Why Hunter Biden’s Laptop Will Never Go Away
A year and a half ago, less than three weeks before the presidential election, the New York Post published a story about the recovery of a laptop that allegedly belonged to Hunter Biden, and a trove of personal emails and photographs allegedly found on it. Many were embarrassing; a few were interesting enough to become memes. (The most indelible—the authenticity of which I have not personally verified—is of Hunter smoking a cigarette in a bathtub.) The meat of the article was the claim that the younger Biden had traded inappropriately on his family name, up to the point of arranging meetings between his Ukrainian business associates and his father, while the latter was vice president.
President Donald Trump’s camp made the story out to be more than it was—Hunter Biden was for invoking his family’s political fame to help him make money, and he denied the specific allegations of wrongdoing (though a broader investigation into his affairs has been ongoing , led by federal prosecutors in Delaware, working with the FBI and the IRS). The story’s claims about Joe Biden’s participation were weak (at best). It quickly came out did not think that the paper had done enough to confirm the authenticity of the laptop. But the story was a lit match, and the national mood at the time was kerosene.
