Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said in an interview on Monday said that Hunter Biden’s laptop “is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” amid claims from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff suggesting otherwise.
A Fox News report says Ratcliffe rebuked allegations from Schiff, who over the weekend said that the Hunter Biden emails suggesting Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden had knowledge of, and was allegedly involved in, his son’s foreign business dealings.
“It’s funny that some of the people who complain the most about intelligence being politicized are the ones politicizing the intelligence,” Ratcliffe said. “Unfortunately, it is Adam Schiff who said the intelligence community believes the Hunter Biden laptop and emails on it are part of a Russian disinformation campaign.”
He added: “Let me be clear: the intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports that. And we have shared no intelligence with Adam Schiff, or any member of Congress.”
Fox News also reported that Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is investigating Hunter Biden’s emails which revealed that he introduced his father, the former vice president, to a top executive at Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings in 2015.
Ratcliffe went on to say that his role as director of National Intelligence, which he assumed earlier this year, is “to not allow people to leverage the intelligence community for a political narrative that’s not true.”
First reported in the New York Post, the laptop of Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, was dropped off at a repair shop in Biden’s home state of Delaware in April 2019, according to the store’s owner.
According to the NY Post, the customer who brought in the water-damaged laptop never paid for the service or retrieved it or a hard drive on which its contents were stored, according to the shop owner, who said he tried repeatedly to contact the client.
The shop owner couldn’t positively identify the customer as Hunter Biden, but said the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunter’s late brother and former Delaware attorney general.
Photos of a Delaware federal subpoena given to The Post show that both the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December, after the shop’s owner says he alerted the feds to their existence.
The contents of the laptop have been reported on for days by the NY Post and the story has drawn attempts from social media giants to limit the story’s spread.
“I find this behavior stunning but not surprising from a platform that has censored the President of the United States,” wrote Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) in a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Republican lawmakers announced plans to subpoena Dorsey to testify about his platform’s actions, said part of a report from The Associated Press.
Material published by the NY Post says Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.
The NY Post also said that Hunter Biden pursued lucrative deals involving China’s largest private energy company — including one that he said would be “interesting for me and my family.”
As of Monday, the only response from Joe Biden was a tense exchange with CBS News reporter Bo Erickson. When asked by Erickson if he had a comment regarding the NY Post reporting, Biden said, “I know you’d ask it. I have no response, it’s another smear campaign, right up your alley, those are the questions you always ask.”
