Bugger. You beat me too it ! I spotted this yesterday but didn't get time to post it. Emphasis added.
"Exclusive: Alleged Hunter Biden Emails Circulated in Ukraine as Rudy Giuliani Dug for Dirt There Last Year
Explicit photos and emails purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden were circulating in Ukraine last year at the same time that Rudy Giuliani was searching for dirt there on former Vice President Joe Biden, two people approached about the material during that period tell TIME.
The emails’ alleged availability, which has not been previously reported, comes to light in the wake of Giuliani’s recent claims that he obtained private photos and emails of Hunter Biden from a broken laptop abandoned in Delaware. Giuliani, who is President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, has passed this material to right-wing news outlets, which began publishing it last week. Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment on the origins of the material he obtained.
Over the past year, the practice of selling or leaking private communications has become so common in Ukraine that the government has announced plans to pass a law against it. Igor Novikov, a former adviser to Ukraine’s President who now researches disinformation, referred to the practice as Ukraine’s “national sport” in a recent interview with the Washington Post.
The two people who said they were approached with Hunter Biden’s alleged emails last year did not know whether any of them were real and they declined to identify who was behind the offers, the first of which came in late May 2019 and the second in mid-September 2019. The two people said they could not confirm whether any of the material presented to them was the same as that which has been recently published in the U.S.
Last week the New York Post began publishing the material they obtained from Giuliani, and the sources and authenticity of the published emails has been hotly debated ever since. Hunter Biden and his father’s presidential campaign have declined to comment on the leaks in detail or to address whether any of the published emails are genuine. Hunter Biden has been unable to figure out where the material could have originated, says a person familiar with the situation.
Over the past week, Trump has used the leaks from Giuliani to fuel his claims of corruption against the Biden family. The President called on Attorney General William Barr to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the material in the recent reports. “We’ve got to get the attorney general to act,” Trump said in an interview with Fox on Tuesday, two days before he faces Biden in the final debate of the presidential race. “He’s got to appoint somebody. This is major corruption, and this has to be known about before the election.”
"When TIME asked Novikov, the former adviser to Ukraine’s President, about the alleged offers of access to Hunter Biden’s emails, Novikov said it would be “nothing new” for someone in Ukraine to market such material. The trade in kompromat—a Russian word for “compromising material”—has gone into overdrive in Ukraine since last year, when the country became entangled in internal U.S. politics, especially during the impeachment inquiry against President Trump, Novikov says. Various political operatives have rushed to answer Giuliani’s call for dirt on the Bidens, creating what Novikov called a “catalyst for disinformation.” Any documents emerging from this trade should be treated with caution, he adds, because they are “extremely hard to verify, yet very easy to fake.”"
