On October 16, 2020, three days prior to the letter's release,
House Intelligence Committee chairman
Adam Schiff said on CNN, "Well we know that this whole smear on Joe Biden comes from the
Kremlin ... Clearly, the origins of this whole smear are from the Kremlin, and the president is only too happy to have Kremlin help and try to amplify it," though Schiff did not specifically refer to the laptop story. During an interview with
Fox News on October 19, 2020, Trump's
Director of National Intelligence (DNI)
John Ratcliffe disputed Schiff's statement, saying "there is no intelligence that supports that", and accused Schiff of mischaracterizing the views of the intelligence community by describing the alleged emails as part of a
smear campaign against Joe Biden. Schiff's spokesman accused Ratcliffe of "purposefully misrepresenting" the congressman's words. In March 2021, two months after Ratcliffe left as DNI, the intelligence community he had overseen released analysis finding that proxies of Russian intelligence promoted and
laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about the Bidens "to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration". Further dispute over the interpretation of the letter arose when, on the day of its release,
Politico published a story with the misleading headline, "Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say," though the body of the story did not support that wording. Instead, the story's lede accurately quoted the letter's words: "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation". During the second 2020 presidential debate held on October 22, 2020, Joe Biden repeated the article's misleading claim in stating, "Look, there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan". He would later repeat the claim in a
60 Minutes interview held on October 25, 2020. Republican congressmen
Jim Jordan and
Mike Turner said that Michael Morell, a signatory of the letter and former deputy director of the CIA under President Obama, testified before Congress in April 2023 about events leading up to the publication of the letter. Morell revealed that on or around October 17, 2020,
Antony Blinken, then a senior adviser to the Biden campaign, called him to discuss the laptop story. Jordan and Turner highlighted that, according to Morell, the phone call with Blinken "set in motion the events that led to" the publication of the letter. The congressmen said that retired CIA officer David Cariens had informed them via email that the agency's Prepublication Classification Review Board approved the letter and helped recruit signatories. == Reactions ==