The following is how I might reach my conclusions.
I can picture the scenario being something like the following. Hunter's laptops get damaged. No big deal, after all, he should have plenty of money to just buy a new one, problem solved**. But what if he has personal things on those laptops that he failed to make any back up copies for**? Maybe he has some sex videos that he made that he likes to revisit at times, etc.
So he then takes the laptops in for repair, thinking nothing about any possible consequences** in case there are some things found on the hard drives that could get him into a lot of trouble. In the meantime, after he has taken the laptops in for repairs, he then starts discussing this with one of his nerdy friends. The first thing his friend asks him, "there was nothing inappropriate stored on that hard drive, right?" "Because you do know, that in order for the repair shop to fix your laptop, they will have access to everything on your hard drive, meaning they can see everything you have stored on it, assuming the hard drive and it's contents are salvageable".
Hunter doesn't answer out loud but immediately goes into answering this in his head. What is this dude talking about? Of course there is all kinds of inappropriate stuff stored on those hard drives, why would I want it repaired to begin with**? For one reason, because I didn't make back up copies of some of this stuff, yet it never crossed my mind at the time, that the repair shop would actually need to look at the content stored on it in order to try and fix it.**
So times passes, one of the hard drives is salvageable, and that the repair shop attempts to make contact with Hunter to let him know he can come and pick this up. Hunter ignores all of these attempted contacts of him by this shop owner**, because now Hunter is thinking---what if this is a set up, and that when I go to retrieve the hard drive, the FBI will be waiting there to take me away in cuffs**? Maybe I should just ignore this altogether, and this problem will just go away. Maybe we can just blame it on the Russians, problem solved**.