Cybersecurity Expert Authenticates 'Smoking Gun' Hunter Biden Email

Hunter Biden attends Usher's New Look Foundation - World Leadership Conference & Awards 2011 - Day 3 at Cobb Energy Center in Atlanta, Ga. on July 22, 2011. (Moses Robinson/Getty Images for Usher's New Look Foundation)

A cybersecurity expert used a cryptographic key to definitively authenticate a key email recovered from the laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Robert Graham of Errata Security received the email from The Daily Caller, which received a copy of the Hunter Biden hard drive from Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump's personal attorney.

Graham used a DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) string from the email metadata to authenticate the email with Google's servers. Vadym Pozharskyi, a top executive from Ukrainian gas firm Burisma, sent the email from his Gmail account to Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015.

"We can still have our fun arguments about whether it's taken out of context, or the exact provenance (harddrive vs. hacking into his account). But we do know the email is valid -- through the power of crypto!!" Graham wrote on Twitter.

"I have only seen, and been able to verify, a single email -- though it's the most important one, the one claimed to be a 'smoking gun,'" Graham wrote.

In the authenticated email, Pozharskyi thanks Hunter Biden for inviting him to DC and giving him an opportunity to "meet your father and spent [sic] some time together."

"It's really an honor and pleasure," Pozharskyi wrote.

The New York Post was the first to report on Pozharskyi's email. At the time, Giuliani refused to provide a copy of the hard drive to The Epoch Times.

Joe Biden's campaign responded to the initial inquiries about the email by stating that a meeting with Pozharskyi was not on any of Joe Biden's calendars. The campaign later said it could not rule out that Biden and Pozharskiy met informally.

At the time of the meeting described in the email, Hunter Biden held a paid position on the board of Burisma. Hunter Biden's involvement in the firm would go on to be at the center of the impeachment proceedings against Trump, who asked the leader of Ukraine to look into the firing of a top prosecutor who was investigating Burisma.

The prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, has said in a sworn statement that he was ousted due to pressure from Joe Biden because Shokin refused to drop the Burisma probe. Biden would go on to brag publicly about forcing Shokin's firing by threatening to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee from Ukraine.

Google currently uses a different DKIM string, so Graham looked up the key which was in use when the email was sent. He then matched and validated the email's DKIM string with the public key. Graham described the provenance of the email as "extremely probable," in a post on Twitter.

"We do have the little problem that we are getting the signing key not from Gmail, but from other sources on the Internet. But there are so many MANY sources all in agreement," Graham wrote.

A Google search for the DKIM confirms Graham's assertion. The Epoch Times reached out to Google to confirm the key. Google did not immediately respond.