When then-Vice President Joe Biden was put in charge of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy, his son, Hunter Biden, earned up to $1 million a year from 2014 to 2019 serving on the board of Ukrainian oil and natural gas company Burisma.

In October 2020, weeks before the presidential election that put Joe Biden in the White House, a controversy erupted involving data from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden that was abandoned at a Delaware computer shop. The New York Post published a story presenting emails from the laptop, alleging they showed corruption by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. The story was based on information provided by Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney of then-incumbent president and candidate Donald Trump. Forensic analysis later authenticated some of the data on the laptop, including one of two key emails used by the Post in its initial reporting.

Trump tried to turn the story into an October surprise to hurt Biden’s campaign, saying he was guilty of corruption while in office regarding Ukraine. The hard drive data had been shared with the FBI and Republican operatives including Trump advisor Steve Bannon before it became public, the New York Times reported at the time.

PolitiFact wrote in June 2021 that the laptop did in fact belong to Hunter Biden “but it didn’t prove much” and nothing “from the laptop has revealed illegal or unethical behavior by Joe Biden as vice president with regard to his son’s tenure as a director for Burisma”.

Analysts found that people other than Hunter Biden had repeatedly accessed, copied data and written files to the drive for years, both before and after the New York Post story.

After the 2016 election, social media companies were criticized for allowing false political information to spread on their platforms, including from Russian intelligence, suggesting it may have helped Trump get elected. Twitter and Facebook took measures to prevent sharing the New York Post article.

The Hunter Biden laptop scandal persists, with some Republican lawmakers pinning hopes on it as something that could somehow derail Joe Biden. Scrutiny is expected to continue now that the GOP has taken over the House, Associated Press reported.

After years of attacks by Republican officials and conservative media, Hunter Biden has asked the Justice Department to undertake a criminal investigation of close Trump allies and others who accessed and disseminated personal data from the laptop.

The House Oversight Committee for the new Republican majority is investigating the Biden administration and his family.

New Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk has suggested that the internal communications he released as part of his so-called “Twitter files” show government censorship – suggesting Twitter acted “under orders from the government” when it suppressed the New York Post’s October 2020 laptop story.

However, former Twitter executives told Congress on Feb. 8 they did not get any requests from the government to temporarily suppress the story, CNN reported.

Some of the executives acknowledged to lawmakers before the House Oversight Committee that Twitter was wrong to have temporarily suppressed the New York Post story regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020.

Former Twitter policy director Vijaya Gadde deflected allegations of collusion between the FBI and Twitter to censor The New York Post, the New York Post reported.

“In 2018, we had developed a policy intended to prevent Twitter from becoming a dumping ground for hacked materials,” Gadde said. “It became clear that Twitter had not fully appreciated the impact of that policy on free press and others.”

“In hindsight, Twitter should have reinstated The Post account immediately,” Gadde added.

Former Twitter head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, told the committee that “Twitter made a mistake” by blocking The Post’s reporting and locking the newspaper out of its accounts.

Republicans on the committee were not satisfied with that explanation, The New York Post reported. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) called Twitter “basically a subsidiary of the FBI.”

Photo: From left, James Baker, Former Deputy General Counsel of Twitter; Vijaya Gadde, Former Chief Legal Officer of Twitter; Yoel Roth, Former Global Head of Trust & Safety of Twitter; and former Twitter employee Anika Collier Navaroli, are sworn in to testify during a House Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing on Capitol Hill, Feb. 8, 2023. (AP/Carolyn Kaster)