Earlier this week, a lawyer for Hunter Biden asked the Justice Department in a letter to investigate close allies of former President Donald Trump and others who accessed and disseminated personal data from a laptop that a computer repair shop owner says was dropped off at his Delaware store in 2019.
Biden's attorneys also asked Fox News host Tucker Carlson to retract and apologize for what they say are false and defamatory claims made repeatedly about him on-air, including implying that he had unauthorized access to classified documents found at his father's home.
Christian Adams is a former Justice Department attorney and founder of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. He argues the new GOP-controlled House has spurred that pushback against Republican officials and conservative media.
"I think that certainly changed the atmosphere a bit on Hunter Biden," Adams tells AFN. "But I think there's a more fundamental reason this is happening – [and that's] because that's who these people are: they don't play around.
"When something like this affects them, they punch back by any means necessary by finding ways to cause pain for the people interested in them."
Adams contends the laptop scandal is all about family corruption and influence peddling.
"Hunter Biden was making enormous amounts of money from foreign governments for doing nothing – and that's what they're afraid of: the message being that somehow this family was profiting off of their political power … You enrich yourself because of your government office," he says.
The former DOJ attorney considers that to be "a more devastating story" than the discovery of classified documents at Joe Biden's Delaware residence.
