On Wednesday, the New York Times admitted in a new report that the infamous laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden was, in fact, his personal device.
The New York Post, which first broke the controversial laptop story in October of 2020, reports that the admission from the Times was part of its larger, comprehensive report about the ongoing federal investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax filings.
In the report, the Times acknowledged that a lengthy email exchange between Hunter Biden and his former business partner Devon Archer, which was obtained by the Times, “appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop.” Those email exchanges are currently being reviewed by federal investigators in the ongoing probe.
The Post first reported on the laptop less than one month before the 2020 presidential election, in which Hunter’s father, former Vice President Joe Biden, was the Democratic nominee against President Donald Trump. The laptop contained a trove of emails, pictures, text messages, and other files on Hunter Biden, ranging from personal family matters to business negotiations and financial documents. Most infamously, the laptop’s hard drive contained numerous photos and videos of Hunter with prostitutes and actively taking hard drugs, as well as Hunter himself admitting to his numerous foreign business dealings in China, Ukraine, and elsewhere.
In the most prominent example of his overseas affairs, Hunter had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma Holdings, despite having no experience in the energy sector whatsoever. Archer, who was convicted of an unrelated fraud charge last month, served with Biden on the Burisma board, and has since agreed to cooperate with federal investigators in the tax probe.
When Ukraine’s then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin announced his intentions to investigate Burisma for corruption, then-Vice President Joe Biden called the President of Ukraine at the time, Petro Poroshenko, and threatened to withhold $1 billion in American aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was fired and the investigation dropped. Poroshenko ultimately relented, and Shokin was fired. Biden even boasted about the incident during a panel several years later, which was caught on camera. When President Donald Trump attempted to have this matter investigated for possible corruption from the former Vice President, Democrats in the U.S. Congress retaliated by impeaching him.
The ongoing federal probe started with a focus on Hunter’s taxes, including how he allegedly paid off a tax liability of over $1 million just one year after he admitted to being under investigation by the IRS for defrauding the agency. However, the scope of the investigation expanded in 2018 to include any instances of his international business deals possibly influencing, or being influenced by, his father’s political career.