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- The Hunter Biden laptop controversy began three weeks before the 2020 United States presidential election when the New York Post published a story in October 2020 using emails from a laptop computer which the Post alleged to show corruption by then-US presidential candidate candidate Joe Biden with regard to his son Hunter Biden's tenure as a director at Burisma Holdings Limited. Then-president Donald Trump tried to turn the story into an October surprise to hurt Biden's campaign, with Trump falsely claiming Biden had acted corruptly regarding Ukraine while in office. After extensive scrutiny of the laptop contents by multiple parties, no evidence of illegal or unethical activity by Joe Biden or Hunter Biden was found. The laptop lacked a clear chain of custody, and was considered "a mess" from a forensic standpoint by analysts. The owner of a Wilmington, Delaware, computer repair shop, John Paul Mac Isaac, said the laptop was brought to his shop in April 2019 by a person who said that he was Hunter Biden. The person never came back to retrieve the computer. The drive contained emails marked to and from Hunter Biden and other digital files relating to him. PolitiFact wrote in June 2021 that it is possible that "copies of a laptop" were obtained, instead of Hunter Biden's actual laptop. The New York Times and The Washington Post reported that their sources had authenticated a number of emails, including one that was the subject of the New York Post reporting. Nearly 22,000 of the almost 129,000 emails on the hard drive were confirmed as authentic in 2022 by two forensic analysts who independently examined the data for The Washington Post; the analysts could not verify the vast majority of the data. The unverifiable emails included some prominently reported previously by other news outlets. The analysis found that people other than Biden had written files and folders to the drive before and after the original report by the New York Post, but only after it had been taken into FBI custody. It also found that data had been accessed and copied off the drive by people other than Biden over nearly three years. 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 data originated with Hunter Biden and had not been altered. (en)
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