When the New York Post first reported in 2020 about a laptop once used by Hunter Biden — which the paper said contained incriminating evidence against him and his father, Joe Biden, who was running for president — it set off a firestorm.
Many national news outlets raised questions about the existence of the laptop and the claims about its contents, while major social media platforms limited posts about the Post’s coverage. Conservatives said those reactions were evidence of liberal censorship.
Many of the claims made by the Post in its coverage of the laptop, in which the publication sought to link President Joe Biden to corrupt business dealings, have not been proved. But the laptop had enough incriminating evidence to continue to haunt Hunter Biden.
The laptop and some of its contents played a visible role in federal prosecutors’ case against the president’s son, who was charged with lying on a firearm application in 2018 by not disclosing his drug use. A prosecutor briefly held up the laptop before the jury in Delaware, and an FBI agent later testified that messages and photos on it and in personal data that Biden had saved in cloud computing servers had made his drug use clear.
Tuesday, the jury found Biden, 54, guilty of three felony charges. He will be sentenced at later date.
A copy of the hard drive from the laptop, a silver Apple MacBook Pro that Biden accidentally left at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, was turned over to the Post by Rudy Giuliani, an ally of Donald Trump, who was president at the time.
The Post first reported on the existence of the laptop on Oct. 14, 2020, less than a month before the presidential election. In a front-page article, the Post wrote that the laptop contained emails that it described as a “smoking gun” showing corruption in the Biden family, including correspondence that appeared to describe a meeting that Biden had arranged between his father and a Ukrainian businessperson when his father was vice president.
Questions were raised immediately after the Post published its article, including about the legitimacy of the laptop. Facebook and Twitter restricted the distribution of links to the Post’s article, saying fact checkers needed to verify the claims before they could be shared. Several days later, more than 50 former intelligence officials signed a letter claiming that the emails had “the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation operation.”