A former CIA officer who signed an open letter attempting to discredit reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election admitted that most of what was discovered on the laptop is real.
Douglas Wise, a former CIA officer and Defense Intelligence Agency deputy director, signed an open letter in 2020 that the New York Post’s October 2020 report had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” About 50 other former U.S. intelligence officials, including former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, signed the document.
Over the past weekend, however, Wise conceded that most of what was found on the infamous laptop was real. Last year, the New York Times and Washington Post published articles making similar admissions.
“All of us figured that a significant portion of that content had to be real to make any Russian disinformation credible,” Wise told The Australian newspaper on Sunday. But Wise told the paper that he doesn’t regret signing the letter and said it is “no surprise” the emails were real.
“The letter said it had the earmarks of Russian deceit and we should consider that as a possibility,” Wise said. “It did not say Hunter Biden was a good guy, it didn’t say what he did was right and it wasn’t exculpatory, it was just a cautionary letter.”
Wise, who has not responded to an Epoch Times request for comment, added that former New York Mayor and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani “had just been in Ukraine trying to dig up evidence on the Bidens and he met with a known Russian intelligence official. Russians or even ill-intended conservative elements could have planted stuff in there.”
In the Oct. 19, 2020, letter, the 51 former officials wrote that they “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.” Making an appeal to authority, they wrote that their “experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”
The officials then explained that “such an operation would be consistent with some of the key methods Russia has used in its now multi-year operation to interfere in our democracy—the hacking (via cyber operations) and the dumping of accurate information or the distribution of inaccurate or misinformation.” Others who signed the letter include former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and CIA chief of staff Jeremy Bash.
