Explainer: The 2020 'October surprise' - Hunter Biden's laptop

Twitter’s new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, retweeted “The Twitter Files” over the weekend, a series of tweets detailing censorship on the platform from independent journalist Matt Taibbi. Tweet number 16 of the thread provides a title for "part one" of the Twitter Files: "How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story."

Hunter Biden's laptop has been in and out of the news since late 2020, and those not caught up with U.S. political discourse might not know exactly what’s happening. So if you read the words “Hunter Biden laptop story” and had no clue what that meant - here it is, explained. 

Background

In late 2019, a conspiracy theory became prominent, one that claimed that presidential candidate Joe Biden, while vice president, engaged in corruption relating to his son Hunter's employment by a Ukrainian gas company.  

On October 14, 2020, three weeks before the election, the New York Post published an article with the headline: "Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad." In the article, the Post claims that the aforementioned email "flies in the face” of Joe Biden's claims, chiefly that he knew nothing about his son’s business activities in Ukraine.

How did the Post get its hands on this email? Well, as per the article: "The blockbuster correspondence... is contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer."

One could guess by now that this is the titular “Hunter Biden’s laptop.” 

It continues that the computer was “dropped off at a repair shop in Biden’s home state of Delaware in April 2019." In addition, there are details about other material extracted from the computer, including scandalous videos of Hunter - who has been open about struggling with addiction - smoking crack while engaging in sexual activities. 

The Post article notes that the person who brought in the laptop - described as a "water-damaged MacBook Pro" - never paid for the repair or retrieved it and cites the shop owner, a man named John Paul Mac Isaac, as the source for all these claims. 

Then, the Post provided additional interesting material: Photos of a Delaware federal subpoena showing that the FBI seized the computer and hard drive in December 2019. But, before the FBI could do so, Mac Isaac luckily made a copy of the laptop’s hard drive, giving it to former mayor Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello.

Giuliani then provided the materials to the New York Post. He has later been quoted as saying he provided the material to the publication because "either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out."

Aftermath

The Post quickly started receiving questions about the article's veracity. People asked about the laptop’s chain of command. Reports even emerged that the staff member who wrote it refused to put their name on it due to credibility concerns. 

A month after the initial report, in an interview with The New York Times, it came out that Mac Issac was legally blind and “could not be sure whether the man was Hunter Biden.” However, according to Mac Isaac, he asked the man’s name to fill out a work order, and he identified himself as Hunter Biden. Additionally, according to him, there was a sticker from Beau Biden Foundation on the laptop.

Many have called the laptop controversy an "October surprise," an orchestrated political event that happens the month before an election that hopes to impact the outcome. Additionally, some have noted that, according to The Daily Beast, Mac Isaac was an “avid Trump supporter.” Some also called it a “Russian plot,” but that was never proven to be true. 

In a 2021 interview with CBS, Hunter Biden spoke on the controversy, claiming: “I don't have any idea… 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 Russian intelligence. It could be that it was stolen from me.”

In March 2022, The Washington Post said that thousands of emails from the laptop "are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures," citing two security experts who examined the data. However, it did also note: "The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified." 

Additionally, an independent review commissioned by CBS News, which was published late last month, found that the data from the laptop "shows no evidence of tampering or fabrication."