Hunter Biden Claims “Laptop from Hell” Never Existed

Oh, and the dog ate his rent check and the crack fairy planted all those videos in his accidentally public Dropbox.

🎄Wednesday is typically my paid-subscriber day, but since it’s Christmas Eve and my amazing boss [hi!] has given me the rest of the week off, I couldn’t do it. Merry Christmas to my incredible tribe—thank you for keeping me honest, busy, and creatively over-stimulated. I’ll be back on Monday with bells on. (Not literally. That would be super annoying.) XOXO🎄

It was sometime in 2012 and the morning of my youngest daughter Sasha’s second-grade parent-teacher conferences.

“Have fun, I guess,” she lisped nervously as my husband and I were heading out. “And remember, if my teacher says anything bad about me, it wasn’t me.”

At the time, it was peak seven-year-old adorableness. In hindsight, it’s giving serious Hunter Biden laptop vibes.

This week, the planet’s most infamous First Son sat down for a miniseries-length interview with podcaster Shawn Ryan. It was five hours of grievance-airing, self-absolution, and plotlines that would get rejected from a daytime soap for being too implausible. He complained about being $15 million in debt, tried to wax poetic about politics (“there’s no savior coming to fix everything”), and insisted that the Bidens possess “no generational wealth,” which is certainly a take for a family with decades of D.C. influence, bottomless foreign business entanglements, and a beach house that’s been called a “Cape Cod-style mini-mansion.”

He blamed his financial faceplant on collapsing art sales, a memoir that’s flatlined, and legal bills from suing those bastards who exposed his infamous “laptop from hell.” You’d almost have to feel sorry for the guy, except in the same interview he announced—deadpan—that the laptop from hell doesn’t actually exist. (Next week’s headline: Hunter Biden Sues Santa Claus, Demands Recount of Naughty List.)

It’s actually impressive how many evolutionary iterations the now-fictitious laptop has gone through. In 2020, when the New York Post first reported that a very real, very Hunter-looking MacBook had been abandoned at a Wilmington repair shop, Hunter’s position was simple: I don’t know if it’s mine. Which—given what he’s openly admitted about his drug use at the time—was oddly plausible.

The media quickly supplied a more convenient explanation, declaring the story “Russian disinformation.” The phrase spread instantly, repeated by cable news anchors, national newspapers, intelligence officials, even the Big Guy himself during a 2020 presidential debate against Donald Trump.

The public was told—in a letter signed by 51 former senior intelligence officials, no less—that the story had “all the classic hallmarks” of a Kremlin influence operation. And what were those hallmarks? Well… that was never really spelled out. It was more of a vibe; a general atmospheric mist that floated through NPR and The Washington Post for a few weeks. Social media platforms, eager to avoid being blamed for another election outcome, dutifully throttled the story, blocked links, and suspended accounts for even sharing it. By the time the election was over, the public understanding of “the laptop” was basically: fake, foreign, and dangerous to democracy.

Then came 2022–2023, when multiple outlets—including many of the same ones that originally dismissed the story—quietly confirmed the laptop was real. The FBI had it in their possession. Forensic analysts authenticated the email headers and device IDs. Hunter asked for a criminal probe into Trump allies for “theft” of data from his precious portable computer. Even The New York Times and The Washington Post begrudgingly verified its legitimacy. Congressional watchdogs went further, calling the material “the biggest influence-peddling scheme in American history,” detailing an international web of payments, shady consulting arrangements, shell companies, and eyebrow-raising messages involving the so-called “big guy.” In other words, the laptop went from “Russian psy-op” to “actually legitimate” faster than Hunter could trot out his pop’s name in an investor meeting.

But now, Hunter has created yet another version of the story: the laptop doesn’t exist at all. Not metaphorically—literally. His new claim is that the entire thing was “cobbled together” from stolen data and falsely presented as a single device.

It’s a fascinating pivot, because it directly contradicts his prior public statements, including the one where he told CBS News that the laptop “absolutely could” be his and he was just too high to remember dropping it off. At the time, “I was on so much crack I can’t rule anything out” was treated as a reasonable defense.

