A former Moscow station chief for the CIA revealed on Friday that he was given the chance to sign onto a letter attacking The Post’s bombshell report on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop as possibly Russian disinformation — but he ultimately refused.
Daniel Hoffman told Fox News on Friday that he was presented with the letter, which ended up being signed by 51 top US intelligence officials, on Oct. 18, 2020, but didn’t sign it because there was “no evidence” of Russian involvement
“[A]t first glance, it seemed natural to lay the blame at the Kremlin’s doorstep,” Hoffman said during an interview on “America Reports.” “Remember, Vladimir Putin is in the Kremlin and he’s well-known for cloak-and-dagger espionage operations. But at the same time, there was no evidence. And the letter noted there was no evidence.”
Hoffman explained that the arguments presented in the speculative letter were “convoluted” and would need to be scrutinized by an investigatory agency such as the FBI before being considered credible.
“It was not up to us to speculate. So I didn’t sign the letter. I typically don’t put my name to other people’s words,” he said.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) revealed last week that former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell testified before his panel that he drafted the letter and that Secretary of State Antony Blinken – a Biden campaign adviser back in 2020 – was the “impetus” behind the attempt to discredit The Post’s reporting.
Hoffman said Friday that when Morell showed him the letter his now-late wife was undergoing cancer treatment and he didn’t have the time to ask Morell “what the point was about the letter.”
“So I just left it and didn’t sign the letter and didn’t respond,” he added.
Hoffman noted that standard procedure for a case like the one involving the first son’s laptop would be to meet with Morell in order to “hash out all the evidence that we had.”
“Then Michael would draw analytical conclusions with some level of confidence – low, medium or high – and bring it to the White House. We didn’t have that debate about this laptop issue. We weren’t invited to debate it,” Hoffman said.
Hoffman speculated that some of the other officials that signed onto the letter might not have known that Morell had discussed the matter with the Biden campaign beforehand.
“The part that I didn’t know – and I’m assuming that my former colleagues who signed the letter probably didn’t know either – was that Michael Morell had discussed the laptop issue with then campaign adviser Tony Blinken,” he said.
On Oct. 19, 2020, Politico published the letter and it was cited by Joe Biden during his Oct. 22, 2020. debate against former President Donald Trump to deflect accusations about his involvement in overseas influence-peddling schemes by claiming The Post had reported on “a Russian plant.”
Hunter Biden’s laptop, abandoned by the first son at a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019 as he struggled with a crack cocaine addiction, links President Biden to Hunter and brother Jim Biden’s foreign influence-peddling schemes.