The Hunter Biden 4Chan Leak Has Tucker Carlson and the Far Right Salivating

The fringe message board 4chan has been called a lot of things over the years: The birthplace of QAnon. A radicalization pipeline for mass shooters. A cesspool of white supremacy, racism, and revenge porn.

What it hasn’t been known as is a bastion of free speech that’s saving the world from Big Tech’s supposed anti-conservative censorship. 

But that all changed when Fox News host and internet savant Tucker Carlson talked about the fringe message board on his top-rated show Monday night.

The reason Carlson was even talking about 4chan last night was because one of the message board’s users claimed to have cracked Hunter Biden's iCloud account and leaked some of the content.

“He put it on 4chan, which is some sort of website that’s, basically not very moderated; it’s kind of the website of last resort for people who want to get information out there but can’t because everything is so completely censored at this point,” Carlson told his millions of viewers.

It should be noted that 4chan moderators took the Biden post down almost immediately, though not before it was downloaded and re-uploaded elsewhere online.

The 4chan user who posted the information said the data they had obtained included “voicemails, videos, voice recordings, pictures etc. of Joe.” The user posts what they claimed were backups for Biden’s iPhone and iPad. VICE News has not been able to independently identify the veracity of those files, though some images of Biden posted to 4chan do not appear anywhere else online.

“We have no reason to believe any of these data are fabricated,” Carlson said, before saying in the next breath that his team has not independently verified any of the information. “But it’s pretty obvious that the materials that we’ve looked at are real,” he added, echoing a view shared across Trumpworld in recent days.

Since the alleged leaked data was uploaded to 4chan, Trump supporters, QAnon followers, and far-right extremists have gone into overdrive, dubbing this the “iPhone from Hell” and claiming—without evidence—that the leak was going to bring down the Biden administration. 

The Secret Service said on Monday that it is aware of the alleged leak of data belonging to the president’s son, but told NBC that “at this time we are not in a position to make public comments on potential investigative actions.”

This leak comes two years after the New York Post claimed to have obtained a copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive, which he left at a Delaware repair shop. Supporters of former President Trump tried to use its contents—which allegedly included images of the younger Biden smoking crack and having sex—to scupper his father’s presidential bid.

Two years later, “Hunter Biden’s laptop” remains a shorthand among Trump sycophants to describe nefarious—but completely unproven—actions by the president. Indeed Carlson’s mention of 4chan and the alleged iCloud leak on Monday came in the middle of a much longer monologue that once again referenced the laptop and how it supposedly contained secrets for why the president is “beholden” to China.

While demonizing Hunter Biden, Carlson once again failed to mention that he once asked the president’s son for a reference letter for his own son, who was trying to get into Georgetown University. Even though Biden did write that letter, Buckley Carlson did not attend Georgetown.

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