When the New York Post first reported on Hunter Biden's former laptop in 2020, it sparked a fierce debate by saying it contained incriminating evidence against him and his father, Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was running for president.
Many national newspapers raised doubts about the existence of the laptop and its alleged contents, and major social media platforms restricted posts about the Washington Post's reporting, a response that conservatives said was evidence of liberal censorship.
Many of the claims made by The Washington Post in its reporting about the laptop attempting to link President Biden to corrupt business deals have never been substantiated, but there was enough evidence on the laptop to continue to haunt Hunter Biden.
The laptop and some of its contents featured prominently in federal prosecutors' case against Biden's son, who was charged with making false statements and failing to declare drug use on a firearms application in 2018. Prosecutors briefly presented the laptop before a Delaware jury after an FBI agent testified that messages and photos on the laptop, as well as personal data Biden stored on a cloud server, revealed his drug use.
A jury on Tuesday found Biden, 54, guilty of three felony charges. A sentence will be handed down at a later date.
A copy of the hard drive from the silver Apple MacBook Pro laptop that Biden accidentally left behind at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, was turned over to The Washington Post by Rudolph W. Giuliani, an ally of then-President Donald J. Trump.
The Washington Post first reported on the existence of the laptop on October 14, 2020, just under a month before the presidential election. In a front-page story, the Post reported that the laptop contained emails that it said were “smoking gun” for corruption within the Biden family, including emails that appeared to show Biden setting up a meeting between his father and a Ukrainian businessman when Biden was vice president.
Questions arose immediately after the Washington Post published the story, including about the laptop's legitimacy. Facebook and Twitter restricted distribution of links to the Post article, saying they required fact-checkers to verify the article before it could be shared. A few days later, more than 50 former intelligence officials signed a letter alleging that the emails bore “classic hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.”
Even within The Washington Post, which often reports on Trump, some reporters and editors were initially skeptical of the laptop. The New York Times reported at the time that the reporters who wrote most of The Post's first articles on the laptop refrained from signing them due to concerns about the articles. Giuliani said he gave the laptop to The Post because “no one would take it, or if they did, they would do everything in their power to refute it before publishing it.”
The Wall Street Journal, which, like the Washington Post, is owned by Rupert Murdoch, was approached by Trump allies in 2020 but declined to provide access to the laptop, The New York Times reported.
The existence of the device and the authenticity of some of the materials stored on it have since been confirmed by multiple media outlets. But the extensive and ongoing reporting by The Washington Post alleging irrefutable links between the messages on the laptop and President Biden's alleged corrupt overseas business dealings has not stood up to scrutiny.
A New York Post spokesperson on Tuesday pointed to multiple editorials the paper has published about the laptop, including one dated June 6 that slammed the news organization. The editorial said that the news organization had dismissed the Post's initial report at the time as “Russian disinformation,” but that “now that Joe Biden's own Justice Department has introduced the laptop as evidence in Hunter's gun trial, the news organization is happy to discuss the story as if they never denied it.”
Sohrab Ahmari, who was editorial editor at The Washington Post when the first laptop story was published, said in an interview that the mainstream media's behavior in reporting the incident was “shameful.”
Amari, who left the Washington Post in 2021 to co-found Compact, an online political magazine critical of Trump, was not involved in reporting or editing the Post's coverage of the laptop, but he criticized many media outlets for what he saw as encouraging a “rush into censorship” by social media platforms.
“Regardless of how you feel about the politics of The Washington Post, it's the responsibility of other journalists to do their own reporting,” he said.