Tucker Carlson asks if Hunter Biden sexually abused minors based on rumors about laptop with child pornography
Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the April 28 edition of ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ saw him making a disturbing claim. After criticizing Joe Biden administration’s supposedly vindictive tactics against its dissidents, Carlson came to the topic of Matt Gaetz, who he called “smart, articulate, and brave”.
“So the question is, who exactly did Matt Gaetz sex traffic? We can’t answer that question, because no charges have been filed. All remains is the stigma. The remarkable thing is, there is apparently material on Hunter Biden’s laptop that suggests he was involved in the sexual abuse of minors. If that’s so, the FBI would know, because they have a copy of the laptop,” said Carlson.
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But is there any truth to this claim? Is there material on Hunter Biden’s laptop that suggests he was involved in the sexual abuse of minors?
Last year, the not-for-profit national news organization PolitiFact, owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute for Media Studies, looked into these allegations. It found that there is no evidence that a laptop, previously belonging to Hunter Biden, contained child pornography.
As per the report, an InfoWars video on Facebook with more than 173,000 (at the time) views claimed Trump "has footage of Hunter Biden raping and torturing little girls." It is worth noting that InfoWars is a far-right conspiracy theory and fake news website that has been suspended and banned from many platforms for violating their terms of service, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, iTunes, and Roku.
“We can’t say for certain what is or isn’t on a hard drive,” said the report. “But there is no evidence to support allegations that it contains thousands of images of Hunter Biden abusing children in China.” The unproven claim, it noted, had roots in 4chan, a website known to be a haven for the alt-right, neo-nazis, conspiracy theorists, and other far-right subcultures.
So, why does this claim exist? Carlson has been known to attack Hunter Biden on several occasions in the past. Earlier this month, both Carlson and Sean Hannity showed explicit images of Hunter Biden engaging in sex acts on their shows, saying they came from Biden’s missing laptop. One image appeared to show the president’s son with two naked women. Another showed him pulling back a woman’s hair. Carlson used the photographs to criticize President Joe Biden. “He’s a weak liberal who has no control of the people around him,” he said.
In a recent interview with CBS' Tracy Smith for ‘CBS Sunday Morning’, Hunter Biden said the laptop, that was first mentioned in a report by the New York Post, “could” be his. "For real, I don't know," Hunter Biden said. "There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me. It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was the -- that it was Russian intelligence. It could be that it was stolen from me.”