I'm loathe to ask but to save me a pretty nasty google search,
what's the issue with Hunter Biden and his laptop?
He left a laptop in to be fixed in NYC and someone got their hands on it and it has proof of insider trading or using status for financial gain or some such?
Short version: nobody really knows except the people that have seen the contents, and the ones that are talking are biased.
The story goes like this: Hunter Biden left the laptop to be fixed in Delaware and never picked it up during a long drug binge. Delaware law says its ownership reverts to the guy fixing it if the bill goes unpaid for 90 days. Guy who fixed it opens it up once it's his, having noticed a ton of pornography on the desktop while fixing it, and among an ungodly amount of personal data finds income information. He thinks that data represents a great criminal conspiracy of influence peddling, though he's neither conversant with campaign finance laws nor a forensic accountant.
He turns the information over to the FBI, who do nothing he can see. Not trusting them in the first place, he kept copies. He turns to Bannon, who does Bannon things right before the election.
There seems to be general agreement that the Feds can get Hunter on some fairly penny-ante stuff. He was using drugs (by his own admission) when he bought a gun, and lied on the form. There appear to be some tax charges the Feds can bring to bear. The US Attorney is a Trump appointee, and he seems hesitant to bring those charges. That makes sense, because we aren't talking about the sort of stuff the Feds usually go after, they don't like losing and it only takes one juror who thinks the charges are politically motivated to hang a jury.
In a
Citizens United world, the bribery lines have become pretty blurry. A bribery case needs two things to stick: a transfer of something of value, and a
quid pro quo. If Johnny Chung walks a $50,000 check to Hillary's chief of staff and says to others that he's being funded by Chinese military intelligence, then a year later Clinton signs off on repealing the Jackson-Vanik amendment with respect to China and supports China's WTO accession, it looks bad. In that case, the Feds went after Chung for campaign finance violations, but not the DNC or Clinton, because they didn't have ironclad proof of a
quid pro quo.
These days, people are a lot smarter about concealing the
quid pro quos and it's a lot harder to "follow the money", as Mark Felt instructed Woodward and Bernstein. There's nothing illegal about handing a politician's kid a sinecure job. It's a way of getting access to social networks, which is totally legal. Lobbyists trade money for access all the time. It's an explicit "do 'A' and I will give you 'B'" that's illegal, which can be hard to prove.
