Gaetz Lights up FBI Official on Hunter Laptop, Makes Move Leaving Nadler Speechless

Saul Loeb/Pool via AP

By Nick Arama | Mar 30, 2022

Looks like the story of the Hunter Biden laptop is heating up again as Republicans in Congress are pushing to finally get answers.

On Monday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) dropped receipts with bank records showing that a Hunter Biden firm received $100,000 from a company that Grassley said was effectively an arm of the Chinese Communist government. Grassley and Johnson said they had more records that they would be dropping.

On Tuesday, Rep. Matt Gaetz was questioning the assistant director of the FBI Cyber Division, Bryan Vorndran, about the laptop. The FBI had taken the laptop after the repair shop owner called them and turned the laptop over to them in Dec. 2019. But when Gaetz was questioning him, Vorndran claimed that he didn’t know where the laptop was or what had happened to it.

BREAKING: FBI Cyber Chief can’t find Hunter Biden’s laptop… pic.twitter.com/sZrJcc9IWR

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) March 29, 2022

“So you don’t have it, you don’t know who has it, you don’t know where it is, you’re the assistant director. You know, earlier you talked about whether or not you were the Grant Hill or the Christian Laettner; it sounds you’re the Chris Webber, trying to call a time out when you don’t have one,” Gaetz said, implying that the FBI official was trying to wiggle out of the questioning.

Gaetz asked if the FBI had plumbed the question of whether what was on the laptop had posed a point of vulnerability for the country — Vorndran couldn’t answer that question. When Gaetz pursued if he didn’t know, who would know what happened to it, Vorndran said he didn’t even know the answer to that question.

Gaetz then asked Vorndran if he would commit to finding out and giving them a briefing since there were other issues that he was going to have to brief them on in the future. Vorndran said he would be happy to take the request back to the FBI to ask. But then he seemed to dispute that this was even something that his cyber division should be concerned with, claiming it wasn’t a cyber asset.

Gaetz indicated he was shocked that there wasn’t a concern about the vulnerability that this posed. “You don’t even know if they’re [the first family is] compromised.” That’s when he pulled out a flash drive and said that he had a copy of the laptop that he wanted to enter into the Congressional record. Now, that’s a “boom” moment, if ever there was one.

That caught House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler (D-NY) by surprise and he was speechless for a moment. Initially, Nadler objected to letting it in but then changed his mind.

Nadler’s change of heart came after what Gaetz described as “consultation with majority staff.”

“I seek unanimous consent to enter into the record of this committee, content from, files from and copies from the Hunter Biden laptop,” Gaetz said.

Nadler responded, “Without objection.”

Gaetz also said that he would be introducing legislation that he called the “Spook Who Cried Wolf Resolution,” to grab the security clearances of any of the 51 intel officials who signed a letter saying that they thought the laptop was likely Russian disinformation although they had no evidence to support that claim.

It’s ridiculous that, at this point, the FBI has a representative who says he doesn’t know where the laptop is and he doesn’t know who would know. It’s also ridiculous — given all the compromising information that was on the laptop — that after all this time, we don’t have an answer to this question from the FBI when they’ve had it since 2019. Of course, it would have been critical to know this information before the 2020 election, but it’s critical to know now if there are continuing vulnerabilities and conflicts.