Former President Donald Trump insisted in an interview with Piers Morgan that the story about a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden falling into the hands of the media shouldn’t have been suppressed by social media outlets and cost him the 2020 election.

       In part of their wide-ranging interview which was broadcast on Monday for the first episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored, Morgan tells Mr Trump that the censoring of efforts to share the New York Post story detailing the contents of a laptop supposedly belonging to Hunter Biden before the election was unfair.

       He claimed this was a stronger argument for the 2020 election being “rigged” than any of Mr Trump’s repeated false claims about the election.

       The former president appeared to agree with the assertion that it had cost him the election, telling Morgan that keeping the story off of Twitter “made a 17-point difference” in the final election results.

       “But you know what?” he added, returning to those falsehoods about a stolen election, “Even without it, I won it, and we won it big.”

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       The former president’s remarks are some of his most explicit yet about the Hunter Biden laptop story, as he appears to directly assert that the story’s purpose was to swing the election trends in his favour.

       In reality, the story was not found to have been the result of a Russian disinformation campaign, as was speculated by some news outlets at the time, but also was not a “smoking gun” proving wrongdoing by Joe Biden or his son that some Republicans have claimed it to be. At best, emails authenticated after being found on the laptop suggest so far that the former vice president may have at most had more discussions about his son’s business with Hunter than he let on.

       The former president has loudly claimed for months that the 2020 election was stolen by Joe Biden but his campaign failed to provide any evidence for the wide-scale fraud he alleges occurred in numerous court settings.

       Republicans have vowed to press Joe Biden and his son with congressional investigations should they retake the House and/or Senate in the fall.