President-elect Donald Trump plans to suspend the security clearances of 51 intelligence officials who asserted that reporting related to Hunter Biden’s laptop bore “the classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation ahead of the 2020 election.
Trump intends to revoke the clearances of these so-called “Spies Who Lie” as part of a series of executive orders expected on his first day back in the Oval Office, Fox News reported on Monday, citing a senior administration official familiar with the matter.
While federal authorities eventually confirmed the authenticity of the laptop belonging to President Biden’s son, national security experts maintain their original concerns about potential disinformation. The New York Post’s reporting on the laptop in the run-up to the election between Biden and Trump included allegations of foreign influence-peddling, drug use, and other salacious activities involving Hunter Biden.
Emails from the device, left at a Delaware computer shop, indicated that Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm where Hunter, 54, served on the board. A copy of the hard drive was provided to The Post, while the computer itself was handed over to the FBI by the computer shop’s owner in 2019.
Credit: New York Post
Following the explosive reporting, numerous former senior intelligence officials signed a letter claiming that many of the emails bear “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” though they did not present new evidence to support this assertion.
The New York Post’s coverage of the Bidens was briefly censored on social media, but the so-called “laptop from hell” was later used by federal prosecutors and confirmed as authentic during Hunter Biden’s gun trial last year. An IRS whistleblower also stated in a 2023 congressional deposition that the FBI “verified” the laptop’s authenticity in November 2019.
Nonetheless, the dozens of former intelligence officials who raised doubts about the legitimacy of the computer’s contents have either maintained their concerns or declined to comment when contacted by Fox News. A lawyer representing seven of the signatories asserted that there “continues to be, by many, a calculated or woefully ignorant interpretation of the October 2020 letter” signed by the former officials.
“It served as nothing more than a warning letter of what we have known for decades: certain foreign governments — including Russia — continue to try and actively interfere in our domestic affairs and our guard must remain vigilant,” Mark S. Zaid said at the time. “Every patriotic American should have signed that letter.”
