The laptop that 51 former intelligence officials said was Russian disinformation four years ago was just used to convict its owner.
On Tuesday, Hunter Biden was found guilty on all three felony gun charges, months before he’ll go on trial for federal tax crimes in September. After a week-long trial, Biden was convicted of violating an unconstitutional gun law, but he didn’t have to face the far more serious criminal allegations that are based on information revealed by his laptop (discovered by the New York Post in 2020). While Biden escaped prosecution on charges for crimes likely to implicate his president father, any trial of those crimes would have been propelled by the contents of the most embarrassing hard drive ever to go public.
Prosecutors in the Delaware gun case presented jurors with messages and photos from the laptop after the computer was accepted by a federal judge as evidence. In fact, according to the Washington Examiner, an agent from the FBI confirmed the authenticity of the hard drive at the trial, “as well as certain items of evidence from Biden’s computer data and excerpts from a memoir he wrote about his addiction battles.”
But the FBI refused to offer comment when asked by Fox News whether the agency had “any regrets” about rejecting the laptop’s authenticity. The agency itself, however, peddled the lie that the laptop was an instrument of Kremlin interference by preemptively warning social media companies to shut related stories down.
Many of the 51 former intelligence officials who publicly promoted the 2020 Russia hoax, meanwhile, have only doubled down on the election-year misinformation.
“Fox News Digital reached out to all 51 individuals who signed the heavily scrutinized October 2020 letter, published just before the 2020 presidential election, asking if they regretted signing it now that the laptop is being used by the prosecution arguing Hunter committed a federal gun crime,” the network reported. “Dozens,” Fox reported, “are either declining to retract or doubling down despite the device being entered as evidence in his ongoing criminal trial.”
An attorney representing Ronald Marks, Marc Polymeropoulos, Douglas Wise, Paul Kolbe, John Sipher, Emile Nakhleh, and Gerald O’Shea sent Fox News a statement on behalf of the signatories claiming the letter to Politico in 2020 was “patriotic.” Former CIA Director Michael Hayden, on the other hand, “hung up the phone when contacted.”
Hayden, who served under President George W. Bush and led the National Security Agency (NSA) during the worst intelligence failure in U.S. history, 9/11, is also on the advisory board of the left-wing disinformation group NewsGuard. In 2022, Hayden said he was “perfectly fine” with peddling misinformation to elect President Joe Biden.
“It looked like disinformation,” he told New York Magazine. “It would be nice if we didn’t have to do anything or say anything, but the Russians were doing so much.”
Hayden still signed the letter with more than 50 former intelligence officials discrediting the laptop as Russian disinformation despite an on-the-record statement rejecting such characterization from the director of national intelligence at the time.
Many of the former intelligence officials who sought to dismiss Hunter Biden’s laptop are still held up as credible by outlets that similarly refused to give the computer the legitimate coverage the hard drive deserved in the 2020 election. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper remains a CNN analyst. According to Fox News on Monday, Clapper said “no” when pressed on whether he regretted signing his name, and he also declined “to publicly remove his name from the letter or concede that those signing onto it should have waited longer for more information to develop.”
House Republicans are now probing whether the CIA was behind the letter in 2020. In December, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, wrote to CIA Director William Burns demanding the agency release the names of any contractors who are listed as signatories.
“We understand that former intelligence officials often return to the intelligence community under private contract for their previous agencies,” Jordan wrote. “It is vital to the Committees’ oversight to understand whether any of the signatories of the public statement were actively employed by CIA as contractors or consultants at the time they signed the public statement.”
