A former DIA Deputy Director is backtracking and now admitting that “significant” parts of Hunter Biden’s laptop “had to be real,” after independent investigations found no evidence of fabrication or tampering.
Former top intelligence chief now admits ‘significant’ parts of Hunter Biden’s laptop ‘had to be REAL’
Douglas Wise, a former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Deputy Director who was one of 51 former senior intelligence officials that signed a letter calling the Hunter Biden laptop story “Russian disinformation,” is now reversing his opinion.
On October 19, 2020, five days after the New York Post issued its bombshell report that an email revealed how Hunter Biden introduced a Ukrainian businessman to his then-Vice President dad. This shocking revelation was just one of many smoking guns in a massive trove of data that was recovered from a laptop Hunter dropped off at a repair shop in Delaware in April 2019.
51 intelligence officials, including wise, initially called it a “Russian information operation”
After the Post broke this story, 51 senior intelligence officials signed on to a letter that outlined their belief that the emails allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” Politico reported at the time. They added that their national security experience made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” They added: “This is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election.”
DIA Director changes his opinion: Hunter laptop “had to be real”
“All of us figured that a significant portion of that content had to be real to make any Russian disinformation credible,” Wise told The Australian regarding the 2019 letter about Hunter Biden’s laptop. He added he was “not surprised” when the laptop was authenticated.
However, Wise clarified: “I don’t regret signing it [the letter] because the context is important.”
“The letter said it had the earmarks of Russian deceit and we should consider that as a possibility,” Wise pointed out. “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.”
Multiple independent investigations find no evidence of fabrication or tampering with Hunter Biden’s laptop
In 2021, the Daily Mail authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop. Other outlets soon followed in 2022, including CBS, Washington Post, and the New York Times.
A CBS-commissioned independent investigation by two cyber investigators from Minneapolis-based Computer Forensics Services, who found no evidence of fabrication or tampering. The investigators also declared that no user data had been modified. Further, they did not find any new files originating after April 2019, when the store records of a Delaware computer repair shop indicate Hunter Biden dropped it off for repair.
