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. 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. According to the Post, the story was based on information provided to Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney of incumbent president and candidate Donald Trump, by Mac Isaac. 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. Shortly after the Post story broke, social media companies blocked links to it, while other news outlets declined to publish the story due to concerns about provenance and suspicions of Russian disinformation. By May 2023, no evidence had publicly surfaced to support suspicions that the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation scheme. In December 2019, under the authority of a subpoena issued by a Wilmington grand jury, the FBI seized the laptop from Mac Isaac. FBI investigators handling Hunter Biden's laptop quickly concluded in 2019 "that the laptop was genuinely his and did not seem to have been tampered with or manipulated". In June 2024, federal prosecutors utilized the laptop as evidence as part of a criminal case against Hunter Biden, alongside testimony from an FBI agent involved in authenticating and investigating the laptop. The hard drive data had been shared with Trump advisor Steve Bannon before it became publicly known. 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. A joint investigation by two Republican Senate committees released in September 2020 and a Republican House Oversight committee investigation released in April 2024 did not find wrongdoing by Joe Biden with regard to Ukraine and his son's business dealings there. PolitiFact wrote in June 2021 that the laptop did belong to Hunter Biden, but did not demonstrate wrongdoing by Joe Biden. Starting in 2021, news outlets began to authenticate some of the contents of the laptop. In 2021, Politico verified two key emails used in the Post's initial reporting by cross-referencing emails with other datasets and contacting their recipients. CBS News published a forensic analysis which examined a "clean" copy of the data obtained directly from Mac Isaac. It concluded that the "clean" data, including over 120,000 emails, originated with Hunter Biden and had not been altered, while other copies circulated by Republican operatives "could have been tampered with". Other outlets also verified portions of the data, while noting problems in fully authenticating the copies they had to work with.