During Presidential Debate, Biden Denied Hunter Laptop Story

by Sharon Rondeau

(Dec. 5, 2022) — On Sunday afternoon, 45th President of the United States Donald J. Trump posted on his TruthSocial account a segment of a 2020 debate with then-Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden in which Biden denied The New York Post‘s October 14, 2020 reportage of his son Hunter’s laptop computer.

The emails from the computer contained evidence that the Biden family, with Joe Biden’s knowledge, engaged in business dealings with the nations of Ukraine, Russia, and China, among others, while Biden was vice president and Barack Obama’s point of contact on Ukraine. The arrangements reportedly resulted in significant enrichment to the Bidens.

During the campaign, Biden repeatedly said he knew nothing about his son’s business transactions with foreign countries, including Hunter’s position on the board of directors of Ukrainian energy company Burisma at a salary of $83,000 a month with no prior experience or expertise in the field.

At a January 2018 Council on Foreign Relations conference, Biden bragged about having used a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee to effect the firing of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who had opened an investigation into Burisma and Hunter Biden specifically.

Since Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s revelations Friday night that Twitter suppressed The Post‘s story with the purpose of helping Biden win the election with clear coordination with his campaign, Trump has posted on his TruthSocial site substantial commentary indicating he believes the new evidence supports his claim to be the true winner of the election and that drastic steps should be taken to make the situation right.

The video segment Trump posted, one of several over the course of the day, shows the debate unexpectedly turn from the topic of “race” to the Hunter Biden laptop, with Biden responding to Trump’s labeling of him as “a corrupt politician” by invoking a letter signed by 51 former Intelligence Community officials strongly suggesting the laptop narrative was “a Russian information operation.”

“If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this,” the former officials wrote. “…Such an operation would be consistent with Russian objectives, as outlined publicly and recently
by the Intelligence Community, to create political chaos in the United States and to deepen
political divisions here but also to undermine the candidacy of former Vice President Biden and thereby help the candidacy of President Trump.”

As the facts have unfolded over the last 2+ years, the IC officials were shown to have been incorrect in their assessment at the very least or misrepresenting The Post‘s report at worst approximately two weeks before the presidential election.

A small survey taken after the 2020 election of Biden voters in seven “swing” states, all but one of which were certified for Biden, showed the laptop was one of eight issues with which they were unfamiliar but which would have swayed them away from Biden had they known.

According to the report from the Media Research Center (MRC), a sufficient number of voters in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan said they would have voted differently had they been aware of one or more of the issues. “In 6 of the 7 states surveyed, enough voters would have not voted for Joe Biden that those states would have gone to President Trump, giving Trump 311 electoral votes and re-electing him,” the report concludes.

Further “testing” conducted by LifeNews revealed:

Even more Biden voters (45.1%) said they were unaware of the financial scandal enveloping Biden and his son, Hunter (a story infamously censored by Twitter and Facebook, as well as ignored by the liberal media). According to our poll, full awareness of the Hunter Biden scandal would have led 9.4% of Biden voters to abandon the Democratic candidate, flipping all six of the swing states he won to Trump, giving the President 311 electoral votes.

“…If this stuff is true about Russia, Ukraine, China, other countries, Iraq — if this is true, then he’s a corrupt politician,” Trump said of Biden, “so don’t give me this stuff about how you’re this innocent baby. Joe, they’re calling you ‘a corrupt politician’…it’s the laptop from hell.”

Asking for a chance to respond, Biden said, “Look, there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is ‘a Russian plant.’ They have said that this has all the char — Five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except his [sic] and his good friend, Rudy Giuliani.”

Giuliani supplied a copy of the laptop’s contents to The Post as well as to the New Castle County, DE police, he said. In December 2019, the FBI took possession of the laptop from repair-shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac and was aware of a second missing computer which Hunter Biden believed could leave him open to “blackmail,” The Federalist reported over a year ago.

The New York Times and The Washington Post have since admitted that the emails gleaned from the laptop are “real.”

Isaac was vilified in the press and remains in hiding, he reported last month. On “Fox & Friends” Sunday morning he said he felt “vindicated” following Musk’s release of the documents showing the coordination among Twitter, the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

His lawsuit alleging defamation against Twitter for claiming he had “hacked” the laptop might have had a different outcome had Musk owned the company at the time, Isaac told the three co-hosts.

“You mean the laptop is now another ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ hoax?…Is this where you’re going?” Trump exclaimed in response to Biden, referring to the unsubstantiated allegations that his 2016 campaign “colluded” with the Russian government to win the election. “You have to be kidding. Here we go again with Russia.”

“That’s exactly what…told,” Biden said underneath Trump’s retort.

“Gentlemen, I want to stay on the issue of race, OK?” moderator Kristen Welker of NBC News interjected.

Just before the beginning of the video segment Trump posted (1:11:23), Trump said he “ran” because of the “poor job” he believed Barack Obama and Biden, as his vice president, did. Biden then responded, “…You know who I am; you know who he is. You know his character; you know my character. You know our reputations for honor and telling the truth. I am anxious to have this race…character, country is on the ballot. Our character is on the ballot. Look at us closely.”

Wikipedia, for its part, reports as a “conspiracy theory” “that then-Vice President Biden withheld loan guarantees to pressure Ukraine into firing a prosecutor to prevent a corruption investigation into Burisma and to protect his son.”