Numerous former intelligence officers, including numerous high-ranking former officials, hurried to write a letter in the final days of the 2020 election denouncing the Hunter Biden laptop as a Russian misinformation campaign.
The Biden campaign used the letter to discredit Donald Trump’s criticisms of it after it was leaked to Politico, no certainly with the intention of making it public. Instead of focusing on the corruption and degeneracy of the Biden family, the original article was twisted into yet another round of allegations that Trump was working with the Russians.
The Washington Post and other media outlets subsequently “investigated” and verified that the laptop was authentic after a continuous campaign of suppression by social media and the press. However, by that point, the harm had already been done and a presidential election may have been affected.
One of the 51 former intelligence officials who released the open letter on October 19, 2020, five days after The Post started a string of articles on the now-first son’s questionable international business transactions, was Douglas Wise, a former deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
“All of us figured that a significant portion of that content had to be real to make any Russian disinformation credible. 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.”
But Wise has no regrets, of course. In reality, he continues to blame the right for failing to grasp the circumstances.
