NR contacted all 51 of the former officials who signed a letter claiming that Russia was behind the Hunter Biden dirt.
Many of the former intelligence officials who signed an open letter speculating that the Kremlin was behind reports of Hunter Biden trading on his father’s name are standing by their conclusion despite the news that federal prosecutors have been investigating Hunter and his associates since 2018.
National Review reached out to all 51 of the former officials who publicly signed the October letter, and discovered at least one who was not aware that he had been listed as a signatory. While the majority did not respond or declined to comment, those that did defended the letter and emphasized that the existence of an investigation, which reportedly pertains to tax evasion and money laundering, does not disprove their claim that Russia may have helped disseminate the damaging information.
“If I thought I was wrong I’d say I was wrong,” retired CIA senior operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos, who served under the Trump administration, told National Review. Polymeropoulos revealed that he and former acting CIA director Michael Morell — reportedly considered as Biden’s pick for CIA director — “basically wrote” the letter. Morrell did not return repeated requests for comment.
“The last two years of my career, I oversaw a lot of the Russia stuff, so I knew a thing or two about Russian active measures, information operations, disinformation ops, everything,” Polymeropoulos explained. “The idea of the letter was to get other folks — Russia experts from both Democrat and Republican administrations — to sign on and give it some more credibility as well, because that was important. I think there’s a good cross section of folks who signed this, but Michael and I kind of put it together.”
He stressed, however, that the letter was not intended to question whether the Hunter Biden materials were authentic, but rather to raise the possibility that the Russians were trying to interfere in the presidential election by helping in some way to bring the information to the attention of the press.
“We talk about how this is a Russian information operation, it’s not disinformation,” he stated. “And that’s an important nuance to me as a former intelligence officer. It might not be for the rest of the public, or for people on the right, or the left, or wherever, who would criticize the letter, but it is an important nuance. Because we did not say it was Russian disinformation, we said it was a Russian information operation.”
Citing the hacked 2017 campaign of French president Emmanuel Macron — which resulted in the U.S. charging six Russian nationals in October, though the French have not officially attributed the attack to the Kremlin — Polymeropoulos explained that Russia will disseminate “legitimate information” in order to sow chaos.
“When you say it’s an information operation, that includes the Russians’ capability to put out information, even if accurate, that’s still going to work towards their goals,” he said. “I still stand by what we wrote here. I don’t think there’s anything in the letter that is necessarily inaccurate.”
But when Politico broke news of the letter, it ran with the headline “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” and Joe Biden subsequently referenced the letter in the final presidential debate to substantiate his claim that the damaging emails found on Hunter’s abandoned laptop were “a bunch of garbage.”
After the New York Post first reported the existence of the emails, in which Hunter can be seen trading on his proximity to the Obama administration, senior Biden adviser Michael Carpenter told Politico that “this is a Russian disinformation operation. I’m very comfortable saying that.” Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said at the time “there is no intelligence that supports” the claim that Russia was involved.
Other signatories reached by National Review echoed Polymeropoulos in saying they had not changed their stance on the letter in light of the federal investigation, but some differed in their assessment on whether the Hunter Biden emails were, in fact, disinformation. Some also dismissed the current federal investigation.
“Whatever the US attorney(s) handling Biden’s tax and related investigations recently revealed pursue down the road, if anything, is another matter,” former CIA officer Kent Harrington said in an email. “The travesty created by this president, his enablers at home and the Russian exploitation of Trump’s venality continue. It’s a blow to our capability to build public understanding about both the threats they pose and the capabilities we need to counter them when people don’t speak out. I welcome the opportunity to do so.”
Emile Nakhleh, a former CIA senior intelligence analyst and current professor at the University of New Mexico, said that recent news of massive hacks into American federal agencies and companies — which officials have said was likely the work of Russian intelligence — “underscore my thinking that the whole Hunter Biden email incident is part and parcel of the Russian disinformation operation and persistent ugly campaign against the United States.”
David Cariens, who worked in the intelligence community for over 50 years and signed the letter with his wife Janice, said that “I think the current investigation is probably bogus, and being pushed by the president as he seeks revenge on Biden.”
“If you’re going to go after children, which I think is disgusting,” he continued, “I would really like to see somebody investigate all of Ivanka’s dealings with China. She got all sorts of preferred treatment — she got all sorts of patent rights, she got everything else. I mean that’s peddling the office of the presidency to make members of your family rich. I think we should have an investigation of that.” (Hunter Biden turned 50 this year.)
In a phone call, Nick Shapiro, former aide to CIA director John Brennan, said that “the whole point” of the letter “was that the Russians most likely spread the information, whether it was disinformation or accurate information.”
“That’s what we were saying, that’s what I signed on to say,” he said.
Many of the signatories were cagey about how exactly they heard about the letter and how it was publicized.
Cariens said he was not comfortable sharing who asked him to sign the letter “because I don’t trust Trump, and the current Attorney General, and the one that’s going to be following, to try and use names for some sort of revenge.”
Polymeropoulos said that while they initially thought of writing an op-ed, he and Morell ultimately opted for “more of a public statement,” but said he was not involved in gathering signatures or making the letter public.
“Basically I helped draft the whole thing, Michael and I got together, and then other people got the signatures, and how they disseminated it, I’m not sure exactly how it got out,” he said. He also admitted that it was “not good, but probably an innocent oversight” that Gregory F. Treverton, a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, told National Review he never saw the letter, but was still listed as a signatory.
Politico’s Natasha Bertrand, who reported the letter, said in her article at the time that Shapiro gave the letter to Politico.
Shapiro stressed that neither he nor Brennan were involved in organizing the letter, explaining that he passed it to the press after he was contacted about signing it.
“Reporters come to me often and say things like, ‘What do you think about — insert current event situation going on here,’” he explained. “That time of period, lots of reporters were asking about Hunter Biden. And my answer to everybody was, ‘Hey there’s a letter going around, have you seen it? I have it, would you like it? This reeks of Russian operation.’ And I gave the letter. I didn’t go out [pushing it] — I don’t even know if I read the clip after it came out.”
Shapiro declined to say whether he had asked Politico’s to change its headline, saying “it’s not my story.”
“Sounds like you’re hitting up every person who’s signed the letter,” he said. “Has anyone told you the letter is about disinformation, when it clearly says the opposite?”
Bertrand did not return a request for comment when asked about the decision to use “disinfo” in the headline — and whether she had been able to verify the signatories before publishing.