WASHINGTON — In the weeks that preceded the New York Post’s explosive report on Hunter Biden’s so‑called “laptop from hell,” Senator Ron Johnson’s staff received an offer to take possession of the infamous hard drive, only to refuse it because they couldn’t shake several reservations, he explained on the current episode of “Pod Force One.”
“You got the one that was going to be given to us, but we couldn’t accept,” Johnson told The Post’s Miranda Devine. “It did sound like a suspicious story. I mean, something you had to be careful.” He went on to say that before moving forward, the team would have needed to “properly vet it. You had to do your due diligence on it.” He feared the laptop might have been stolen property, a concern that forced the team to adhere strictly to their integrity rules.
The laptop, abandoned in a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019, had been left behind by the younger Biden at an unknown location. Its owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, who is legally blind, suspected that Hunter Bucket dropped it off but was not certain. Copies of the device were circulated and eventually became the basis for the Post’s headline October 2020 story, which unveiled an email linking vice‑presidential aide Vadym Pozharskyi to Joe Biden. The story surfaced just three weeks before the election and was briefly shut down by Facebook and Twitter — now X — which even blocked the Post from posting.
The event also sparked criticism from 51 current and former intelligence officials. Still, other outlets began citing the laptop and prosecutors later used its contents in Hunter’s firearms trial.
A few weeks after the Post broke the story, the FBI had already acquired the laptop in December 2019. “So, they could authenticate it, they knew it was real,” Johnson said. About that period, the senator’s office received the hard drive around the end of September and reached out to the FBI for verification, only to be given a protracted “runaround.” In an August 2020 briefing, the FBI allegedly warned Johnson and his fellow Republican, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, that “you got to be careful about what you hear out of Russia and out of Ukraine, and spread disinformation.” Johnson recalled feeling “quite livid” at the briefing, saying the FBI seemed to be “throwing us off the track.”
The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Johnson, had always been more interested in health‑care policy and the national debt than in digging into scandals. Yet when the Clinton email controversy broke, his curiosity about potential violations of the Federal Records Act sparked his investigative career.
Through it all, Senator Johnson maintained that he was not there to “investigate” a political figure but to “fix Obamacare” and curb the national debt — a stance that puts him at odds with the voters who flooded the Post’s story into a social‑media storm.
Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for candid conversations with Washington’s most influential disruptors on “Pod Force One.”
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