The Hunter Biden laptop, explained
What is *actually* going on here?
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To hear Republicans tell it, the laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of the current president, is the key to bringing down the First Family.
“According to polling, of the people who were made aware of the Hunter Biden laptop story, 53% would have changed their vote,” House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik has said.
For Democrats, the laptop is the latest in a long line of red herrings, a nothing-burger that says more about Republicans’ obsession with fact-free conspiracies than it does about Hunter or Joe Biden.
There’s so much partisan smoke around the issue that it’s hard to know whether there’s actually any real fire there.
I wanted to find out for myself, so I went digging through everything (or a lot of things!) that have been written about the laptop, its origins and its contents. Below is my attempt to separate the fact from the spin.
Let’s start from the beginning.
In October 2020, the New York Post reported on a trove of emails that included, purportedly, proof that Joe Biden had met with the head of a Ukrainian power company named Burisma, whose board Hunter served on.
That “proof” came in the form of an email, allegedly from an executive in the firm, to Hunter. “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together,” it read. “It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure.”
For Republicans, it was evidence of what they had long alleged without proof — that Biden, as VP, had pulled strings for his son. At the center of that controversy is a December 2015 trip Biden made to Ukraine in which he called on the country to remove its top prosecutor. Republicans alleged that Biden’s move was an attempt to protect his son who served on the board of Burisma. Fact checks debunked that claim.
The Biden campaign denied the Post report -- as did Hunter Biden. The Post provided no proof of the authenticity of the email. Social media companies briefly limited the ability of users to share the Post story, a decision which has caused its own long-lasting controversy.1
The emails that allegedly revealed the meeting came from a laptop. The Post described it — and how it was obtained thusly:
The computer was dropped off at a repair shop in Biden’s home state of Delaware in April 2019, according to the store’s owner.
Other material extracted from the computer includes a raunchy, 12-minute video that appears to show Hunter, who’s admitted struggling with addiction problems, smoking crack while engaged in a sex act with an unidentified woman, as well as numerous other sexually explicit images.
The customer who brought in the water-damaged MacBook Pro for repair never paid for the service or retrieved it or a hard drive on which its contents were stored, according to the shop owner, who said he tried repeatedly to contact the client.
The shop owner couldn’t positively identify the customer as Hunter Biden, but said the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunter’s late brother and former Delaware attorney general.
A repairman at the shop said he made a copy of the hard drive and then turned that copy over to a lawyer for Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani put the materials in the hands of the Post.
Joe Biden suggested — during the final days of the 2020 campaign — that the laptop was a Russian effort to disrupt the outcome of the election.
“Look, there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan,” Biden said in a debate with Trump during that time. “They have said that this has all the characteristics — four, five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend Rudy Giuliani.”
Which wasn’t exactly right. The letter, which was first reported on by Politico, said that the discovery of a trove of emails on the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
It expressly did NOT say that it WAS a Russian disinformation campaign. In fact, the letter made clear that the former intelligence officials “do not have evidence of Russian involvement.”
Hunter Biden has never confirmed whether the laptop actually belonged to him. (You’ll note that the Post story above never says definitively it is Biden’s laptop.)
“There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me,” Hunter Biden told CBS in 2021. “It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was the – that it was Russian intelligence. It could be that it was stolen from me. Or that there was a laptop stolen from me.”
An attorney for the Delaware computer shop owner told the Washington Post that Hunter Biden signed a repair form for the computer but had never responded to later calls asking him to pick it up.
That repairman filed a defamation suit against Hunter Biden in 2019. In March, Biden’s attorneys filed “counterclaims alleging invasion of privacy,” according to ABC News. That report said the move by Biden amounted to “a major escalation in the younger Biden's increasingly aggressive legal posture toward some of his most vocal critics and those who allegedly trafficked his personal information.”
