For the first time, the Justice Department confirmed taking possession of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden from a computer shop. The new filing by special counsel David Weiss, which includes several embarrassing revelations, is the latest example of the increasingly antagonistic relationship between Hunter's team and his father's Justice Department after a proposed plea deal unraveled last summer. When some contents of the laptop's hard drive made it to the New York Post in the fall of Joe Biden and his supporters argued that the contents had the makings of a Russian disinformation campaign, and large social media companies suppressed or blocked access to the Post's article about it.
A DOJ filing tracks the story told by Delaware-based John Paul Mac Isaac, who owned a computer repair shop and claimed Hunter Biden left behind a laptop. Weiss wrote that in September 2019 Apple provided digital backups of Hunter's data in response to a search warrant and the laptop was "largely duplicative of information investigators had already obtained from Apple investigators." Hunter's lawyers have not said the president's son ever left behind a laptop, but have acknowledged that Mac Isaac and Rudy Giuliani accessed and disseminated his digital data in the final weeks of the 2020 election campaign. Hunter's discarded laptop, and whether it exists, is a controversial topic because it came to light in the final weeks of the election. Trump supporters mined the hard drive, including its personal contents, and published them across the internet.