A former intelligence official who signed the letter attacking the New York Post story on the Hunter Biden laptop as potential Russian disinformation has admitted to knowing much of the story had to be true and has no regrets about signing the letter at the time.
Shortly after the New York Post published its story on the Hunter Biden laptop Douglas Wise, a former Defense Intelligence Agency deputy director, joined 50 other intelligence officials in a letter attacking the story as Russian disinformation. The letter gained national steam when Politico reporter Natasha Bertrand (now with CNN) published an article detailing the letter to sink the story’s credibility.
Speaking to The Australian newspaper, Wise said he knew a “significant portion” of the recovered Hunter Biden laptop files “had to be real” and yet feels no regret.
“All of us figured that a significant portion of that content had to be real to make any Russian disinformation credible,” said Wise.
The letter at the time did notably come with the caveat that “we do not know if the emails … are genuine or not and … we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.” Wise cited this in defense of the letter while also arguing that it never attempted to defend Hunter Biden.
Hunter Biden’s laptop repairman, John Paul Mac Isaac, said an FBI agent threatened him to stay silent after Isaac told the agent he would change the FBI agents names when he published a book about the “laptop from hell.” https://t.co/VM9tWxrZuU
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) August 13, 2022
“The letter said it had the earmarks of Russian deceit and we should consider that as a possibility,” Wise told The Australian. “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.”
As noted by the New York Post, the letter contained some charged statements like “the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue” and “it is high time that Russia stops interfering in our democracy.”
Wise even went as far as to label critics of the letter “members of the conservative journalist community, conservative politicians or just ultra-right wing extremists.” He also cited former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s meeting with pro-Moscow Ukrainian politician Andriy Derkach.
“They haven’t paid attention to the content,” charged Wise. “I don’t regret signing it because the context is important. Remember 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.”
Seventy-one percent of Americans believe accurate reporting of Hunter Biden’s “Laptop from Hell” could have altered the 2020 presidential election, TIPP Insights polling revealed Monday. https://t.co/gpzr69jURY
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) December 13, 2022
In 2018 and 2020, Breitbart Senior Contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption.
Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter Biden and Joe Biden flew aboard Air Force Two in 2013 to China before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism.
Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’s investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing to even have a ten percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
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