In case anyone is wondering who was responsible for the idea that the Hunter Biden laptop story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper assures us it was not the 51 retired intelligence community leaders who penned the letter which said it was. Instead, it was the media who mischaracterized their words.

Clapper’s signature topped the list of prominent former government officials willing to stake their reputations on the infamous letter that was written to sow doubt about a story that, if it had not been suppressed, could arguably have changed the result of the 2020 presidential election.

Clearly, these officials had only one goal in mind: to torpedo the New York Post’s bombshell story about the emails that pointed to then-candidate Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s influence-peddling operation. Perhaps anticipating they may one day face charges of election interference, the signatories carefully worded their letter to absolve themselves of legal responsibility for their malfeasance.

Specifically, Clapper, who is best known for lying to Congress in 2013 about the National Security Agency’s collection of Americans’ telephone records and for his role in perpetuating the Russian collusion hoax, blamed Politico for “deliberately distorting” their letter in an October 2020 piece titled , “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”

"There was message distortion. All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation,” Clapper told Washington Post “fact checker” Glenn Kessler. “Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five."

Paragraph five is indeed a disclaimer. It states : “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.”

But if Clapper felt the letter had been deliberately distorted, he certainly had ample opportunity to clear things up. After leaving office at the end of the Obama administration, Clapper became a political analyst for CNN, giving him a major media platform from which to do so. Yet he remained silent — even as leftist pundits and congressional Democrats spread the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop story had been planted by Russia.

Moreover, Clapper claimed to be “unaware” of how Joe Biden had used the letter to dismiss concerns about his son’s business dealings during a presidential debate, according to Kessler. Are we to believe that Clapper somehow missed the debate or at least the part where Biden used the letter to successfully shield himself from Trump’s attacks on his family’s alleged pay-to-play scheme?

Kessler reported the “letter was organized by Michael J. Morell, former deputy director of the CIA. … Morell had long been considered a top candidate for CIA director in a Biden administration, news reports said, but key Democrats objected , claiming he publicly supported the CIA’s enhanced interrogation methods after the Sept. 11 attacks.” In other words, this hoax was coordinated by a man with a strong personal interest in a Biden victory.

Kessler reached out to another of the letter’s signers, former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research Thomas Fingar, who responded by email. He wrote, “No one who has spent time in Washington should be surprised that journalists and politicians willfully or unintentionally misconstrue oral or written statements. The statement we signed was carefully written to minimize the likelihood that what was said would be misconstrued, and to provide a clear written record that could be used to identify and disprove distortions.”

Let’s rephrase that. No one who has spent time in Washington should be surprised that 51 members of the administrative state would use their clout to sway an election toward their favored candidate. Each official who signed onto that letter did so to mitigate the damage to the Biden campaign from the New York Post’s explosive story.

They knew the legacy media would pick up their narrative, and they were not disappointed. Rather than trying to authenticate the emails on the laptop by contacting individuals on the other end of those communications, the legacy media either declared the story to be fraudulent or else suppressed it entirely.

Much as a defense attorney works to create reasonable doubt in the face of incriminating evidence, these highly credentialed intelligence officials provided a very plausible explanation for the devastating material. In doing so, they perpetrated a fraud of biblical proportions which arguably changed the course of a presidential election and, in turn, the future of this country. Their strategy worked exactly as they had hoped it would.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, they’re hiding behind the language they so carefully incorporated into the letter. And that is A-OK with Kessler — naturally.

Elizabeth Stauffer is a contributor to the Washington Examiner and the Western Journal . Her articles have appeared at MSN, RedState, Newsmax, the Federalist, and RealClearPolitics. Follow her on  Twitter  or  LinkedIn .