What we DO know is that the laptop was seized by the FBI from the Delaware computer shop in 2019. And, as CNN reported in 2021:
A law enforcement source has told CNN that the assumption is that it is Hunter Biden’s laptop. But the FBI is still working through the content and the integrity of what is on it, because it was not in Hunter Biden’s sole possession the whole time before it was handed over to the FBI.
What’s less clear is whether the laptop is tied in any way the ongoing federal investigation into Hunter Biden. That investigation began in 2018. According to the Washington Post:
Initially, the investigation centered around Hunter Biden’s finances related to overseas business ties and consulting work. Over time, investigators with multiple agencies focused closely on whether he did not report all of his income, and whether he lied on gun purchase paperwork in 2018.
The Post reported in the fall of 2022 that federal investigators believed they had enough evidence to charge Hunter Biden with with “tax crimes and a false statement related to a gun purchase.”
Just today the Post reported that a decision on charging Hunter Biden is close, noting that Biden’s lawyers met last week in DC with the U.S. Attorney from Delaware to discuss the case.2
“Typically, that sort of meeting — in which defense lawyers urge prosecutors not to seek an indictment of their client, or to seek reduced charges — comes toward the end of an investigation,” noted the Post.
The investigation has been further complicated by the emergence of a whistleblower last month — alleging that the investigation into Hunter Biden’s financials is riddled with conflicts of interests.
The whistleblower, who is an IRS special agent, is alleging “examples of preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected,” according to a lawyer for the person.
Anyway, back to the laptop. In late 2022, the Washington Post was given access to a hard drive purportedly containing the data from the laptop allegedly connected to Biden.3
The Post was able to conclude that nearly 22,000 of the 129,000 emails contained on the hard drive were extremely likely to be authentic and not faked in any way. Security experts were unable to make the same determination about the other 100,000 or so emails.
What was in the 22,000 emails the Post could verify? Here’s what they wrote:
Many of the nearly 22,000 verified emails were routine messages, such as political newsletters, fundraising appeals, hotel receipts, news alerts, product ads, real estate listings and notifications related to his daughters’ schools or sports teams. There was also a large number of bank notifications, with about 1,200 emails from Wells Fargo alone.
Other emails contained exchanges with Hunter Biden’s business partners, personal assistants or members of his family. Some of these emails appear to offer insights into deals he developed and money he was paid for business activities that opponents of his father’s bid for the presidency sought to make a campaign issue in 2020.
In particular, there are verified emails illuminating a deal Hunter Biden developed with a fast-growing Chinese energy conglomerate, CEFC China Energy, for which he was paid nearly $5 million, and other business relationships. Those business dealings are the subject of a separate Washington Post story published at the same time as this one on the forensic examinations of the drive.
The drive also includes some verified emails from Hunter Biden’s work with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company for which he was a board member. President Donald Trump’s efforts to tie Joe Biden to the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma led to Trump’s first impeachment trial, which ended in acquittal in February 2020.
The Post’s review of these emails found that most were routine communications that provided little new insight into Hunter Biden’s work for the company.
And, the Post noted that its investigators “found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.”
Does the laptop have any role in the ongoing investigation that could be resolved any day now? The honest answer is that no one not involved in the investigation knows that.
What you make of the laptop seems to come down to where you land on the partisan spectrum. The facts are that MUCH of what’s on it is unverified and may well be unverifiable.
I’ll keep updating this post as we learn more.
In February 2023, House Republicans held hearings to try to get answers from social media executives for why the article was, briefly, limited in terms of its share-ability on their sites.
The U.S. Attorney from Delaware is a Trump appointee. The Biden administration has chosen not to replace him.
Yes, there are a lot of allegedly’s in this story. Because so much is accusation rather than fact.
If Hunter Biden committed crimes, he should be charged. If there isn't enough evidence (or no evidence), investigators should say so. This has gone on long enough.
Facts may prove otherwise, but I still can't shake the feeling that this is all a big smokescreen to deflect from the nepotism and corruption of the Former Guy.