Welcome to Pushback. I'm Aaron Mate.

Joining me is Ben Shrekinger. He is a national political correspondent for Politico, and his new book is The Bidens, Inside the First Families' 50-year rise to power.

Ben, how are you?

Hey, I'm doing well. Thanks so much for having me, Aaron. I'm glad to be here.

Congratulations on this book. I want to start with the headline finding from it, which is that

when it comes to this controversy that arose shortly before the November 2020 election about Hunter

Biden's laptop. These emails come out showing that Hunter Biden was leveraging his

family connections to pursue various business dealings. The response from the

Biden campaign and from the media was essentially that all this was

unconfirmed and even possibly

Russian disinformation. For this book, you've confirmed the contents of this laptop, at least

some of the contents of this laptop. Can you talk about just how this controversy arose and what

you were able to confirm yourself? Sure. So, you know, famously in mid-October of 2020, the New York Post began publishing a series of

stories based on what it said were the leaked contents of Hunter Biden's laptop.

The story it provided as to how it came into possession of these files was that Hunter had dropped off,

whacked off in a hard drive at a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, not far from where his father lives,

and forgot about them, and that after 90 days per this repair contract,

the hardware became the property of John Paul McIsaac,

the owner of this Macbook shop in, or Mac shop in Wilmington,

and that he later passed them along to Rudy Giuliani,

and that Giuliani and Bannon got them to the post in the waning weeks of the presidential campaign.

And there was immediate suspicion of this story of, you know, was this legitimate information? Was this backstory real? Was this Russian disinformation as a number of former

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