Hunter Biden is revisiting the scandal that rocked his family ahead of the 2020 presidential election, appearing to claim that there “is no laptop” in a new interview.
The interview on the Shawn Ryan Show dropped on YouTube this week, with the conversation covering Biden’s struggles with addiction, thoughts on current politics, and of course, the infamous laptop controversy.
In a clip from the interview teased on Instagram, Hunter claimed he had “no recollection” of dropping off a laptop for repair, the supposed origin of the sequence of events that came to a head in 2020.
At the time, the New York Post published a controversial report claiming Biden’s laptop was dropped off for repair at a Delaware computer repair shop and left unclaimed.
The FBI eventually seized the laptop, and the Post’s report was largely based on alleged files from it that fell into the hands of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
“I have no recollection whatsoever of ever dropping off a laptop to John Paul Mac Isaac … He’s a laptop repair shop owner in Wilmington, Delaware, whose store is three and a half miles at most from where everybody knows my parents live,” Biden said in the new interview. “So if he had a laptop that he wanted to return, he thinks that the best thing to do is call Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Bob Costello, and give it to my sworn enemy?”
The Post claimed the laptop contained files showing then-Vice President Joe Biden tried to protect his son from a corruption investigation by Ukrainian officials involving energy company Burisma.
For a brief period after the Post story's publication, social media outlets blocked links to it and other news outlets remained cautious about following up on it, for fear that the story may have been linked to Russian disinformation efforts — a fear brought on by Russia's documented interference in the 2016 election. No public evidence has ever backed up that theory, however.
Multiple congressional investigations found no evidence of Burisma-linked corruption. However, the controversy colored the 2020 campaign ahead of Biden’s presidency.
Hunter Biden, meanwhile, faced a mountain of legal issues relating to drugs, guns, and taxes, some of which were pardoned by his father in 2024.
In his Shawn Ryan interview, Biden claims there was never a laptop at all. He told Ryan that the material said to be the contents of the laptop was actually stolen from other sources and presented to the public as if it came from his computer.
“They cobbled together all this digital material that had been stolen from phones, taken from the dark web, and they made it out to be this thing,” Biden told Ryan. “Then the story doesn’t become about the laptop at all because there’s nothing in the laptop other than a record of me being a degenerate at the worst moment in my life. Smoking crack, doing drugs, doing whatever.”
https://www.complex.com/life/a/kris-seavers/hunter-biden-says-there-is-no-laptop (Archive)
