Co-Author of Letter Warning Hunter Biden Laptop Could Be Russian Disinfo Wanted to Give Biden Campaign a ‘Talking Point’: Report
AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File
A new report from the Washington Examiner‘s Jerry Dunleavy sheds further light on the political motivations behind an October 2020 letter arguing that a New York Post story about a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden was possibly the result of a Russian disinformation operation.
According to Dunleavy, former CIA director Michael Morell, one of the document’s two primary authors, pitched the letter to other former officials as a potential “talking point” for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
Morell speculated that then-president Donald Trump would use the contents of the story to attack Biden in an upcoming debate between the two. “We want to give the VP a talking point to use in response,” explained Morell, who has previously stated that he was motivated to write the letter because he “wanted him [Biden] to win the election.”
In the letter itself, Morell and his co-signatories tried to toe the line between declaring that the story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” and overtly arguing that it was as much. The letter warned the laptop could contain both genuine information and planted information to impact the election. “Russia did both of these during the 2016 presidential election – judgments shared by the US Intelligence Community, the investigation into Russian activities by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and the entirety (all Republicans and Democrats) on the current Senate Intelligence Committee,” the letter added.
“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,” wrote Morell before nevertheless adding that, “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.”
The Post‘s reporting was later substantiated, despite the doubt cast on it by the letter’s signatories and temporary suppression of it on Twitter and Facebook.
Morell’s efforts bore fruit when Biden defended himself during the debate in question by claiming that “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan. They have said that this has all the characteristics — four, five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage.”
None of the signatories issued a public statement to clarify their views at the time.
