Chuck Ross on April 9, 2021
In interviews this week, Hunter Biden referred to a scandal about his purported laptop as a “red herring,” while falsely suggesting that the U.S. intelligence community has said the computer is part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
Biden commented most recently on the laptop in an interview Thursday on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
“I really don’t know, and the fact of the matter is it’s a red herring. It’s absolutely a red herring,” he told Kimmel when asked whether the mystery laptop is his.
“I’m absolutely within my rights to question anything that comes from the desk of Rudy Giuliani. So, I don’t know, is the answer.”
Biden’s alleged laptop has been the source of controversy since mid-October, when the New York Post published documents said to be from a computer that Biden left at a computer repair shop in Delaware in April 2019.
The store owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, says he provided the computer to the FBI in late 2019 after its owner never came back to retrieve it. He has released a work order dated April 12, 2019, which includes his contact information and a signature that resembles Biden’s.
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In September 2020, Isaac provided a copy of the hard drive to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who leaked some of the contents to the New York Post and other news outlets.
Biden acknowledged in an interview with CBS News last week that the laptop could be his, but he has suggested that it was stolen from him or hacked, possibly by Russian operatives.
Biden repeated the Russia claim in an interview with podcast host Marc Maron earlier this week, but added a new wrinkle to his defense.
Biden falsely suggested to Maron that the U.S. intelligence community has commented on the laptop saga.
“The only thing I do know is that the intelligence community just came out with a report that said the entire thing is Russia’s disinformation,” Biden told Maron.
The intelligence community released a report on March 16 regarding efforts by Russia, China and Iran to influence politics in the U.S. The report said that Russian operatives had released disinformation about Joe Biden and his family, but nowhere in the report is the laptop mentioned.
The report does say that a Ukrainian lawmaker, Arkady Derkach, is associated with Russian intelligence. Derkach and Giuliani met at least once, in December 2019. Giuliani has denied that Russians were involved in handling the laptop.
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