Sen. Ron Johnson said his team was offered a copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop weeks before the New York Post published its October 2020 report, but he chose not to accept it due to concerns about the circumstances and an FBI briefing he later described as an “ambush.”
Johnson discussed the episode during an interview on “Pod Force One” with The Post’s Miranda Devine, as reported [1] by The New York Post.
“You got the one that was going to be given to us, but we couldn’t accept,” Johnson said, recalling how the offer first came to his staff.
“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 laptop, abandoned in 2019 at a Delaware repair shop, was believed by the shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, to have been dropped off by Hunter Biden, although he could not be completely certain.
Copies of the hard drive were circulated before ultimately reaching The Post, which published its report on Oct. 14, 2020, three weeks before the election.
The story included an email suggesting Hunter Biden introduced Burisma adviser Vadym Pozharskyi to his father, then–Vice President Joe Biden.
Following publication, the story was suppressed by Facebook and X, which restricted sharing of the report and temporarily blocked The Post from its account.
Additionally, 51 current and former intelligence officials publicly questioned the authenticity of the laptop material at the time. The device was later cited by federal prosecutors in Hunter Biden’s firearms case.
“The FBI, obviously got Hunter Biden’s laptop in December of 2019. So, they could authenticate it, they knew it was real,” Johnson said.
Johnson described how, in August 2020, shortly before his team was offered the hard drive, the FBI summoned him and Sen. Chuck Grassley for briefings warning them about potential Russian and Ukrainian disinformation.
He recalled being told, “you got to be careful about what you hear out of Russia and out of Ukraine, and spread disinformation.”
Sen. Ron Johnson told @mirandadevine [2] on this week’s episode of “Pod Force One” that he was offered Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop in 2020 but “couldn’t accept” it. Subscribe here: https://t.co/x59BzQ3ygn [3] pic.twitter.com/GM0GoFmAc4 [4]
— New York Post (@nypost) December 3, 2025 [5]
Johnson said agents also suggested that negative information about Hunter Biden could be part of such efforts.
He said he became “quite livid,” arguing that the briefing contained nothing new and questioning the motivations behind it.
When asked if it was an ambush, he responded, “Yes, it absolutely was. It was meant to throw us off the track.”
Johnson said his team received the offered laptop copy in late September 2020 and contacted the FBI, only to be met with weeks of delays. The FBI already had the device in its possession.
Johnson, who chairs the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, noted that he did not originally run for office to conduct inquiries.
“I didn’t come to the Senate to investigate,” he said, explaining that his focus had been on issues such as Obamacare and the national debt. He became involved in investigative work after becoming chairman of the Homeland Security Committee in 2015.
“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 said.
“So, that began my investigatory career.”