One of the signatories of the open letter more than two years ago attempting to discredit the findings from the content of Hunter Biden's laptop computer admitted in an interview with The Australian that most of what was discovered in the emails had to be based in reality.
Douglas Wise, a former Defense Intelligence Agency deputy director and former senior CIA operations officer, said that "all of us figured that a significant portion of that content had to be real to make any Russian disinformation credible."
Wise added in the interview published on Sunday that he had no regrets signing the letter and said it was "no surprise" that the emails were genuine.
Wise was among the more than 50 former intel officials who claimed that the content of the laptop first reported by the New York Post in October 2020 "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation."
That open letter, first published by Politico, was used by Democrats and the mainstream media to downplay the findings from Biden's laptop, which was mostly being taken seriously only in conservative media.
"We are all individuals who devoted significant portions of our lives to national security… We are all also individuals who see Russia as one of our nation's primary adversaries," the ex-intel officials told The Australian. "All of us have an understanding of the wide range of Russian overt and covert activities that undermine US national security, with some of us knowing Russian behavior intimately, as we worked to defend our nation against it for a career… Perhaps most important, each of us believes deeply that American citizens should determine the outcome of elections, not foreign governments."
The letter continued that "it is for all these reasons that we write to say that the 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," they wrote.
At the end of the letter, made public only days after the New York Post first published its story, the ex-intel officials acknowledged that "we do not know whether these press reports are accurate."
Politico, which first reported on the open letter, was also the first mainstream media outlet to verify the authenticity of Biden's laptop in September 2021.
The following year, many others in the mainstream media also verified the laptop story, which they all dismissed during the 2020 presidential campaign.
Many of former President Donald Trump's supporters said the mainstream media's suppression of the laptop story was enough to turn the election in favor of President Joe Biden.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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