After all but ignoring the Hunter Biden story for more than two years, CBS News on Monday raised questions about the business dealings of President Biden’s son based on information from a laptop abandoned at a repair shop in Delaware.

CBS said it obtained a copy of the laptop’s data and had its authenticity confirmed by digital forensic analysts. The data, CBS said, are likely to be used against the president by Republicans when they take over control of the House of Representatives in January and unleash a flurry of investigations into subjects touched on by the laptop’s contents.

After a review of the data, CBS’s analysts said there is no evidence that it was tampered with or otherwise falsified, as some allies of the president have suggested. Correspondent Catherine Herridge reported that the laptop’s contents do not appear to contain the smoking gun that some Republicans are hoping for, however. 

“After two years of scrutiny, the laptop has not produced evidence that President Biden directly benefited from his son’s business deals,” Ms. Herridge said.

The New York Post first reported on the contents of the laptop in mid-October 2020, just weeks before the election that Mr. Trump would go on to lose to President Biden.

At the time, the Post’s report about the laptop was decried as “Russian disinformation” and widely suppressed by major press outlets and social media platforms. In a presidential debate before the election, Mr. Biden called the laptop a “Russian plant.”

Analysts at the conservative Media Research Center who monitored coverage of the saga of “Hunter Biden’s laptop” said the major U.S. networks gave the topic only passing coverage.

After watching more than 73 hours of coverage on their morning and evening newscasts as well as their Sunday roundtable shows, the MRC analysts said ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted a total of 17 minutes of coverage of the story. CBS, the MRC said, had the most coverage — a total of 10 minutes and 33 seconds.