by WorldTribune Staff, June 1, 2026 Non-AI Real World News
The 2020 letter from 51 former intelligence officials stating that Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” was proven false years ago after the laptop was verified as authentic.
Legacy media took its marching orders from the intel chiefs and dutifully reported it as Russian disinformation. Big Tech used the letter as a springboard to censor factual reporting, much of it exclusive by the New York Post. Then-candidate Joe Biden used the letter to fend off public criticism regarding corruption in his family.
In 2022, even lefty media outlets like the Washington Post and CBS News admitted the laptop was authentic and not a product of Russia as they had reported for two years.
In 2023, reports noted that the Biden campaign had pushed the intel officials to write the letter.
Also in 2023, former Director of CIA Analysis Michael Morell, one of the 51 individuals who signed the letter, testified before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees that he saw no direct evidence of Russian involvement in the Hunter Biden laptop.
In January 2025, President Donald Trump suspended the security clearances of the 51 officials who signed the bogus letter.
But the Deep State is not called deep by coincidence. It took nearly six years for someone not under congressional testimony to break free of its grasp and admit what that letter was all about.
Related — Report: CIA helped get 51 intel officials to sign Hunter laptop letter, May 10, 2023
Thomas Kuhns, a senior intelligence community official under the Obama Administration, submitted a memo recently to the Intelligence Community Inspector General stating “the planning, drafting, and dissemination” of the Hunter Biden laptop letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials “exhibit characteristics consistent with coordinated intelligence deception operations and tradecraft.”
Kuhns said in the memo that the matter “warrants a standards-based review to assess whether the conduct constituted a deception operation involving trained U.S. intelligence professionals targeting the American People.”
Kuhns said his analysis is “grounded in my expertise applying analytic integrity standards and intelligence tradecraft to evaluate raw and finished intelligence assessments/judgements. Those standards provide a framework to identify politicization, bias, and analytic weaknesses, as well as to identify whether intelligence tradecraft itself has been misapplied or misused.”
Just the News, which obtained a copy of the memo, noted: “One of the biggest concerns Kuhns identified with the process of drafting the letter is that none of the officials who signed on appeared to seek confirmation from the FBI, despite the fact that the laptop had been in the agency’s possession since 2019.”
According to a notification sent to Kuhns on Thursday, the Intelligence Community Inspector General referred the complaint to the Department of Justice’s Inspector General.
2026 Contract With Our Readers
2020 laptop letter from 51 intel officials said characteristic of ‘deception tradecraft’ added by Editor Two on
View all posts by Editor Two →