How a CIA ‘cover-up’ backfired on Joe Biden

Three weeks before the 2020 presidential election, a group of former CIA directors broke cover to make an extraordinary intervention in the race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

They could not possibly have imagined the firestorm they would ignite – and how it would ultimately plunge US intelligence agencies into the political debate amid growing mistrust of government institutions among the Right.

In October 2020, the Trump-backing New York Post was reporting on damaging emails from a laptop belonging to Mr Biden’s son, Hunter.

The “smoking gun” material included emails on dubious foreign business dealings, sexually explicit photos and a “raunchy, 12-minute video” of a crack-smoking Hunter with an unnamed woman, the paper said.

Regardless of its provenance, it was highly embarrassing for the Biden team, and had the potential to inflict serious damage on the Democratic campaign.

Within days, 51 former intelligence officials had taken the unusual step of circulating an open letter warning the kompromat had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”. The signatories included John Brennan, Barack Obama’s CIA Director, and James Clapper, his director of national intelligence, while social media companies limited the spread of the New York Post story after it was published.

During the final presidential debate, days before the polls opened, Mr Biden parried attacks from Mr Trump about the laptop by citing the letter, calling the material a “Russian plant”.

In the intervening years, multiple news organisations have confirmed the authenticity of at least some of the laptop material.

It came, as the New York Post had reported in 2020, from a hard drive recovered from a laptop Hunter had abandoned at a repair shop in Delaware.

But how the laptop saga divided opinion among Americans of different political stripes is just another illustration of how febrile the country’s discourse has become.

The row has reignited in the wake of Hunter’s conviction this week on federal gun charges, and in which material from the laptop was instrumental.

For Republicans, this was proof of a Washington establishment intent on tipping the election scales in the Democrats’ favour.

A fringe of the Right has gone further, casting it as supporting evidence to unsubstantiated claims of a CIA plot.

Democrats have dismissed the claims as a conspiracy theory. Caution over the laptop, they argue, was necessary given Russian election interference efforts during the 2016 campaign.

The 51 former intelligence officials acknowledged their intervention came despite them having no knowledge of whether the laptop material was “genuine or not”, and without “evidence of Russian involvement”.

The laptop and the hard drive were seized by the FBI, after the shop’s owner alerted the authorities, though not before he copied the data and handed it to Trump’s allies.

However unsavoury its origin, this was no Russian hack.

That was underscored in dramatic fashion during the trial of the president’s son. At one point, a prosecutor held up Hunter’s silver MacBook Pro for jurors to see.

An FBI agent called to the stand in Wilmington, Delaware, testified to the authenticity of deeply personal messages and sordid photos retrieved from the device which were used to demonstrate Hunter’s drug addiction.

Following his conviction for lying about his drug use to buy a gun, the Right has taken a victory lap, and touted vindication over the infamous laptop, and their claims of a biased intelligence community.

“In other words,” Fox News host Sean Hannity told viewers in an opening monologue, “you were lied to on a very high level just before an election by numerous people and entire institutions.”

Jim Merrill, a GOP strategist, said Hunter’s conviction was unlikely to be “top of mind” for voters in November, but the laptop saga could become “a rallying point for the [Trump] base that feels like there is this coordinated effort to protect the president”.

“It’s a reminder that facts can be seen through two very different prisms, facts can be fitted to suit a partisan perspective, and it happens on both sides,” he told The Telegraph. “I certainly think that’s happened in this case and it underscores how difficult it is to gain consensus on anything.”

Democrats have downplayed the impact of Hunter’s case on his father’s re-election effort, although some concede it cuts into their ability to highlight Trump’s own conviction.

However Scott Jennings, a prominent Republican strategist, said the laptop controversy would have tangible repercussions for the Biden campaign.

“Biden’s ability to recover is going to be based somewhat on whether people find him to be credible,” he told ABC News. “And now, one of the problems is they know full well he lied right to their face about this laptop.”

Some GOP officials have gone further and demanded repercussions for the intelligence community.

“The 51 intelligence officials who interfered in the 2020 election by signing the fraudulent letter carried out their own information operation against the American people and must be held accountable,” Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson said.

Many of the signatories, including Mr Clapper and former CIA chief Leon Panetta, have said they had no regrets about their involvement in discrediting the laptop story.

“It served as nothing more than a warning letter,” said Mark Zaid, a lawyer for seven other signatories.

It is impossible to say what impact the letter had on the 2020 campaign, but in 2024, it has made America’s intelligence agencies another front in the White House battle.

Pete Giangreco, a strategist who previously worked for Mr Obama, said the biggest impact of Hunter’s conviction was that it “completely undermines Trump’s claims that the justice system is rigged”.

“I think the laptop was one of the great fizzles of all time,” he said, in reference to Republicans’ claims Hunter was given preferential treatment by the Justice Department.

“The fact is, Hunter Biden was convicted of a crime that’s rarely ever prosecuted as a first time offence of somebody who’s got a drug problem,” he said. “So it kind of doesn’t hold any water. The laptop was no smoking gun. It was kind of a fantasy, and he actually got tougher treatment than what is usually normal for the offence that he had.”

He added: “It’s not even the biggest lie the Right is pushing. I mean, you’re talking about folks who still to this day claim the election was rigged.”