CBS News is the latest mainstream media outlet to find that the famous “Hunter Biden laptop” is authentic as Republicans, now in control of the House, are poised to launch investigations centering on its contents.
Independent analysts commissioned by CBS confidently concluded the laptop was real and hadn’t been tampered with. The outlet’s finding flies against widespread denial and suppression of news about the laptop that began ahead of the election of President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden’s father.
“I have no doubt in my mind that this data was created by Hunter Biden, and that it came from a computer under Mr. Biden’s control,” said Mark Lanterman, chief technology officer of the company that performed the review, Computer Forensics Services.
CBS was provided with what was described as an “exact copy” of the laptop’s data that was given to federal investigators. The independent analysis “found no evidence” that data had been “tampered with” or that new files were made after the laptop was last believed to have been used in 2019, CBS reported.
The laptop contains emails that allegedly link the Bidens to illegal overseas business dealings, as well as vivid photos depicting Hunter Biden’s drug abuse and sexual activity. Material from the laptop is at the center of investigations Republicans are launching with control of the House newly secured in the midterm election.
The laptop became an “October surprise” when the New York Post broke news of its existence weeks before the 2020 election. Twitter and Facebook restricted sharing the story for a time as a consensus took hold that it was likely disinformation. That claim was even promoted by dozens of former senior intelligence officials, as reported by POLITICO.
In the days after the story broke, CBS published a lengthy description of the laptop’s origins and reported that it “has not seen or corroborated the data supposedly on the hard drive.”
But in March 2022, the New York Times later reported that emails on the laptop “were authenticated.” And two weeks later, the Washington Post, reported that thousands of emails on the laptop had been verified in an independent review.
An attorney for Hunter Biden told CBS that “there have been multiple attempts to hack, infect, distort, and peddle misinformation regarding Mr. Biden’s devices and data.”
The attorney added: “There are ongoing efforts to utilize the infected and distorted data to spread disinformation. At no time did any individual … have Mr. Biden’s consent to access his computer data or share it with others.”
