An interesting way to square this conspiracy with what Ratcliffe says. Someone really did abandon a water-logged laptop with this guy. The guy checked out the hard drive after recovering it and found child porn. He alerted the FBI and sent it to them under subpoena. The hard drive that Rudy produced to the Post is Russian disinformation, but it is not actually a copy of the child porn containing laptop's hard drive. Perhaps that computer actually did have a Beau Biden Foundation sticker on it, but it wasn't Hunter's, and it didn't have his emails. The shop owner didn't know what was on it other than the child porn he discovered, but when this whole conspiracy stuff came up on the news, he put 2 and 2 together and thought the FBI should know it may have been Hunter's. The FBI knew it wasn't from him and was using it as part of a child porn investigation, so they thanked him for the tip and told him to pound sand when he was paranoid and asked for their protection. He was still paranoid and miffed so he connected with Rudy, turned over his copy to him, and Rudy told him sweet nothings that he would protect him so the guy was willing to tell the media about it and embellish a bit about the identification, his motives, and his awareness of the hard drive contents -- basically all the these things he couldn't tell a consistent story about when legit media outlets interviewed him.
So Ratcliffe gets to say the laptop is real, it isn't Russian disinformation, and the FBI's investigation of it has nothing to do with Russia whatsoever.
But leave out that the hard drive provided to the post has nothing to do with the one seized by the FBI.