Actually he was saying that he didn't care about the laptop being covered up, which changes everything.

Correct, he was lying (or extremely ill-informed) and pretending that the laptop was just about Hunter's troubled personal life and not the corruption of, the gods protect him, Joe Biden.

This isn't a hypothetical world where Biden's presidency hinges on Harris' vote and where Harris' voting motives have to be boiled down to obnoxiously reductive logic. It's a real world, where he knows that the laptop getting full, free press coverage would have harmed Biden's campaign.

Correct. He even accidentally told the truth and said that it was a left-wing conspiracy until ratonalization kicked in. But isn't it interesting that by the time he addressed this, Biden's presidency did not hinge on Harris rationalizing all the evils done to get there, and he justified it anyway?

In this context he said that had Hunter had dead children in his basement and it had been covered up to protect Biden's campaign, then that still would have been the morally correct thing to do because of the extent of Trump's evil.

While I don't doubt that he would have believed that in the situation, and perhaps even justify it to himself by persuading himself that this has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO with Joe Biden, I think that as it happened, he was just saying that he doesn't care.