Over on Substack I’m writing about the last seven years of my life. It’s the first draft of the whole story. All of it. Below is a short excerpt. I’ll be releasing chapters every few days, along with “Where’s Hunter?” a video series exclusive to Substack. Check it out. Link is in the replies. The Laptop They called it the laptop. I will call it that too, although the name is not accurate, the provenance was never established, and no court or forensic examiner ever certified the chain of custody that would have made it evidence rather than theater. I will call it the laptop because by now the word belongs to something larger than a piece of hardware. It belongs to a story they needed me to confirm, and I am done letting them tell it. Their origin story begins in a Delaware repair shop, but it does not end there, and it did not begin there either. By the time a legally blind computer repairman named handed a hard drive to Rudy Giuliani’s attorney, men had already been traveling to Kyiv and Vienna and Zurich for more than a year trying to assemble exactly this object. The laptop did not surface and create a scandal. A scandal was constructed, and a laptop was produced to anchor it. So. The laptop. Here is what was on it. Twenty years of my life, or a version of it. Messages sent at hours that don't belong to anyone sober. Photographs I would never have taken in daylight. A record of every way a body can fail its owner when the owner has stopped trying to help. None of it is a single dramatic moment. It is accumulation, the slow daily work of an addict doing the thing that is killing him because the alternative feels like dying faster. All of that was on it. I am not denying any of it. That is not a small thing to say. I have spent years in rooms where men and women with far less scrutiny than I have faced tore themselves apart trying to account for what they did in the middle of their disease. The inventory of an addict’s life is never clean. It is not meant to be clean. Recovery does not erase the record. It requires reading it. I have read mine. What I will not do is accept their lies. Because a record of what is on it, or more precisely, what was not, exists. (Read the whole story on Substack)

The Court’s Order 1drv.ms/b/c/7C0E23135A587225…

I am grateful that the rule of law prevailed in my defamation case against Patrick Byrne. The court’s order which you can read for yourselves speaks for itself. “the most plausible explanation is that Defendant is not credible, fabricates awesome and farfetched narratives to garner attention in the media, and fabricated the defamatory story at issue in this case to damage Plaintiff’s reputation.” (Page 14 of the order.)

When I heard about Senator Graham’s death last night, the first thing I thought about was not all the things he said and did in service of Donald Trump. I thought of the time before Donald Trump when he was a brother to Senator John McCain. A time when senators from different parties could fight about politics and still be friends. A time when a conservative Republican from South Carolina could say of my father: “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem. He’s the nicest person I’ve ever met in politics. As good a man as God ever created.” That is the Senator Graham I will remember today. Not because I have forgotten what came after. Because in that memory there is hope. Hope for a country where brothers can fight like hell over policy and still share a meal, and a laugh, and the loss of the people they love. I will choose to remember the time before Trump. Because I believe in an America after Trump.

Three years ago I sued @PatrickByrne for lying about me. He claimed that I took a bribe and committed treason. He implied I was in some part responsible for the Hamas attack of October 7th. His lies caused real damage and endangered my family. On Friday I was awarded $1.7M in punitive damages by a Reagan-appointed federal judge. The court determined that everything he said about me was a complete fiction. For those of you who don’t know Patrick Byrne, he is the former Overstock CEO who lost control of his company when it became public he was sleeping with convicted Russian agent Maria Butina. He is the man who was in the Oval Office with Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell leading up to the January 6th insurrection. He is a clownish footnote in history. But his lies travel far and wide. He is a fraud who did the bidding of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon. This isn’t the first defamation case brought against Byrne, and it won’t be the last. Even after losing, he is still doing it. He continues to tell his audience he has “three dynamite voicemails” and a former federal agent whose testimony confirms his story. Byrne had three years to bring that evidence to court. He never produced it. The voicemails he did produce, the court found, “do not mention a bribe, implicate contemporaneous involvement in any illegal scheme by Plaintiff, or otherwise independently corroborate Defendant’s story.” The former federal agent Byrne relied on, John Moynihan, gave sworn testimony that contradicted him. The FBI agent Byrne claimed had backed him up denied it under oath. Those are not my findings. Those are the findings of a federal court. And nothing prevents Byrne from releasing the voicemails he keeps promising his audience. He never has, because the court has already listened to what he produced and found they prove nothing. Patrick will try not pay this judgment. He didn’t pay the $34,969 the court ordered six months ago either. His strategy is delay. Fire the lawyer. Skip the hearing. File nonsense with courts that have already ruled. Repeat the lie on Alex Jones while the clock runs. He is not a whistleblower or a spy. He is a man who got played by a Russian intelligence asset, lost his company over it, and has been performing a spy fantasy on the internet ever since. He is a coward who wouldn’t even show up in court to face me. He is hiding in Dubai, where he fled during my case to avoid being deposed, and told the court a story about a Venezuelan hit squad to explain it. He will run from this judgment the same way he ran from my trial. Fine. Every defamatory statement is a new lawsuit. I have as much time as he has words.