Intel Letter On Hunter Biden Laptop Interfered With Election 'Far Greater' Than China, Russia

An intel letter that aimed to discredit a story related to Hunter Biden's laptop interfered more in the 2020 election than any other foreign effort, a top GOP lawmaker said Sunday.

Speaking during an appearance at the "Cats Roundtable" show, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said the letter interfered with the 2020 election to "a far greater extent than China or Russia" could do.

"Actually, they knew the Hunter Biden laptop was real. The FBI knew that. They had possession of it in December 2019," Johnson said. "They wrote a letter to interfere in our election to a far greater extent than anything China or Russia ever could hope to do — claiming that the laptop had all the earmarks of ... a Russian information campaign. That letter was an information campaign. It had far greater impact on our election than anything any foreign adversary could ever undertake. ... This isn't suspect anymore. This is fact!"

Johnson is referring to a public letter published in October 2020 that claimed the emails found in Hunter's laptops and published by The New York Post were part of Russian disinformation. That letter, revealed just weeks before the November 2020 election, was signed by at least 50 former intelligence officials.

"It is for all these reasons that we write to say that the arrival on the US political scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden's son Hunter, much of it related to his time serving on the Board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation," the letter read.

"We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that 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," the letter continued.

Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell has since admitted that the letter was orchestrated by then-Biden campaign senior adviser and now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken to discredit the story on Hunter's laptop.