Hunter Biden announced Thursday that he will publish a series of essays on Substack covering the past seven years of his life, and he opened with the one subject his family has spent years trying to bury: the laptop.
The first installment, titled "The Laptop," revisits the controversy that engulfed his father's 2020 presidential campaign after the New York Post reported that a device Hunter Biden dropped off at a computer store contained incriminating information about both him and then-candidate Joe Biden. Years of Republican scrutiny over Hunter Biden's business ventures and personal life followed.
Now, with his father out of office and a seven-year sobriety milestone behind him, Hunter Biden wants to tell the story his way. The question is whether the version he's selling bears any resemblance to the facts the public already knows.
In excerpts shared on X and reported by The Hill, Hunter Biden's essay does not deny the laptop existed. He does not deny its contents reflected his life. What he does is something more slippery: he disputes the framing while conceding the substance.
"They called it the laptop. I will call it that too, although the name is not accurate, the provenance was never established, and no court or forensic examiner ever certified the chain of custody that would have made it evidence rather than theater."
Read that again carefully. He accepts the label. He accepts that the contents are real enough to write about. But he wants the reader to treat the device itself as somehow illegitimate, not because the material on it was fabricated, but because no court formally certified its chain of custody. That is a legal technicality dressed up as exoneration.
The laptop's contents, emails, text messages, photographs, financial records, have been reported on extensively since October 2020. Congressional investigations relied on them. Federal prosecutors used material from the device in their cases against Hunter Biden himself. The idea that the laptop was mere "theater" requires ignoring everything that followed its disclosure.
Hunter Biden does not shy away from the personal wreckage the laptop revealed. His essay acknowledges what was on the device in terms that are, at minimum, candid about his addiction:
"Twenty years of my life, or a version of it. Messages sent at hours that don't belong to anyone sober. Photographs I would never have taken in daylight."
And further:
"It is accumulation, the slow daily work of an addict doing the thing that is killing him because the alternative feels like dying faster."
These are not the words of a man denying the laptop's authenticity. They are the words of a man who knows exactly what was on it and is trying to recast the entire episode as a story about illness rather than influence, recovery rather than corruption.
Addiction is a real disease. Nobody serious disputes that. But addiction does not explain the foreign business dealings, the payments from overseas energy companies, or the questions about what, exactly, Hunter Biden was selling to clients in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere. Those questions were never about substance abuse. They were about access, and whether the Biden family traded on the vice presidency for profit.
By leading with addiction, Hunter Biden collapses the entire laptop controversy into a personal health narrative. It is a shrewd rhetorical move. It is also a dodge.
Perhaps the most revealing line in the essay is Hunter Biden's claim that efforts to target him began before the device was even recovered, and that "a scandal was constructed, and a laptop was produced to anchor it."
This is conspiracy framing, plain and simple. It inverts the timeline of accountability. The New York Post published its reporting. Senate committees investigated. The Justice Department pursued its own cases. Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to federal tax charges and faced a separate firearms prosecution. None of that was "constructed." It happened because the evidence warranted it.
The suggestion that powerful forces manufactured a scandal and then conveniently produced a laptop to support it asks the reader to believe that the New York Post, Republican investigators, federal prosecutors, and the IRS whistleblowers who came forward were all part of a coordinated fabrication. That is a heavy lift, and Hunter Biden offers no evidence for it in the excerpts shared so far.
Hunter Biden posted on X to announce the series, writing:
"Over on Substack I'm writing about the last seven years of my life. It's the first draft of the whole story. All of it."
He said chapters will be released every few days, accompanied by an exclusive video series titled "Where's Hunter?", a name that borrows from the mocking phrase Republicans used for years when the president's son seemed to vanish from public view during politically inconvenient moments.
The format is notable. Substack gives Hunter Biden total editorial control. No editors. No fact-checkers. No adversarial questions from reporters. No cross-examination. He can frame every episode, choose every detail, and omit anything he likes. It is memoir without accountability, published in installments designed to build an audience and, presumably, revenue.
This is not Hunter Biden's first attempt to shape his own narrative. In 2021, he published a memoir called "Beautiful Things," which detailed his recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. That book largely avoided the business dealings and political controversies that made the laptop a national story. The Substack series appears to follow the same pattern: personal confession as a substitute for substantive answers.
For all its literary ambition, the first Substack installment leaves the hardest questions untouched, at least based on the excerpts made public so far.
There is no discussion of the specific business relationships that drew congressional scrutiny. No mention of the emails detailing meetings with foreign executives. No accounting of the millions that flowed through Biden family-linked entities. No engagement with the testimony of IRS whistleblowers who said the investigation into Hunter Biden was slow-walked and politically managed.
Hunter Biden recently celebrated seven years of sobriety, and no one begrudges him that. Recovery is hard. But sobriety does not retroactively answer questions about whether a sitting vice president's son leveraged his father's name for foreign cash, and whether the vice president himself was aware of or involved in those arrangements.
Those are the questions that drove years of GOP scrutiny. Those are the questions the laptop helped surface. And those are the questions Hunter Biden's Substack essay, so far, appears designed to avoid.
Hunter Biden calls his series "the first draft of the whole story." But first drafts, by definition, are incomplete. They get revised. They get edited. They leave things out.
A man who spent years refusing to answer questions in public is now offering to tell "all of it", on a platform where no one can ask follow-ups, challenge his claims, or demand documentation. That is not transparency. It is content strategy.
The laptop was real. The contents were real. The investigations were real. The guilty plea was real. No amount of elegant prose on Substack changes any of that.
When someone controls the platform, the format, and the release schedule, what you're reading isn't a confession. It's a closing argument, delivered to a jury of subscribers who already bought the ticket.
