What could be more scandalous than one Hunter Biden laptop? How about… two Hunter Biden laptops?
Andrew Rice, a contributing editor at New York magazine, floated the idea that the president’s prodigal son may have lost more than one computer during a CNN interview on Monday:
People close to him have propagated the idea that perhaps actually there’s a second laptop out there that it might actually trace back to, which goes back to the general point that Hunter Biden was capable of losing more than one laptop that potentially contained devastating information about himself in this time period in his life.
To recap: Hunter abandoned his first laptop in a Delaware repair shop back in April 2019. The store owner attempted to turn the computer into the FBI, before passing it on to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who in turn supplied it to the New York Post.
Post stories emerging from the laptop’s contents — concerning for instance Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine and China — were censored and suppressed by Twitter and Facebook in October 2020. This was due to the tech giants’ concerns, heightened by the FBI, that the laptop may contain “Russian disinformation.”
Other supposedly neutral outlets such as the New York Times, NPR, CNN and MSNBC, neglected to cover the laptop story at face value, opting instead to quote “security officials” who also cried disinformation, baselessly. It was only well after the election that some of these outlets investigated and conceded that, yes, the laptop was genuine and, no, there was no evidence of Russian disinformation.
Rice was appearing on CNN to discuss the lengthy investigation of the laptop he undertook with Olivia Nuzzi for a New York magazine cover story, published one year, ten months and twenty-nine days after the Post’s first article.
The emails on the laptop offered a window into the inner workings of the post- and pre-White House Biden family business. But the photos and videos were much more salacious, showing Hunter cavorting with sex workers, smoking crack and lining up candy on his enormous appendage. Rice and Nuzzi characterize the whole sorry affair thus: “It is hard to think of a single living individual who has experienced as total an annihilation of digital privacy since our devices became extensions of our consciousness.”
After taking in all 11,000-plus words of Rice and Nuzzi’s story, Cockburn found his mind wandering to an enlightening moment from a different court drama: this Sunday’s episode of HBO’s House of the Dragon. The rapidly declining King Viserys proclaims that his daughter Rhaenyra is his “political headache” — after she’d returned from a debauched night of drinking, whoring and incest. Cockburn wonders if President Biden is a fan of the show…
