Contradicting his own past comments, Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is claiming the infamous letter he signed alleging Russian links to the Hunter Biden laptop story was “distorted” by the reporting on it.
Back in October 2020, shortly after the laptop story broke, over 50 former senior intel officials signed a letter falsely claiming that Hunter’s emails “[have] all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Politico’s Natasha Bertrand broke the story of the letter, headlining her article “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”
Now that even Hunter’s lawyers have effectively admitted that the laptop was real all along, Clapper is trying to pretend he isn’t a liar by pushing the blame on Bertrand for “misrepresenting” the letter.According to the Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy:
Clapper complained about the Politico headline to the Washington Post this week. “There was message distortion,” Clapper told the outlet. “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said.”
Clapper did not speak up about this during the 2020 election, however, despite the Biden campaign exploiting the letter to dismiss the Hunter Biden laptop stories as a Kremlin disinformation operation, and he implausibly claimed in his new interview that he was unaware of how Joe Biden described the letter during the 2020 debate. “It could have been bad information, false information. But we had no evidence, no inside baseball that it was. The intent of the letter was that this could be Russian disinformation — emphasis on could,” Clapper told the outlet. “It’s a very important nuance … a distinction that people are always ignoring.”
Although the October 2020 letter hedged a bit at various times, it did repeatedly contend there was Russian involvement with the laptop stories, arguing that “if we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election” and expressing “our view that the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue.” The letter claimed that the laptop saga “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” and that “our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”
During a CNN appearance days before the intel letter, Clapper made no effort to hedge his speech that the laptop “could” be Russian disinfo, confidently telling CNN’s Erin Burnett "To me, this is just classic textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft at work. The Russians have analyzed the target, they understand that the president and his enablers crave dirt on Vice President Biden. Whether it's real or contrived, that doesn't matter to them, and so all of a sudden, two-and-a-half weeks before the election, this laptop appears somehow, and emails on it without any metadata. It's all very curious."To be fair, Clapper’s comments were made on CNN so it’s understandable why he didn’t think anyone would find these comments that contradict his new spin.
Matt Palumbo is the author of Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry and The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
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