The most important moment in Hunter Biden’s criminal trial came not when the verdict found him guilty on three counts of lying on a federal firearms application, but in the previous week, when President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice admitted in court and under oath that the laptop linking Hunter Biden to payments from foreign governments was real.

When the New York Post first published the story of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden showing that he had used his connections with his father to secure millions of dollars in payments from foreign governments, including communist China and Ukraine, the Biden campaign immediately realized they had to act fast to neutralize it.