Hunter Biden laptop controversy

In October 2020, a controversy arose involving data from a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden. The owner of a Delaware computer shop, John Paul Mac Isaac, said that the laptop had been left by a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden. Mac Isaac also stated that he is legally blind and could not be sure whether the man was actually Hunter Biden.^[1] Three weeks before the 2020 United States presidential election, the New York Post published a front-page story that presented emails from the laptop, alleging they showed corruption by Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee and Hunter Biden's father.^[2] According to the New York Post, the story was based on information provided to Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney of incumbent president and candidate Donald Trump, by Mac Isaac.^[1] Forensic analysis later authenticated some of the emails from the laptop, including one of the two emails used by the Post in their initial reporting.^[3][4][5] Later assertions by Twitter owner Elon Musk and others that the government had ordered the company to suppress the Post story to favor Joe Biden in the weeks leading to the election were not supported by a Twitter Files examination authorized by Musk.^[6]

Trump attempted to turn the story into an October surprise to hurt Joe Biden's campaign by falsely alleging that while in office Biden had acted corruptly regarding Ukraine to protect his son.^[7][8][9] The hard drive data had been shared with the FBI and Republican operatives such as Trump advisor Steve Bannon before it became publicly known.^[1] In December 2019, under the authority of a subpoena issued by a Wilmington grand jury, the FBI seized the laptop from Mac Isaac.^[1][10][11]

PolitiFact wrote in June 2021 that, while "over time, there has been less doubt that the laptop did in fact belong to Hunter Biden", the laptop "was real in the sense that it exists, but it didn't prove much", as "[n]othing from the laptop has revealed illegal or unethical behavior by Joe Biden as vice president with regard to his son's tenure as a director for Burisma".^[12]

In November 2022, CBS News published a forensic analysis it commissioned, which examined a "clean" copy of the data obtained directly from the repair shop operator. That analysis concluded that the "clean" data, including over 120,000 emails, originated with Hunter Biden and had not been altered, contrasting that to other copies circulated by Republican operatives, which "could have been tampered with".^[3] The Washington Post reported that experts at their request had authenticated a number of emails, including one that was the subject of the New York Post reporting.^[4] The drive analyzed for The Washington Post lacked a clear chain of custody, and was considered "a mess" and "a disaster" from a forensic standpoint by the two analysts.^[4] It contains emails marked to and from Hunter Biden^[7] and other digital files relating to him.

Two forensic analysts who independently examined the data for The Washington Post^[4] authenticated 1,828 and 22,000 emails, respectively, of the almost 129,000 emails on the hard drive in 2022. Neither analyst could verify the vast majority of the data, nor could they find clear evidence of tampering but they note "key pieces of evidence useful in discovering tampering were not available." In some cases, The Post matched content to other sources "that the experts were not able to assess". The unverifiable emails included some prominently reported previously by other news outlets. The analysis found that people other than Hunter Biden had created six new folders on the drive over a week after the original report by the New York Post and months after the laptop had been taken into FBI custody. It also found that data had been accessed and copied off the drive by people other than Hunter Biden over the course of nearly three years.^[4]

Despite persistent allegations that the laptop contents indicated corruption by Joe Biden, a joint investigation by two Republican Senate committees released in September 2020 did not find wrongdoing by him, nor did a Republican House Oversight committee investigation by November 2023.^{[13][14][15][16][17]}