Suddenly, we’ve upgraded to: There was never a laptop. At all. The laptop is a myth. A political Loch Ness Monster. Apparently the same man who once said he was too fried to recall basic life functions now wants us to believe he’d definitely remember something as uneventful as leaving a device at a repair shop.

“They cobbled together all this digital material that had been stolen from phones, taken from the dark web, and they made it out to be this thing,” Hunter explained on the podcast. “Then the story doesn’t become about the laptop at all because there’s nothing in the laptop other than a record of me being a degenerate at the worst moment in my life. Smoking crack, doing drugs, doing whatever.”

Sure, dude. It’s just you, some gutter glitter, and a few hookers enjoying a DIY drug safari. There’s nothing whatsoever about selling access to your dad, sketchy Ukrainian business deals, millions in Chinese wire transfers, shady shell companies, illegal firearm possession, or any of the other little political bombshells that keep showing up in congressional hearings and intelligence reports.

It’s the world’s most chaotic misdirection attempt: “Look over here at my sad little drug problem so you ignore the international crime scene behind Door #2.”

Just to be clear: Multiple pieces of evidence—including FBI testimony and independent analyses—point to an actual laptop tied to Hunter Biden and a corresponding hard drive that shows no signs of tampering. An FBI agent testified the serial number matched Apple’s records, and a CBS forensic review found zero signs anyone Photoshopped, airbrushed, copy-pasted, deep-faked, AI-generated, or sprinkled fresh scandal onto it. In other words, the madness was all original content.

So why is Hunter suddenly trying to un-exist the laptop now, after it’s been authenticated by media outlets, congressional investigators, and the nation’s top federal law-enforcement agency? Why pretend the physical object never existed when the photos, emails, metadata, and timestamps have been circulating for years? What exactly is this new deflection supposed to accomplish in 2025?

Maybe Hunter is jealous that the Epstein files finally dropped and stole all his scandal-thunder. (“You want salacious? I have THOUSANDS of filthy photos right here! High-res! Curated!”) Maybe, after years of being America’s walking cautionary tale, he’s realized that pleading “I was too drug-addled to keep track of my electronics” doesn’t age well. Maybe he’s trying to rebrand himself as misunderstood—in which case, I can see why he might try to discredit a searchable library of his greatest crack-fueled hits. Perhaps he just can’t resist rewriting history every time someone puts a microphone in his face.

The most likely scenario? Trump’s out there handing out audits the way Oprah handed out cars—“You get a subpoena! You get a subpoena!” And Hunter, who knows exactly what’s on that machine (more or less) and no longer has First Family immunity, can hear the legal sirens warming up. So what’s the move? Simple: declare “the laptop” a myth. A mirage. A digital Bigfoot. If the contents are dangerous, the easiest fix is to shout “FAKE!” loudly and often and hope it sticks. The irony? That’s literally the same trick the media pulled in 2020 when they swore the whole thing was Russian fan fiction.

The unintentionally funniest part of Hunter’s latest pivot is that it requires us to believe that the same man who documented his naked drug orgies like he was shooting a Netflix original is suddenly a reliable historian. It demands we ignore the timestamps, signatures, and receipts in favor of, essentially: “Trust me, I was too high to remember it, therefore it didn’t happen.” And it commands us to pretend we didn’t all live through the very public evolution of this story—from “might be mine,” to “Russian hoax,” to “okay, fine, it’s real,” to “biggest influence-peddling scheme ever documented,” to “actually it never existed.”

Here’s the real punchline: after five years of shifting explanations, legal filings, congressional hearings, FBI testimony, leaked photos, authenticated emails, and a presidential election warped around the thing, Hunter Biden wants us to buy the one version of the story that requires zero evidence and relies entirely on his memory—his memory!—from the Olympic-level bad decisions era.

So much yes.

You’re free to believe whatever you want. But if you’re asking me to choose between expert investigators and the guy who left a crack pipe in a rental car, I’m rolling with the folks who don’t routinely misplace their felony diaries.

Seriously, though. Merry Christmas, y’all!