FBI agents who raided Rudy Giuliani’s apartment and office in 2021 didn’t want to touch Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drives — despite the first son being under investigation at the time for potential tax fraud, the former New York City mayor’s lawyer told “Pod Force One.”
Robert Costello, who represented Giuliani for legal challenges related to 2020 election interference, told The Post’s Miranda Devine on the latest episode, out Wednesday, that agents executing the search warrant on the former mayor’s Upper East Side building saw the Biden scion’s hard drives as “radioactive.”
“They knew that Rudy Giuliani had them,” he explained.
“They knew that Rudy Giuliani was giving them to the New York Post, and they knew that their plot to keep all of this stuff secret was falling apart fast.”
The hard drives led to The Post’s bombshell October 2020 reports on Hunter Biden’s efforts to leverage his father’s position as vice president for lucrative business deals with Ukrainian and Chinese energy companies.
Costello also said the FBI raid and the bureau’s other actions to downplay the damning details in The Post’s report was “the best proof of election interference in the 2020 campaign,” after having described agents wanting to ditch the hard drives at Giuliani’s Manhattan apartment.
“I pick up the phone, and it’s Rudy on the phone with an FBI agent next to him. They’re in his apartment, and they’re going through things,” recalled Costello, who previously served as deputy chief of the Criminal Division for the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York.
“So, he puts me on the phone with the lead FBI agent, and I explained to him, I said, ‘Listen, this is a legitimate question. I’m not trying to insult you. Do you know what a hard drive looks like?’” And he said, ‘Yes,’” the lawyer continued.
“He described it accurately, and I said, ‘Okay, now go into Rudy’s office, and you’ll see on his desk either two or three hard drives.’ So, he’s on the phone with me. He says, ‘Yes, I see those.’ I said, ‘Those are Hunter Biden hard drives,’” Costello said.
The lead FBI agent responded immediately, “Oh, we’re not going to touch those,” according to Giuliani’s attorney, contradicting the order on the warrant “to seize every electronic device in his home.”
“I said to the FBI agent, ‘Well, those are electronic devices. Your warrant requires you to take those,’” Costello added. “He said, ‘I’m not touching those at all. They’re staying here.’”
“Now ask yourself this question. Why would they treat those hard drives as radioactive?” he asked Devine. “Because they knew that they were legitimate.”
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Subsequent federal and congressional investigations confirmed that the Biden family received tens of millions of dollars from foreign patrons — but The Post’s initial reporting on emails laying bare the influence-peddling scheme resulted in its Twitter, now X, account being locked.
The FBI had “verified” the authenticity of Hunter’s laptop as far back as November 2019 after taking custody of the device, and agents for the bureau had even told content moderators at Twitter that the emails on its hard drive were real when the first Post report was published on Oct. 14, 2020.
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The bureau had created confusion, however, by holding weekly meetings with the moderators beforehand that warned of ominous “hack-and-leak operations’’ by “state actors” involving Hunter Biden “likely” in October, a sworn declaration by Twitter’s former head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, later revealed.
Fifty-one former US intelligence officials — including ex-CIA Director John Brennan and ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom are now under federal investigation themselves — also suggested in a signed Oct. 19, 2020, letter that the reporting was part of a “Russian information operation.”
Special counsel David Weiss later said he couldn’t prove the business entanglements amounted to acting as an unregistered foreign agent, though Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to charges of tax fraud and illegal possession of a handgun in 2024 — only to be pardoned by his father weeks before Joe Biden left office.
Costello claimed on “Pod Force One” that his client’s claims of the 2020 election being interfered with are bolstered by the FBI’s actions with respect to the Hunter Biden case.
“The Hunter Biden laptop by itself proves that what he was doing is telling the truth,” he said. “Yet, they
disbarred him because that was part of the cancel culture. Take his reputation, take his money and take his law license.”
Costello concluded by also revealing that he’s been in contact with informants who are working to corroborate how “everything” that Giuliani claimed about the Biden’s influence-peddling with respect to Ukraine “was true.”
That includes some who have expressed that Joe and Hunter Biden did receive a $10 million “bribe” from an executive at the Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings.
“[W]e have other witnesses whose names I’m not going to reveal, but I have revealed it to the correct people who say the same thing that in fact, there was a $10 million transaction to Hunter and Joe Biden,” he said.
“In fact, those people are still communicating with me today, and I am trying to get them to the right place in either the Department of Justice or the Senate or the House of Representatives, so that they can follow up on this, because some of these people are willing to cooperate, and if they do, it will show that everything that Rudy Giuliani, for example, said about Ukraine was true.”
