More than 120,000 emails retrieved from an abandoned laptop that belonged to the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and many of which point to a culture of high-level influence peddling and corruption, have been posted online by a former White House staff member who served under President Trump, British newspapers including the Times of London and the Daily Mail reported Tuesday night.

The laptop was initially left at a Delaware computer repair shop by Mr. Biden and its contents subsequently passed to Mr. Trump’s legal team ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Last night’s postings of thousands of unclassified messages, some of which implicate President Biden in questionable business dealings with international dimensions, were made by Garrett Ziegler, a former assistant to Peter Navarro, the director of trade and manufacturing policy under Mr. Trump. 

On his website, bidenlaptopemails.com, Mr. Ziegler, 26, describes the emails as “a modern Rosetta Stone of white and blue collar crime.” The emails, reportedly numbering 128,775, were uploaded to a searchable database through his organization, Marco Polo.

News of the leaked emails was quick to ripple across the Atlantic. The Times of London reported that one email was sent in May 2017 by James Gilliar, a business associate of Hunter Biden, suggesting the distribution of percentage shares in a Chinese venture including “10 held by H for the big guy.” The newspaper reported that  a former business partner of Hunter Biden, Tony Bobulinski, told Fox News in the run-up to the 2020 election that he was “1,000 percent” certain the former vice president was “the big guy” mentioned in that communique.

Late Tuesday night, in what it called an exclusive, the Daily Mail, which said it received a copy of the hard drive from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in spring 2021 from a man named Jack Maxey, reported that some of the original emails did not appear in the sizable, newly disclosed batch. One such, previously published by the Daily Mail, showed Hunter Biden inviting his foreign business partners and associates to a 2015 dinner at a Washington, D.C., restaurant that his father would secretly attend.

In that email he said the dinner at Café Milano would be “ostensibly to discuss food security.” The White House at first denied the vice president was there, but eventually admitted it when photographs emerged from the event, the Daily Mail reported. 

The Times of London reprinted another email that apparently shows Hunter Biden griping about the son of a Mexican billionaire not returning a favor: “We have been talking about business deals and partnerships for 7 years. And I really appreciate you letting me stay at your resort villa…but I have brought every single person you have ever asked me to bring to the f’ing White House and the Vice President’s house and the inauguration and then you go completely silent.” The email was signed “RHB” — Hunter Biden’s first name is Robert.

On the same day of the email leak, the Washington Post reported that a Justice Department probe into a Washington lobbying firm’s work for a  Ukrainian oil and natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, has been closed with no finding of wrongdoing, according to an attorney for the CEO of the firm, Blue Star Strategies. The Post noted that the lobbyist’s work for Burisma became a flashpoint in the debate over Hunter Biden’s role on the board of the Ukrainian company, which has faced allegations of corruption domestically as well as in Britain and the United States.

Burisma is based in Kyiv but registered in Cyprus, the island nation and EU member that has tried to fend off perceptions it is a haven for money laundering and was recently described by Italian network RAI as a place that grants asylum to businesspeople who want to keep their business private. Two years ago Brussels launched a probe into the country’s since discredited citizenship-by-investment, a so-called golden passport scheme.

How many of the leaked emails, if any, related to the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine was not immediately clear.

In recent months the president’s son has tried to paint himself as a different kind of artist, his splotchy oeuvre represented by the Georges Bergès Gallery in SoHo, which told the New York Times it will not disclose the identity of buyers who might pay up to $500,000 per splotch. But a catalog of thousands of the younger Mr. Biden’s emails is now available with a simple click — and best of all, it’s free.