Exclusive | Sen. Ron Johnson tells ‘Pod Force One’ he was offered Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 but ‘couldn’t accept’

WASHINGTON — Weeks before The Post’s bombshell story on Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell,” Sen. Ron Johnson’s team was offered the infamous device but “couldn’t accept” it due to various concerns, he revealed on the latest episode of “Pod Force One.”

“You got the one that was going to be given to us, but we couldn’t accept,” Johnson (R-La.) recounted to The Post’s Miranda Devine.

“It did sound like a suspicious story. I mean, something you had to be careful.”

“You had to properly vet it. You had to do your due diligence on it. So, we thought it could have been stolen property. I had no idea. So, we had to kind of follow our rules of integrity.”

The younger Biden’s laptop had been abandoned in a computer repair shop in Delaware in 2019.

Owner John Paul Mac Isaac, who is legally blind, believed the former first son dropped off the laptop, but wasn’t conclusively sure.

Copies of the laptop hard drive were shopped around, and ultimately, The Post used it to break the bombshell October 2020 story about a smoking gun email showing that Hunter introduced Burisma adviser Vadym Pozharskyi to his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden.

That story, which dropped three weeks before the presidential election, was suppressed by Facebook and Twitter, now known as X, which even briefly blocked The Post from accessing its account.

Some 51 current and former intelligence officials also cast doubt on the story. But ultimately, other media outlets eventually cited the laptop in stories, and prosecutors used it in Hunter’s trial for charges related to his possession of a firearm while addicted to illicit substances.

---

Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington on ‘Pod Force One.’ Subscribe here!

---

“The FBI, obviously got Hunter Biden’s laptop in December of 2019. So, they could authenticate it, they knew it was real,” Johnson recounted.

Around the time, the senator’s team was offered the laptop, the FBI gave him what Johnson described as an “ambush” briefing. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) also received a similar, separate briefing.

“This was August [2020],” he recalled, explaining how the FBI was telling him and Grassley, “you got to be careful about what you hear out of Russia and out of Ukraine, and spread disinformation.”

---

Full Episode

---

“I think maybe in that briefing, they might have talked about what they were also talking about publicly,
that you just might have disinformation about the president’s son.”

Johnson recounted being “quite livid” over the briefing as the FBI wasn’t telling him “anything I don’t
know” and was curious about who put the agents up to that.

“Yes, it absolutely was,” he said, when asked if it was an “ambush.” “It was meant to throw us off the track.”

The senator’s team received the laptop copy around “the tail end of September” and reached out to the FBI, who already had it and gave them the “runaround” for weeks.

Johnson, who helms the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, stressed that he didn’t “come to the Senate to investigate,” but rather to fix Obamacare and attack the soaring national debt.

After briefly becoming chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee in 2015, Johnson quickly became a point person for investigations in the upper chamber.

“When the Hillary Clinton email scandal broke, not only is it my responsibility to investigate corruption within government, but specifically, this had to do with federal records and the law she probably broke in terms of the Federal Records Act,” he explained.

“So, that began my investigatory career.”