Hunter Biden laptop files ‘had to be real’: intelligence chief

US intelligence officials who warned Russia may have been behind the potentially incriminating files believed ‘significant portions’ of them were genuine.

US President Joe Biden (L) alongside his son Hunter Biden. Picture: AFP.

The former top US intelligence officials who suggested – wrongly it turned out – that Russia could have been behind embarrassing and potentially incriminating files found on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 presidential election, all believed “significant portions” of the content “had to be real”.

Douglas Wise, a former Deputy Director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, told The Australian he did not regret signing an October 2020 letter, which Hunter’s father and then presidential candidate Joe Biden, Twitter and Facebook had relied on to justify their dismissal and censorship of the New York Post’s expose on the laptop published 14th October 2020.

Mr Wise said he was “not surprised” the laptop – which a Delaware computer repair shop turned over to the FBI and Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani after Hunter Biden failed to collect it – turned out to be genuine, a fact most of the US media, including the New York Times and Washington Post, conceded only last year.

“In fact, all of us figured that a significant portion of that content had to be real to make any Russian disinformation credible,” he said, referring to the 50-plus signatories to the letter, including former Director of National intelligence James Clapper and former Defence Secretary Leon Panetta.

“The letter said it had the earmarks of Russian deceit and we should consider that as a possibility; 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”.

The laptop was packed with salacious pictures of Hunter Biden along with emails that suggested the younger Biden was selling access to his father, then the Vice President, allegedly referred to as “the big guy” in various uncovered emails, to shady businesses in Ukraine and China.

“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,” the two-page letter read.

“We want to emphasise that we do not know if the emails … are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement,” it went on.

Mr Wise, who retired in 2016 after nearly 30 years at the CIA culminating in his leadership position at the Pentagon’s DIA, slammed the letter’s critics for not having read it properly or at all.

“Whether they‘re members of the conservative journalist community, conservative politicians or just ultra-right wing extremists, they haven’t paid attention to the content,” he added.

The New York Times, Washington Post, CBS and other US mainstream media outlets only conceded the laptop, whose wider coverage Republicans argue could have delivered the presidential election to Donald Trump, was real only last year.

“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,” Mr Wise said.

The “chain of custody of the laptop”, he added, made it possible that “Russians or even ill-intended conservative elements could have planted stuff in there”.

His remarks, in an interview with The Australian, came a week after the new Republican controlled House of Representative established the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponisation of the Federal Government to investigate any inappropriate links between US intelligence agencies and social media giants.

The House Oversight and Accountability Committee, also now in Republican hands, last week launched an investigation into the Biden family’s business dealings, based on part on revelations contained in the laptop.