Miranda Devine has spent years digging through Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop, defending the authenticity of its contents and documenting what she says it revealed about the Biden family’s foreign business dealings.
So when Hunter sat down with Tucker Carlson and suggested — with Carlson appearing receptive — that the familiar story of how the laptop surfaced wasn’t really what happened, Devine was not amused.
In a blistering New York Post column Wednesday night, the author of Laptop from Hell accused Hunter of using Carlson’s enormous platform to try to rewrite a history that Devine argues has already been established by documentary evidence, federal investigators and Hunter’s own criminal proceedings.
“For Hunter and Joe Biden, lying becomes so habitual they eventually lose grip on reality,” Devine began.
But she saved plenty of fire for Carlson, too.
That’s because Carlson wasn’t some newcomer to the laptop story. Devine reminded readers that when the New York Post broke the story in October 2020, Carlson became one of its most prominent defenders on television.
“He invited me on his Fox show for seven of the next eight days to present evidence from the laptop,” Devine wrote.
That history makes what happened during Carlson’s new interview with Hunter particularly remarkable.
Hunter told Carlson he has “literally zero recollection or memory” of dropping a laptop off at John Paul Mac Isaac’s Delaware computer repair shop.
Then came a much broader claim.
“There is no such thing as a laptop,” Hunter said, before suggesting the material associated with the device came from multiple sources and potentially involved hacked cloud data and various foreign and domestic actors.
Hunter tossed out Russia, Ukraine, China and an Israeli-American computer expert named Yaacov Apelbaum. He also invoked what he called the “Netanyahu side” and “Israeli side” while naming Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Miles Guo, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.
Carlson didn’t exactly challenge the sprawling theory.
“I agree,” he responded.
That two-word reaction appears to have particularly gotten under Devine’s skin.
She described Hunter’s explanation as “incomprehensible nonsense” and accused him of trying to muddy the provenance of the laptop because doing so allows him to cast doubt on what was found on it. Devine then went point-by-point through the evidence she says destroys Hunter’s latest version of events.
She cited the repair receipt bearing Hunter’s signature for data recovery from three MacBook Pros; the FBI’s December 2019 seizure of the laptop from Mac Isaac; and evidence used by federal prosecutors placing Hunter near Mac Isaac’s Wilmington shop shortly before the laptops were dropped off.
Most importantly, Devine pointed to something considerably harder to explain away, the laptop itself eventually appeared in federal court.
During Hunter’s 2024 gun trial, FBI agent Erika Jensen identified the MacBook Pro by serial number, and prosecutors introduced data from the device as evidence. Hunter and his attorneys were sitting in the courtroom, Devine noted, and did not object to its use on the grounds that the computer was some Israeli-Russian-Ukrainian Frankenstein creation.
Contemporary reporting also confirms that the physical MacBook was introduced as evidence in Hunter’s federal gun case, while independent news organizations previously authenticated significant portions of the underlying data.
But Devine’s most pointed criticism may have been directed not at Hunter, whose credibility she clearly considers a settled matter, but at Carlson. “It’s inexplicable that Carlson went along with Hunter’s deceptions,” she wrote.
And there is an extraordinary history behind that criticism.
Carlson once described Devine as an expert on the Biden story and repeatedly hosted her to discuss Hunter’s laptop. As recently as 2024, Carlson’s own program promoted an extensive interview with Devine that included an entire segment devoted to the laptop and Biden family corruption.
Years earlier, Carlson and Devine were together on Fox News attacking the media’s handling of the laptop story. Devine accused major outlets of keeping their audiences “in the dark,” while Carlson gave her a national platform to make the case.
Now Devine sees Carlson helping Hunter do precisely what she spent years accusing the establishment media of doing, introducing enough uncertainty around the laptop to make people wonder whether anything discovered on it can really be trusted.
Carlson offered his own twist during the interview.
“The laptop is real,” he acknowledged, but argued that “the way that it entered the bloodstream of the American media was not real,” saying people connected to Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu had approached him at Fox News with material.
Devine isn’t buying it.
She said neither man explained how Netanyahu supposedly fits into the chain of custody and offered a far more mundane explanation for the Israeli-American computer expert Hunter mentioned.
According to Devine, Apelbaum didn’t meet Mac Isaac until October 18, 2020 — four days after the New York Post had already published its first laptop bombshell. Mac Isaac told Devine that former CIA analyst Larry Johnson introduced Apelbaum as someone who might help verify the laptop.
In other words, in Devine’s telling, the Israeli connection being waved around as a possible explanation for how the laptop story originated doesn’t even enter the timeline until after the story was already public.
And there is another irony hanging over the entire interview: Hunter Biden and Tucker Carlson weren’t always simply political adversaries. Reporting years ago revealed emails indicating Carlson had asked Hunter to help his son with a Georgetown University recommendation — a relationship that makes their long, unusually cordial conversation somewhat less surprising.
Devine’s larger complaint, however, isn’t about Carlson’s manners toward Hunter. It’s about what she believes is being erased. “The pity is that by placing doubt on the origins of the laptop, the Biden corruption that Mac Isaac risked so much to expose is whitewashed,” she wrote.
“Carlson once cared about that.”
For Devine, that is apparently the real story of the interview. She expected Hunter Biden to dispute the laptop, minimize its contents and offer alternative explanations for how the material became public.
What she apparently didn’t expect was to watch Tucker Carlson help him do it.
