On Sunday, an official in the Trump administration said that no one in the intelligence community had been authorized to assert that the claim regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop is part of a Russian disinformation effort.
Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe claimed in an interview released in “The Twitter Files” that the type of engagement between his agency and Twitter, as recounted in the book, in the months leading up to the 2020 presidential election could have only one possible explanation.
On Maria Bartiromo’s “Sunday Morning Futures” show on Fox News, Ratcliffe said that briefing “groups” of private corporations or state election authorities on election security would be part of a “coordinated effort.” However, this would need to be approved by the National Security Council under the previous President, Donald Trump.
As he explained to Maria, “No one in the intelligence community would have had the credibility or desire to suggest anything else” about the rumors that the Hunter Biden laptop was involved in a Russian disinformation effort.
The ODNI will be led by Ratcliffe, a former member of Congress for Texas’s Republican Party, beginning in 2020. During his office, Ratcliffe controlled every intelligence agency in the country. Twitter has met with the FBI and DHS to discuss “election security,” according to a tweet from reporter Matt Taibbi.
The laptop issue made news in October 2015 while Joe Biden, Hunter Biden’s father, was running for president in 2020. The information on Hunter’s laptop, which reportedly detailed his business activities, drug usage, and sex life, has been confirmed to be legitimate. However, with the advent of the laptop, social media companies like Twitter sought to temporarily stifle news flow, which resulted in charges of unlawful election tampering by then-President Donald Trump and his associates.
In October 2020, 51 former intelligence officers signed a document claiming that the laptop was used in a Russian misinformation campaign. As he put it, this is “the official stance of the intelligence community” and “has never been modified, even to this day.”
If Republicans take control of the House next year, they have promised to investigate former Vice President Hunter Biden. Kevin McCarthy (R), a candidate for Speaker of the House in California’s Republican party, has pledged to subpoena the dozens of intelligence veterans who signed on to the letter saying the laptop tale “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Ratcliffe has called for an investigation into former senior FBI lawyer and current Twitter deputy general counsel James Baker after what he called a “domestic disinformation attempt” on Twitter around the New York Post’s article on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter, finally decided to fire Baker after reading this information in The Twitter Files.
It’s unclear, for instance, if Baker “offered information as the FBI general counsel to the benefit of one political party, to the detriment of another” or whether he ceased doing so after accepting a position as Twitter’s general counsel. According to Ratcliffe: