WASHINGTON — Lawyers for President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, have asked the Justice Department to investigate close allies of former President Donald Trump and others who they say accessed and disseminated personal data from a laptop that he dropped off at a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019.
In a separate letter, Biden’s attorneys have also asked Fox News host Tucker Carlson to retract and apologize for what they say are false and defamatory claims made repeatedly about him on-air, including implying without evidence that he had unauthorized access to classified documents found at his father’s home.
The request for a criminal inquiry, which comes as Hunter Biden faces his own tax evasion investigation by the Justice Department, has no practical impact and does not commit federal prosecutors to take any action. But it nonetheless represents a concerted shift in strategy and a rare public response by the younger Biden and his legal team to years of attacks by Republican officials and conservative media, scrutiny expected to continue now that the GOP has taken over the House.
It also represents the latest salvo in the long-running laptop saga, which began with a New York Post story in October 2020 that detailed some of the emails it says were found on the device related to his foreign business dealings. It was swiftly seized on by Trump as a campaign issue during the presidential election that year.