Clapper Says Politico ‘Deliberately Distorted’ His Biden Laptop Disinformation Letter

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper arrives on Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Jan. 5. Evan Vucci/AP PHOTO

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and others have spoken out against Politico’s reporting on the laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop.

The intelligence chief said that a letter from government agencies questioning the origins of the laptop cited by the news organization was “deliberately distorted” to cast doubt, according to The Washington Post.

“All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation,” Clapper told the Post. “Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.”

The paragraph of the letter signed by 50 former senior intelligence officials mentioned by Clapper stated, “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President [Donald] Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.”

Clapper’s comments were included in a long fact-check by the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler on Feb. 13, which deconstructed the letter and how it was also misrepresented by then-candidate Joe Biden in the last weeks of the 2020 race.

During a debate with then-President Trump, Biden stated that intelligence authorities had pronounced the laptop reported on by the New York Post to be a “Russian plan.”

Clapper’s comments in the Post’s story were in sharp contrast to what he said in a late 2020 interview with CNN when he asserted that who was distributing the information about the laptop was very important: “The source matters a lot, and the timing matters a lot.

“To me, this is just classic, textbook soviet, Russian tradecraft at work,” Clapper said a few weeks before the 2020 presidential election in response to questions about the laptop.

“The Russians have analyzed the target; they understand the president [Trump] and his enablers crave dirt on Vice President Biden, whether it’s real or contrived, it doesn’t matter to them.

“And so all of a sudden, two-and-a-half weeks before the election, this laptop appears, somehow, with emails on it without any metadata. It’s just all very curious.

“So here you have a willing target and Russians who are very sophisticated about how to exploit a willing target. To me, that’s what’s at work here.

The former director of national intelligence said he did believe that specific emails with information about meetings could have been planted in the laptop: “I think the emails could be contrived.”

The Epoch Times was unable to reach Clapper for comment.

The Epoch Times reached out by email to Politico for comment but did not get a response.