Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper accused POLITICO of “deliberately” misrepresenting a letter he and 50 other intelligence veterans signed regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Clapper, who served as the nation’s spy chief during the Obama administration, said the letter did not assert that reporting on the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation operation, a notion that POLITICO peddled with its headline when first reporting the existence of the letter.
“There was message distortion,” Clapper told The Washington Post’s Fact Checker. “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.”
The letter from the 51 former intelligence officials came out in the days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, warning that reporting about the laptop’s alleged contents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information…
