At the time there were two clear and obvious issues; the provenance was sketchy (material may easily have been added or deleted), and the source (Hunter) was a drug addict.
The "Yeah, my dad's totally on board with this" suffered from both, it may have been fake material added to discredit Biden (hindsight suggests not) OR (just as damning) it's the utterance of a crackhead bignoting an endeavour for credability.
What followed was one partisan media wing endlessly blowing up nothing of substance into a fabricated conspiracy, the other arm either ignoring the nothing of substance or lamely addressing why it was nothing.
You yourself acknowledge this in the framing you used: "showing that Hunter Biden was claiming that .."
The two problematic italics were precisely why knowledgable and honest journalists chose to not endlessly report on it.
At the time there were two clear and obvious issues; the provenance was sketchy (material may easily have been added or deleted), and the source (Hunter) was a drug addict.
The "Yeah, my dad's totally on board with this" suffered from both, it may have been fake material added to discredit Biden (hindsight suggests not) OR (just as damning) it's the utterance of a crackhead bignoting an endeavour for credability.
What followed was one partisan media wing endlessly blowing up nothing of substance into a fabricated conspiracy, the other arm either ignoring the nothing of substance or lamely addressing why it was nothing.
You yourself acknowledge this in the framing you used: "showing that Hunter Biden was claiming that .."
The two problematic italics were precisely why knowledgable and honest journalists chose to not endlessly report on it.