The 51 former US intelligence officials who smeared The Post’s bombshell reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop as “Russian disinformation” in a 2020 letter are standing by their decision – with some referring to the move as “patriotic” – even after the FBI and Justice Department have confirmed its authenticity, according to a new report.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, ex-intelligence heads of the CIA and other analysts and officers have all said they had no regrets of their involvement in the “Spies Who Lie” missive, Fox News reported on Monday.
Asked whether he was too hasty in signing onto the letter, Clapper told the outlet, “No,” and said he would not remove his name.
All other signatories were also contacted by Fox News and offered similar defenses or declined to comment.
“There continues to be by many a calculated or woefully ignorant interpretation of the October 2020 letter signed by fifty-one former intelligence officials concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop,” Mark S. Zaid, an attorney for seven other signatories, said in a statement to The Post first shared with Fox.
“A careful and objective reading of the document reflects that even today its content is accurate,” added Zaid, who is representing former CIA officers Ronald Marks, Marc Polymeropoulos, Emile Nakhleh, Paul Kolbe, John Sipher and Gerald O’Shea, as well as ex-Defense Intelligence Agency deputy director Douglas Wise.
“It served as nothing more than a warning letter of what we have known for decades: certain foreign governments – including Russia – continue to try and actively interfere in our domestic affairs and our guard must remain vigilant,” Zaid also said. “Every patriotic American should have signed that letter.”
The report comes as special counsel David Weiss’ prosecution of Hunter Biden for alleged gun and tax crimes continues this week after both the FBI and Department of Justice confirmed in court filings and proceedings this year that the laptop’s contents were authentic.
Panetta defended the letter in a CNN interview last July, saying he had “no” reservations about co-signing its dubious claims about the provenance of the so-called “laptop from hell.”
“I signed that letter for one reason, which was to make the American people aware that the Russians deliberately were engaged in a disinformation campaign in the United States and trying to impact on our election and trying to impact on our ability to have free and fair elections,” he told CNN’s Kaitlin Collins.
“This is very old news,” Greg Treverton, who served as chair of the National Intelligence Council, also told Fox News. “What we said was true, we were inferring from our experience, and it did look like a Russian operation. We didn’t, and couldn’t of course say it was a Russian operation. Enough said.”
The Post reached out to the 51 former intel officials in March 2022 and received similarly evasive responses.
Two of the letter’s signatories – former CIA senior intelligence officers Patty Brandmaier and Brett Davis – died in 2023.
In Hunter’s federal gun trial in Wilmington court last week, FBI Special Agent Erika Jensen verified the laptop’s contents and said the hard drive data was cross-checked against the 54-year-old first son’s Apple iCloud account pursuant to a subpoena.
The FBI even told content moderators at Twitter that emails from the laptop reported by The Post, which revealed Hunter cashed in on his dad’s public profile to rake in millions from foreign entities, were real when the first report was published on Oct. 14, 2020.
The bureau had “verified” its authenticity in November 2019 before taking custody of the device, and a federal computer expert subsequently assessed “it was not manipulated in any way,” IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley told Congress last year in a deposition.
Politico published the first story on the letter dismissing the laptop’s veracity on Oct. 19, 2020, titled “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” which remains uncorrected to this day.
“With respect to the Politico story, had I been representing my clients at the time I would have certainly asked for them to modify their headline as it is too categorically and broadly asserted a conclusion that the letter did not,” Zaid told The Post.
The Post has reached out to Politico for comment.
Hunter Biden’s attorneys in February also confirmed that he had left the laptop at a Delaware computer repair shop and claimed his personal data had been “unlawfully” accessed by allies of former President Donald Trump
The letter was organized nearly four years ago by former CIA acting director Michael Morell, he said, after being “triggered” to do so following a phone call with then-senior Biden campaign official Antony Blinken, now the secretary of state.
“[T]he arrival on the US political scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter, much of it related to his time serving on the Board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” it read.
“We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case,” the letter went on.
“If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”
Blinken denied that he solicited the letter or that it was his “idea” in a Fox News interview last year – and refused to answer whether it was “Russian disinformation.”
“With regard to that letter, I didn’t – wasn’t my idea, didn’t ask for it, didn’t solicit it. And I think the testimony that the former deputy director of the CIA, Mike Morell, put forward confirms that,” he told Fox’s Benjamin Hall in an interview.
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
