Is the laptop real?

Every Gmail message carries a DKIM signature, a cryptographic seal from Google that breaks if the message is altered. In March 2022 two experts hired by the Washington Post, Matt Green of Johns Hopkins and Jake Williams, verified nearly 22,000 of about 129,000 emails in a copy of the data that way, including messages central to the 2020 stories. Most of the rest could not be checked because the records needed were missing, and neither found clear evidence of tampering. [1]

A forensic firm commissioned by CBS News in November 2022 found no evidence of tampering or of files being created in the copy it reviewed. Earlier, Senate Republicans had matched travel described in the emails to the Secret Service’s own records of Hunter’s trips. [2][5]

The Justice Department settled it in June 2024. At Hunter’s gun trial an FBI agent, Erika Jensen, testified that the laptop’s serial number matched Apple’s records for Hunter’s account. Prosecutors had separately obtained his iCloud backups from Apple with warrants, and they put his messages on screen as evidence. [3][4]

Some analysts found more than the main copies contained. Bryan Dimitrelos, a former Secret Service agent who examined a copy for the Washington Examiner, said he recovered tens of thousands of deleted files using Oxygen Forensics software. In 2025 Radio Free Europe reported that the company’s two executives had been charged with lying to the U.S. government about its Russian ownership. That does not show his results were wrong, but it means the tool used to produce them has its own questions. [1]

The Washington Post’s experts found that people other than Hunter had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the first Post stories. That broken chain of custody is why most of the data could not be verified. [2]