Andrew Kerr(DCNF) An email Hunter Biden received in April 2015 from a Burisma executive discussing an introduction to then-Vice President Joe Biden, which lies at the heart of a New York Post investigation, is unquestionably authentic, a cybersecurity expert told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday.
The DCNF obtained a full copy of Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday. The DCNF provided Robert Graham, the founder of the cybersecurity firm Errata Security, with a copy of the email and its metadata for forensic analysis.
Graham, who has been cited as a cybersecurity expert in The Washington Post, the Associated Press, Wired, Engadget and other news and technology outlets, told the DCNF that he used a cryptographic signature found in the email’s metadata to validate that an account used by Vadym Pozharsky, an advisor to Burisma’s board of directors, emailed Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015.
In the email, Pozharsky thanked Hunter Biden for “inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.”
Cybersecurity expert Robert Graham said this email is unquestionably authentic after analyzing its DKIM signature. (Robert Graham)
The New York Post first reported the email in October, describing it as a “smoking-gun” showing that Hunter Biden had introduced his father to the Burisma executive in 2015.
The email was sent less than a year before Joe Biden pressured former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire a prosecutor who was reportedly investigating the gas company in return for a $1 billion loan guarantee.
Graham previously told the DCNF that emails sent from Gmail, such as Pozharski’s message to Hunter Biden, can be “absolutely verified beyond a shadow of a doubt” by testing its contents against the unique DKIM signature found in its metadata.
Graham used the DKIM signature within the email to verify with a private key on Google’s servers that the sender, recipient, subject, date and body of the message that the DCNF obtained from Giuliani were unchanged from when the email was originally sent in April 2015. (RELATED: Hunter Biden Emails Could Be ‘Absolutely Verified’ If Rudy Giuliani Released The Metadata, Expert Says)
Graham said the only way the email could have been faked is if someone hacked into Google’s servers, found the private key and used it to reverse engineer the email’s DKIM signature.
Email metadata on its own does not provide any indication of whether hacking had anything to with the email’s release, Graham noted.
“Of course, committing criminal hacking doesn’t make true information any less true, so no matter how illegitimately they gathered emails, the contents are provably legitimate,” Graham said.
Joe Biden’s presidential campaign said in a statement that his schedule indicates that no such meeting as alleged in the email took place. However, the campaign later told Politico that they could not rule out the possibility he had a cursory encounter with the Burisma executive.
