Former Chief of Station with the Central Intelligence Agency Daniel N. Hoffman has revealed why he didn’t sign the Hunter Biden laptop letter 51 other intelligence community officials signed in the fall of 2021, which alleged that the laptop was "Russian disinformation."
Hoffman said that on October 18, 2020, he was one of many retired senior officials that received an email from former acting CIA Director Michael Morell asking him and others to sign the letter, which stated that the emails found on the abandoned Hunter Biden laptop had "all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation," per the Washington Times.
He said that it initially made sense to lay "the blame on the Kremlin’s doorstep."
"Russian President Vladimir Putin was notorious for mounting disinformation and espionage operations against Russia’s 'main enemy,’ the United States," he wrote.
In regards to reasons why it made sense to blame Russia, Hoffman noted that special counsel Robert Mueller indicted the Internet Research Agency, run by Putin confidant Yevgeniy Prigozhin, for interfering in the 2016 US presidential election.
Hoffman also said that Putin had been in the KGB, but added that "just because Mr. Putin had been flooding the zone for years with cloak-and-dagger espionage operations against us, it did not necessarily follow that he was behind the Hunter Biden laptop flap as well."
The retired senior official said that during his time in the CIA, if he or others did not know an answer to a lawmaker’s question, the protocol was to ask "our sources for more information in pursuit of more informed executive decision-making."
"Even as Mr. Morell was circulating the letter," Hoffman wrote, "then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe was saying publicly that the Hunter Biden laptop was 'not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.'"
"The letter I was being asked to sign clearly stated: 'We do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case,'" Hoffman added.
At that point in time, Hoffman said the FBI and US intelligence analysts needed "more time" to conduct forensics and investigation into the laptop, including needing to dig into its discovery at the Delaware repair shop.
"But the email I received from Mr. Morell did not invite any further discussion or debate. The letter was a fait accompli. It was being passed around for signatures, not edits," Hoffman stated.
In the end, Hoffman did not sign the letter, stating that he has "never been one to put my name to words someone else wrote on my behalf," and that he was focusing on caring for his wife who was in the last few months of her life battling cancer.
Hoffman said he has since learned after private sworn testimony from Morell to the House Judiciary Committee that the laptop matter was discussed between the former CIA acting director and then-senior Biden campaign official and current Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
"I do not begrudge those who did sign the letter. As retired government officials, they are certainly entitled to exercise their freedom of speech (as long as they do not reveal classified information), especially if they believed it was their duty to ring the alarm bells about what they assessed as potential malicious Kremlin activity," Hoffman wrote, noting that retired Gen. Michael Flynn was seen on the 2016 campaign trail supporting Trump.
"I also won’t judge those who argue that the letter was a political errand for the Biden campaign.
"But the American public should be careful to distinguish between retired and actively serving U.S. intelligence officers. Actively serving intelligence officers vote, but their exercise of civic duty is divorced entirely from their work," he wrote.
Hoffman concluded by stating that it’s up to American citizens to do their own research and decide for themselves what to believe. "That’s just one of the great benefits of living in a vibrant democracy."
The Hunter Biden laptop story has since been acknowledged as true by a number of mainstream outlets since then, many of which only looked into it years later, after having initially tried to discredit the work from the New York Post. These outlets, like the Washington Post, CBS, and the New York Times, frequently called laptop "Russian disinformation" during the 2020 election.
The laptop story, broken by the New York Post in 2020 just before the election, was heavily censored by social media platforms, all of whom cited the Russian disinformation claim as well as suggesting that the laptop reporting broke their hacked materials policies, as in the case of Twitter.
Former head of trust and safety at Twitter Yoel Roth acknowledged earlier this year that the story did not in fact break any of these rules.
