disk image.

4) Corrupt or fractured file recovery

When doing disk recovery work you often encounter places where the original file information cannot be fully recovered. Pointer table and file entries that have been erased or damaged may overlap. When the extraction and recovery software runs, it will copy and attempt to resurrect each file independently. This can expand file sizes tremendously because large parts of the original files are being copied into multiple attempts to recover damaged or corrupt file structures.

I am an expert in cyber security and forensics and worked on and off for the Intelligence Community, Department of State, Department of Defense, Department of Justice, FEMA, Treasury, and others for decades. The current attacks on what Jack Maxey has found regarding the size of the extracted files are irrelevant.

The important issue is that no one took the laptop seriously with the now-famous false defamation of the Hunter Biden laptop by 51 former leaders of the Military and Intelligence Community trying to make sure the Joe Biden was elected President. These people had bad advisors, were ignorant of the issues, or, worse, are potentially corrupt. This matter should have been deeply investigated years ago, and need to be now. If the FBI has the original in their possession, a thorough and professional cyber forensic investigation should be done by the NSA immediately.”

Harry Haury – Former Senior Information Assurance Architect with high-security clearances worked on a wide variety of technology assessment, cyber security, and cyber forensics issues on defense and attack supporting program development and operational capabilities for the DOD, DOJ, CIA, DHS, DTRA, DARPA, NSA, NRO, NGIA, White House, and others.

One wishes that the individuals who devote so much time to telling us not to pay any attention to Hunter’s laptop spent half as much time examining it and following up on serious issues it raises. Ultimately, this is not about Hunter, hookers, or cocaine. It is about Joe Biden and the very real possibility that we have a man in the White House who is compromised by hostile powers including Communist China.