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]
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