Trump Won’t Let It Go: Still Fixated on the Hunter Biden Laptop Letter

    Trump Won’t Let Go of the Hunter Biden Laptop Letter 

Trump is still hung up on a letter that 51 former intelligence officials (myself included) signed back in October 2020. The letter warned that Rudy Giuliani’s last-minute reveal of Hunter Biden’s laptop  just weeks before the election  had the hallmarks of a Russian interference campaign. We weren’t saying the laptop was fake, just that the timing and circumstances were suspicious. 

But ever since Trump lost, he and his supporters have twisted our words, claiming we lied to protect Biden. They’ve been hammering us ever since, calling us the “Dirty 51” and accusing us of deception. Trump even brought it up recently during a speech at the Justice Department, saying we broke the law “on a colossal scale.” 

His allies have taken things even further. Elon Musk tweeted that “the hammer of justice is coming” for us. Mike Davis, a Trump loyalist, went full-on unhinged, saying he wants our “dead bodies dragged through the streets and burned.” Trump’s self-proclaimed “Secretary of Retribution,” Ivan Raiklin, put our names on a so-called “deep-state target list,” saying we should never be able to go anywhere without facing the “wrath” of our neighbors. 

Even Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz falsely claimed we used our security clearances to spread lies—never mind that most of us had been retired for years and had no access to classified intel. 

The truth is, our letter was never about helping Biden. It was about Russian election interference, something we’d spent our careers dealing with. We even said outright that we didn’t know if the emails from the laptop were real or fake—we were just warning that Russia could be using the situation to manipulate voters, like they did in 2016 when they leaked hacked Democratic emails. 

But that’s not the story Trump and his allies wanted to tell. 

Instead, right-wing media spun our letter as us claiming the laptop itself was a “Russian hoax.” That’s not what we said, but thanks to misstatements by politicians like Adam Schiff and Joe Biden himself, the narrative got muddled. Biden even misrepresented our letter in a debate, saying we called the laptop story “a Russian plant.” That didn’t help. 

Meanwhile, Trump supporters happily ran with the false version of our statement, using it as proof that the “deep state” was working against him. 

And let’s be honest  none of these people actually care about Russian interference. If they did, they’d be worried about all the times Russia tried to influence U.S. elections, including their efforts to boost Trump. Instead, they’re mad that social media temporarily slowed the spread of the laptop story, which they had hoped would be their “October surprise” to take down Biden. 

So now Trump is using this as another excuse to go after his enemies. He’s spinning a narrative where we’re the bad guys, while ignoring the real foreign threats to U.S. democracy. It’s a classic Trump move  weaponize the legal system, smear anyone who speaks out against him, and push the idea that the government is out to get him. 

At the end of the day, this whole saga is just another example of how Trump and his allies twist reality to fit their agenda. We signed that letter because we had real concerns about Russia’s influence in the election. But in Trump’s world, anything that doesn’t serve him is automatically a lie  and anyone who disagrees with him is an enemy. 

And now, we’re seeing just how far he’s willing to go to punish those who dared to speak out.