Were intel officials knowingly spinning misinformation to protect Biden?

 PJ Media:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy says that the House Republicans will demand answers from intelligence officials on what they knew about Hunter Biden’s shady foreign business dealings while Joe Biden was vice president, according to a report from the New York Post.

McCarthy says that if they don’t come in voluntarily, they will be subpoenaed.

“They should come in and talk to us,” McCarthy told the Post. “You’d want to ask these individuals what did they know and when.

After the New York Post published stories about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings based on emails from his abandoned laptop, 51 former intelligence agency officials publicly disputed the story as Russian information.

“The arrival on the US political scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter, much of it related to his time serving on the Board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” the letter read. “If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”

They were wrong, of course. The laptop was genuine, and there was never any evidence that it was Russian disinformation. In a sense, the 51 former intel officials had engaged in disinformation to protect Joe Biden before the 2020 election. The New York Post reached out to all of them earlier this year, but “most ignored the inquiry and none apologized. A few even doubled down.”

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I suspect they wanted the laptop information to be Russian disinformation to protect their preferred candidate.   They had no serious basis for their statements having never looked at the laptop.  In the process they lost crediblity.