Hunter Biden Emails

Now that the Hunter Biden emails from the famous laptop are available, it’s possible to download them to one’s own computer and examine them at leisure, without using the very overloaded site, and without requiring a network connection. I accomplished this using the mail indexer notmuch, and my own fork of the sup email client that uses notmuch as a backend.

First, download the zip file containing the Windows flavor of all the emails here.

Create a mail directory for storing the emails, using a command like this:

maildirmake bidenemails

This will create three subdirectories below bidenemails: new, cur, and tmp.

(The maildirmake command can be found in several packages in Linux Mint; I chose the maildrop package.)

Move to the new subdirectory of bidenemails and unpack the zip file:

cd bidenemails/new
unzip ~/emls.zip

This will put all 128K emails in a single directory. I chose to create separate maildirs for each year, but that isn’t necessary.

Many of the emails will have a bogus first line starting with the bytes FF FE (the Unicode Byte Order Mark), followed by a decimal number. This will cause notmuch to ignore those emails, so it’s necessary to remove the offending lines. The following shell script will do the job:

#!/bin/sh
if [ $# -eq 0 ]
then
  echo usage $0 files ...
  exit 1
fi
for file in "$@" ; do
  if head -1 "$file" | hd | grep -q " ff fe " ; then
    echo "fixing $file"
    sed -i '1d' "$file"
  fi
done

Now it’s time to configure notmuch. Run the command notmuch setup. Give it the full path to the maildir you created before (/home/SOMEBODY/bidenemails in the example above). This will create a configuration file ~/.notmuch-config. Edit this file and make the following changes:

• Change the ignore definition to the empty string.
• Change the synchronize_flags definition to false.

Now tell notmuch to index all of the emails for the first time, using this command:

notmuch new

This took 12 minutes on a seven year old laptop with an SSD. It will probably take longer on a mechanical hard disk.

You can test that things worked by doing a few queries. For example, the following command will find the email where Hunter bragged that he was taking over Ukraine:

notmuch search '"taking over ukraine"'

This will produce output like the following:

thread:000000000000990e   2014-05-30 [4/6] Timothy Stanton; Golf (inbox starred)

Display that thread using the following command:

notmuch show thread:000000000000990e | less

Scroll down a bit and you’ll see the part in question:

On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 2:28 PM, Hunter Biden <hbiden@rosemontseneca.com>wrote:

> That's for people who have time to do such things. Me - I'm busy taking
> over Ukraine.
>
> RHB
> 202.333.1880

While notmuch is certainly powerful, it will probably be more convenient to use an email client to view the emails. Earlier I mentioned that I was using a notmuch-enabled version of the sup email client. Setup for sup is rather involved, so I won’t repeat the instructions here; see the README here.

As an experiment, I also tried using the neomutt mail client, which has support for notmuch. But it was not usable with the large Biden email set. It took several minutes to read every email when it started, and when it exited, it tried to modify every email, a process that took so long that I had to abort it with killall neomutt. The advantage of sup is that it starts quickly and doesn’t modify the emails.