Hunter Biden, the son of President Biden, in a new interview says that he doesn’t know if a laptop found in Delaware that was the center of an election-year controversy was really his.
In an interview on “CBS Sunday Morning” that will air on Sunday, Biden says he doesn’t have any idea whether the laptop at the center of a controversial New York Post story about his business dealings published weeks before the 2020 election was his.
“For real, I don’t know,” Biden tells CBS in the interview
“I don’t have any idea— I have no idea whether or not” the laptop was his.
Pressed further, Biden suggests that there could have been a laptop that was stolen from him.
“There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me. It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was the — that it was Russian intelligence,” he says. “It could be that it was stolen from me.”
Biden’s business dealings were frequently the subject of attacks by former President Trump and other Republicans during and before the presidential campaign.
The New York Post story detailed a computer purportedly belonging to Biden that was left at a Delaware computer shop and never picked up. Emails on the computer, according to the Post story, raised questions about Biden’s business connections in Ukraine, and candidate Joe Biden’s connections themselves.
But it’s never been completely clear whether the laptop was really Hunter Biden’s or whether the emails on the computer were his. Biden’s remarks to CBS News reflect the possibility that the emails were somehow connected to a Russian intelligence operation.
The Delaware store owner told the Post at the time that he was unable to identify whether the individual who dropped off the laptop was Hunter Biden. But he notified federal authorities at the time, and the device was reportedly seized by the FBI. He also provided a copy to Rudy Giuliani, who worked as an attorney for Trump and made unproven claims about the Bidens and Ukraine.
Hunter Biden last December issued a statement saying the Justice Department was investigating his tax affairs, though it was not clear whether it was connected to the seizure of his laptop.
The Post story was also the subject of controversy amid reports that there were doubts in the Post’s newsroom about it.
Security experts at the time suggested that the laptop could have been part of a disinformation operation undertaken by Russia, which the intelligence community says interfered in the 2020 election to damage the elder Biden’s candidacy. A declassified report released earlier this year on election interference made no mention of the laptop, and Trump’s director of national intelligence at the time denied that Russian disinformation was behind the emails linked to the laptop and reported by the New York Post.
The first impeachment of Trump centered around allegations that Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden to hurt Joe Biden, whom Trump viewed as a threat in the presidential election of 2020. Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, but no evidence of impropriety by his father ever surfaced. The intelligence community report released earlier this year said that Moscow stoked the Ukraine claims as part of the effort to interfere in the election.
Trump seized on the Post’s report during the 2020 presidential campaign and pressured then-Attorney General William Barr to investigate Hunter Biden and release the information before Election Day.
The CBS interview comes two days before the Tuesday release Hunter Biden’s book, “Beautiful Things.” In the book, he opens up about being the subject of repeated GOP attacks, saying that he “became a proxy for Donald Trump’s fear that he wouldn’t be re-elected.”