It’s now an infamous headline among conservatives and a sore spot for Politico. But at the time, the October 19, 2020, story by Natasha Bertrand had its intended bombshell effect with this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”
Now former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says Politico “deliberately distorted” the letter he and more than 50 others – many of them open Joe Biden supporters – signed. Critics are wondering why the players in the story are speaking out more than two years later – just as House Republicans are investigating the matter – and why they didn’t cry foul at their own words being twisted at the time.
“If James Clapper knew Politico and Natasha Bertrand were lying about what their letter said, why didn’t he say so then?” journalist Glenn Greenwald asked on Monday. “Reality: the CIA/IC people lying wanted the media to spread this. Only now that someone has to take the hit is Clapper saying Politico lied.”
Clapper’s remarks showed up in a lengthy fact-check by the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler on Monday, which broke down the letter itself and how it was also falsely characterized by then-candidate Joe Biden in the closing weeks of the 2020 election. Biden claimed at a debate with then-President Trump that intelligence officials had declared the laptop reported on by the New York Post was a “Russian plan.” Another letter signer, former deputy director of National Intelligence for analysis Thomas Fingar, told Kessler that no one should be “surprised” by the media or politicians that “willfully or unintentionally” misconstrue statements.
Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say https://t.co/zRdHxTxVsl
— Jen Psaki (@jrpsaki) October 20, 2020
Kessler noted Politico’s headline did not accurately reflect the letter’s contents, which were not quite as conclusive, but rather suggested the laptop had the “earmarks” of a Kremlin disinformation operation. They also declared their “view that the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue” in some capacity. The laptop contained details about Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings, including an email suggesting he peddled his father’s powerful position to help his interests, as well as salacious material involving sex and drugs.
The signers also stipulated they had no evidence to prove their claims but were mostly going by their gut. For a media that often regurgitated Russiagate storylines from intelligence community sources throughout the Trump administration – and was wary of helping Trump by pushing out material harmful to the Biden candidacy in a manner similar to the 2016 election – that was more than enough.
But despite Politico and Biden’s framing, the signers of the letter didn’t come out of the woodworks at the time to dispute their characterization of their words. Nor did they seem to care that numerous Democrats, including future Biden officials like Jen Psaki, Susan Rice, Kate Bedingfield, Andrew Bates and others, shared the story on Twitter or touted its contents in interviews.
The Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy ruefully noted Clapper claimed not to know Biden – his chosen candidate for president that year – had cited his own letter at a presidential debate.
Clapper of course didn’t complain about the Politico headline (“Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say”) at the time, even tho Biden cited the “distorted” article during a debate w/ Trump (which Clapper laughably claimed he didn’t know about).
— Jerry Dunleavy 🇺🇸 (@JerryDunleavy) February 13, 2023
New York Post columnist Miranda Devine told Fox News Digital that Clapper’s comments “show what a fraud he is, and that he’s worried now the GOP controls the House and has vowed to haul in the signatories and make them testify under oath. He’s trying to pre-shape the narrative.”
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, sent a letter earlier this month to a dozen of the signatories, including Clapper, demanding answers. Devine said she didn’t recall any of them expressing public discontent with Politico’s framing of their statements in 2020.
“They were silent. That was the message they wished to convey, and now they are scrambling because the GOP House is about to hold them accountable,” Devine said.
Clapper admitted again to Kessler that he and his fellow signers had “no evidence” to support their suspicions.
“To me, it’s a difference without a distinction. It could have been bad information, false information,” he said. “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.”
But Clapper sounded more sure in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett on Oct. 16, 2020, the same week the New York Post released their story that was promptly blocked by Big Tech outfits.
“To me, this is just classic textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft at work,” he said at the time. “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.”
Clapper himself was repeatedly put on CNN to spread the lie that the materials on the Biden laptop was "Russian disinformation."
But even for CNN: having one employee accuse a "reporter," Bertrand, of "deliberately" lying is something they can't ignore.https://t.co/kjLH42pbaf
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 13, 2023
