Hunter Biden tried keeping his laptop out of child-support dispute in Arkansas

Hunter Biden's legal team sought to exclude testimony about his laptop from the child support case he is litigating in Arkansas, arguing that the financial records in it are outdated, since it was "abandoned sometime in 2019," according to a court motion filed on April 20 but unsealed this week.

While apparently acknowledging that the records and financial information on the laptop were actually Hunter Biden's, the motion filed by his legal team said it was "not an acknowledgment of ownership or abandonment" of the device, according to the Washington Free Beacon. The laptop was dropped off at a computer repair shop in 2019 and apparently abandoned.

"Evidence of Defendant's income from three years ago and beyond would not tend to prove his income today," said Hunter Biden's lawyers. "Thus, the Court should exclude any expert testimony related to the laptop as not relevant."

The April 20 motion has since been withdrawn, though no reason was given for doing that. But it came after a public hearing during which one of Biden's lawyers was asked to clarify if in fact it was Hunter's laptop. The lawyer claimed not to know and was told by the judge that Hunter would need to come to court to explain and answer such questions.

Biden has been paying $20,000 a month in child support since 2020, after a 2019 DNA test confirmed that the now 4-year-old child of 32-year-old Lunden Roberts, a stripper who worked at a club in Washington and had a brief affair with the now 53-year-old son of President Biden, is Hunter's child, according to the New York Post. The figure was agreed to in a private settlement shortly after his father, Joe Biden, announced his run for the presidency in 2020.

Biden wants to have the size of those payments reduced, claiming that he is having financial problems and can no longer afford to make those payments. But his interests are clashing with those of his father, who announced last month that he is officially running for a second term as president.  

The concern is that the child-support battle will force Hunter to answer questions about the contents of the laptop while he is under oath. He is already facing several investigations, including over his allegedly unpaid taxes, over the accuracy of his answers on an application to purchase a gun, and about his business dealings in a probe by Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

Those business dealings, some of which are documented in the laptop and some of which have come through banking records that Comer's committee had subpoenaed, may also implicate other members of the Biden family, including President Biden himself.