Hunter Biden, Mounting Defense of Laptop, Seeks Vindication in the Court of Public Opinion

President Biden’s son, Hunter, is trying to disprove the adage about how the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client. Denying that his infamous laptop even exists, the disbarred attorney demonstrates the audacity that’s essential to rehabilitating a scandal-plagued public image.In Monday’s interview with a former CIA contractor, Shawn Ryan, Mr. Biden laid his defense before the court of public opinion. The conversation ran just shy of five-and-a-half hours, signaling a strategy to flood out as much information as possible to obscure the 2020 tale of the laptop and supplant it with fresh news.Mr. Biden confronted Mr. Ryan’s question about the laptop with classic persuasion rhetoric, saying, “So, what I can tell you…” The implication is that the speaker is taking the listener into their confidence while hinting that there is more that they cannot share but wish they could.“There is no laptop,” Mr. Biden said. He described it with a coarse epithet. He allowed that there’s “an actual, physical laptop that somebody had, but the guy who had that said he had the laptop.” It’s a sentence that would confound any grammar school effort to diagram, which is the point. What sticks is the profanity and the doubts.Mr. Biden alleged that his foes “literally went to Ukraine to get” his laptops and hard drives “four months before John Paul Mac Issac ever even existed.” Note that the repairman, too, is framed as a fabrication, a “legally blind” man who Mr. Biden called “literally blind” and unable to identify him.Although Mr. Mac Issac first presented the laptop to the FBI, Mr. Biden alleged that “the only thing” he could “think of doing” with it was “calling Rudy Giuliani.” He added that the repair shop was a short way from “where my parents live,” as if one can show up at 1600 Pennsylvania like any home to return lost items.Mr. Biden said that his foes “cobbled together” a “stolen, concocted, fabricated mishmash of digital information” and “thousands and thousands and thousands of emails.” He added that “no laptop could have held all of that,” although they can and do.“What they did,” Mr. Biden alleged, “is they just put it all together, and then they talk about it.” Having the metaphorical court reporter read back the testimony sounds like a paranoid recounting of a conspiracy theory. Yet Mr. Biden managed to sell it.Next, Mr. Biden said that “there’s no videotape of me ever dropping off a laptop … none whatever.” Of course, most of human history went unrecorded, which isn’t proof that nothing happened. Yet Mr. Biden’s rapid-fire delivery, jumbled syntax, citation of unfamiliar names, and speaking in the third person left little time to pick such nits.“You never dropped off a laptop?” Mr. Ryan asked. “I have no recollection whatsoever,” Mr. Biden replied, “of ever dropping off a laptop at” that shop. The statement was emphatic and ignored the possibility that he’d blacked out while on a bender.It was a risk for Mr. Biden to give so much time to a conservative like Mr. Ryan. Under questioning, he might have come across like the “Saturday Night Live” attorney, Martin Short’s Nathan Thurm, who fumbled and perspired through interviews, his denials transparent and absurd.Rather than be tripped up by the facts, Mr. Biden rewrote them and offered fresher, more compelling stories. He shared that he owes up to $15 million with “no idea” how he’s “going to be able to pay off” creditors and weighed in on political issues. “We don’t want immigrants that are coming here illegally,” Mr. Biden said, “draining us of resources, and being prioritized above” citizens. Democrats may no longer be paying half a million dollars for one of Mr. Biden’s paintings, but the reaction to that line reminded the party that his family is not to be ignored. Mr. Biden’s defense gave a glimpse of the lawyer he might’ve been had he avoided substance abuse. By laying out a strong case, he demonstrated that — in the court of public opinion, at least — even a disbarred attorney can represent himself without having a fool for a client.

Hunter Biden, Mounting Defense of Laptop, Seeks Vindication in the Court of Public Opinion

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