A prominent signer of the baseless October 2020 Hunter Biden laptop letter — explicitly designed to provide Joe Biden with a “talking point” in his presidential debate with Donald Trump — is continuing to suggest, without any credible evidence, that “the Russians played some role” in the incriminating laptop.
Larry Pfeiffer, the former chief of staff to then-CIA director Michael Hayden (who also signed the laptop letter), made the claim during a SpyTalk podcast episode earlier in August amidst a broader discussion where the former intelligence official also sought to downplay the revelations from recent declassifications made by CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Pfeiffer, the director of the Hayden Center at George Mason University, repeatedly told the podcast hosts — journalists Jeff Stein and Michael Isikoff — that he and other signers still believed the Russians may have been behind the Hunter Biden laptop, which first emerged publicly in mid-October 2020. The New York Post stories detailing the shady business dealings of Joe Biden’s son in China and Ukraine were subsequently banned from social media and self-censored by legacy media who only admitted the authenticity of the laptop after Biden won election.
Rewriting history
“We never said the laptop was fake, in fact, I think we said the laptop and the emails may very well be real,” Pfeiffer said in the August 1 episode. “In fact, the fact that they are and were real smacks even more of a Russian information operation, because most Russian information operations, most good information operations, have some base in truth.”
