Hunter Biden laptop letter signers embraced ‘Russian disinfo’ Politico headline, emails show
Jerry Dunleavy
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Hunter Biden laptop letter signers embraced Politico’s headline alleging the emails belonging to President Joe Biden’s son were “Russian disinfo” while the letter’s co-author and main organizer said the outlet did a “nice job” with its story.
The 51 ex-intelligence officials quickly signed the October 2020 laptop letter, which was published on Oct. 19 and aimed to give Joe Biden a “talking point” to use at the debate with President Donald Trump. The letter contributed to the baseless narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop stories were nothing but a product of Russian disinformation — a narrative happily seized upon by Biden’s 2020 campaign and spread by some of the laptop letter signers.
ELEVEN HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP LETTER SIGNERS VISITED BIDEN WHITE HOUSE
The Politico report about the letter was published Oct. 19 and titled “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”
While several letter writers and signers have since tried to distinguish the nuance of their document from the headline that gave Biden a critical boost in shutting down questions about the salacious contents of his son’s abandoned laptop, a new report by the GOP-led Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government revealed that certain intelligence officials were content with adopting the narrative.
“Contemporaneous documents show that some of the signatories adopted Politico’s framing that the laptop was Russian disinformation,” the Republican-led report said.
The report added, “Notwithstanding these recent protestations, there is no evidence that the statement’s signers attempted to correct Politico’s misleading headline.”
In a newly unearthed email, Thomas Fingar, a former deputy director of national intelligence for analysis who signed the letter, shared a link to the “Politico story” in an Oct. 20 email to his colleagues at Stanford University the day after it was published. Fingar told them, “The letter conveys our judgment that the Hunter Biden emails story published by the NY Post and seemingly endorsed by Trump’s Director of National Intelligence is actually Russian disinformation.”
Fingar recently apparently tried to rewrite his own history during a February interview with the Washington Post, gliding past the then-unknown fact that he himself embraced the “Russian disinfo” framing by Politico.
“No one who has spent time in Washington should be surprised that journalists and politicians willfully or unintentionally misconstrue oral or written statements,” Fingar said this year. “The statement we signed was carefully written to minimize the likelihood that what was said would be misconstrued.”
Joe Biden pointed to the laptop letter during the Oct. 22 debate after Trump brought up the “laptop from hell.”
“There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan,” Joe Biden said.
Former Obama acting CIA director Mike Morell, who co-authored the laptop letter with former senior CIA operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos, sent a newly unearthed email the day after the Politico story published, telling the letter signers he thought that “Politico did a nice job getting out the story of our letter.” The GOP report said Morell “expressed no concern about the story’s conclusory headline that the laptop was Russian disinformation.”
Morell also testified to House Republicans that “the statement clearly says that we’re not saying this is disinformation.” Polymeropoulos testified to congressional investigators that Joe Biden had “mischaracterized” the laptop letter by calling “it disinformation.”
Morell was asked by congressional investigators if he regretted that the “caveats” in the laptop letter weren’t part of the political discourse when it was released, and Morell replied, “I knew they wouldn’t be, as much as we tried, right? … Politics is hyperbole and particularly debates. … So I wasn’t surprised at all that — you know, when President Biden — when Vice President Biden talked about this at the debate.”
The former Obama acting CIA director added, “I guessed that politicians would not use the caveats.”
An October 2020 recruitment email by Morell unearthed by the Washington Examiner last week sent to prospective signers on Oct. 18 said that one purpose of the letter was to give Joe Biden a “talking point” to deploy against Trump in the upcoming debate. Morell sent a separate “talking point” email to John Brennan, Obama’s final CIA director, the morning of Oct. 19, hours before the letter was published by Politico.
Another key letter signatory was Nick Shapiro, a former senior adviser to Brennan. Politico has said Shapiro provided them with the letter, and he was quoted in their article: “The real power here … is the number of former, working-level IC officers who want the American people to know that once again the Russians are interfering.”
Morell told House investigators this year that getting the letter to the media “was entirely Nick Shapiro’s responsibility.” The former acting CIA director sent Shapiro “some thoughts when dealing with reporters” in an Oct. 19 email, telling Shapiro that “between us,” the Biden campaign wanted a certain reporter with the Washington Post to publish the story first, which didn’t end up happening. Morell asked Shapiro to “share with the campaign when you share with” the reporter.
Shapiro reached out to the Washington Post and to the Associated Press before Politico agreed to run the story. He kept then-Biden campaign official and current Biden White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates in the loop with the first two outlets, telling him, “This is what I gave them.”
Morell told Shapiro to tell reporters “off the record” that “we are not making a call on whether the materials are true or not, just that Moscow played a role in getting the information out” because “I’m afraid people might miss this point and say that we are saying that this is all disinformation.”
The ex-CIA chief also told Shapiro to tell reporters on background that Morell was “struck by the fact” that “all” of the intelligence officials he had spoken to “thought Russia is involved here.” The new GOP report said, “Facts cast doubt on Morell’s intended perception that a groundswell of Russia experts organically concluded that the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian intelligence operation.”
Another one of the letter signatories was Jeremy Bash, a former chief of staff at the CIA and the Pentagon, who was picked by Joe Biden to be part of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board in August last year. The GOP report said that Bash’s “assertions about Hunter Biden’s laptop and emails were unambiguous and did not include nuanced caveats.”
“This looks like Russian intelligence, this walks like Russian intelligence, this talks like Russian intelligence. This effort by Rudy Giuliani and the New York Post and Steve Bannon to cook up supposed dirt on Joe Biden looks like a classic Russian playbook disinformation campaign,” Bash said on MSNBC on Oct. 19, calling them “mysteriously created emails — probably hacked through a Russian intelligence operation.”
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Bash also claimed that “every intelligence professional that I’ve talked to over the last 24 hours says that this walks like a Russian disinformation campaign.”
The new GOP report said, “If these intelligence officials were concerned about Politico’s misrepresentation of their public statement, there has been no contemporaneous indication of such a concern.”