Hunter Biden sat across from Tucker Carlson for two hours last week and confirmed every email on the laptop is real. Then he spent the rest of the interview explaining why none of it was his fault.
The real villain, according to Hunter, is Benjamin Netanyahu.
The interview, released Sunday on The Tucker Carlson Show on X, featured the former first son and the conservative podcaster bonding over a shared list of enemies — with the Israeli Prime Minister and President Donald Trump sitting right at the top. The two men hadn't seen each other in eleven years, not since a 2014 email surfaced showing Carlson thanking Biden for writing a recommendation letter for Carlson's son's Georgetown University application.
Whatever personal history existed between them, it apparently greased the wheels for a remarkable public performance. Hunter Biden called Netanyahu "evil incarnate," adding, "If it's antisemitic to point out that Bibi Netanyahu is evil incarnate then I don't know what to say to people anymore." Carlson matched him stride for stride, claiming that Israeli agents connected to Netanyahu had pushed fabricated allegations about the laptop directly to a producer on his former Fox News show.
"The claim that there was material involving the abuse of minors on the computer came from the Israelis," Carlson said. "I'm just telling you that they came to me with it." He went further: "They were behind it. I felt like everybody in Washington knew it, but there was so much pressure not to criticise Israel."
That's a significant claim from someone who spent years as the most-watched host in cable news. The laptop saga has a well-documented timeline. Hunter Biden left a damaged computer at John Paul Mac Isaac's repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware in April 2019. The FBI obtained the laptop in December 2019. The New York Post broke the story in October 2020, weeks before the presidential election. Now Carlson is saying the worst allegations — the ones he himself amplified — were fed to him by a foreign intelligence operation.
But Hunter wasn't done defending himself. On the laptop itself, he was surprisingly direct: "It's all mine, all those emails. You know what not a single one of them proves? Any criminality of my father whatsoever." He admitted that joining the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, while his father Joe Biden was vice president was a "stupid thing to do." Stupid, sure. Criminal? He'd prefer you not connect those dots.
The interview's most revealing stretch had nothing to do with Israel. Hunter Biden called President Trump "the one existential threat I think we face as a country," adding, "I'm not this believer that Trump is merely the symptom of a disease. I believe Trump is central to why this disease has gone from a local epidemic to a pandemic." Carlson didn't push back. In fact, he piled on, calling Trump a "flamboyantly corrupt leader."
So we have Tucker Carlson — the man who built a media empire on the premise that the Biden family was the most corrupt political dynasty in modern American history — now sitting across from Hunter Biden, nodding along, blaming Israel for the laptop's worst allegations, and calling the sitting president corrupt. Hunter Biden, meanwhile, is on what can only be described as a rehabilitation tour, having recently appeared with Candace Owens and even debated white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes.
Hunter disclosed during the conversation that he owes between $4 million and $6 million to the law firm Winston & Strawn and other legal representatives — the accumulated cost of multiple investigations and criminal cases. That's a man with real financial motivation to reshape the narrative around his image, and he found a willing partner in Carlson.
Some on the left are already calling the Netanyahu comments antisemitic. That concern would carry more weight if the same crowd hadn't spent five years insisting the laptop was Russian disinformation. Now that two high-profile media figures are saying it was actually Israeli disinformation, the previous certainty about Moscow looks even more absurd. Everyone had a theory about who planted what. Nobody wanted to deal with what was actually on the device.
Hunter Biden confirmed the emails are authentic. He admitted Burisma was a mistake. He owes millions in legal fees from cases built on evidence he now acknowledges is real. And the takeaway from his two-hour interview is that Netanyahu is evil and Trump is an existential threat.
When your defense requires agreeing with every fact in the prosecution's case and then blaming a foreign country, that's not exoneration. That's a strategy.