Hunter Biden Laptop
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The Hunter Biden laptop is a controversy John Kiriakou has weighed in on directly. He says he did not see anything in the leaked laptop material related to child sex abuse, but that the Biden family, Hunter Biden in particular, has serious, well-documented substance-abuse problems, citing widely circulated photos of Hunter passed out with a crack pipe.

The letter of the 51 former intelligence officials

Kiriakou notes that 51 retired senior-level CIA officers signed a public open letter, published in major newspapers, claiming the laptop story was a "classic KGB intelligence operation" and that the laptop never actually belonged to Hunter Biden. He says the claim was proven entirely false, "they were wrong, every last one of them, all 51 of them were wrong." He has discussed the letter's origins at length, citing former CIA deputy director Michael Morell's congressional testimony on how it came to be written.

Deliberately hedged language

Kiriakou notes that the signatories never actually claimed the laptop story was Russian disinformation, they used a specific hedge. He traces this to his own CIA analytic training, which taught officers to write with qualifiers like "likely" and "presumably" precisely so a claim can be walked back later: "they don't say ever the Hunter Biden laptop is a Russian disinformation operation, they said it bears all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation."

Kiriakou's view on the signatories and Trump's response

Kiriakou says he knows every one of the 51 signatories personally, describing them as a mix, "some of them are brilliant, some of them are morons, some of them are good-hearted, patriotic, faithful people, some are self-serving idiots who want nothing more than to make millions and millions of dollars." He argues that any former intelligence officer who retains an active security clearance should never speak to the media, since the incentive to sound authoritative, "I have the inside track", is impossible to separate from actual analysis. On that basis, he says Donald Trump's 2025 revocation of the 51 signatories' clearances was something Trump should have done when first elected in 2016.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Joe Biden
- President's Daily Brief
- Central Intelligence Agency
