The ex-intelligence official who reported the Hunter Biden laptop letter signed by 51 former officials to the Intelligence Community Inspector General says that calling the incident a hoax would downplay what appears to be an effort to influence a presidential election.  

“[I]t drives me nuts when I hear people call this a hoax, right? Because I think that that just downplays what it really is,” Thomas Kuhns told the Just the News, No Noise TV show on Monday. 

Kuhns was a Senior Intelligence Officer and former advisor to the Deputy Director of National Intelligence during the Obama administration who departed his role in 2016. 

Using skill set to influence and manipulate the American people

Earlier this year he reported his concern that the Hunter Biden laptop letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials in 2020 bore characteristics “consistent with coordinated intelligence deception operations,” according to a memo the ex-official submitted to the Intelligence Community Inspector General, Just the News reported on Monday. 

“We have a group of trained intelligence professionals who, in my mind, use that skill set to influence and manipulate the American people, and if you go out and look at the textbook and doctrine definitions of deception operation, it is putting forward selective information in order to manipulate and to move people how you want them to move, while you're holding back information that might change or get them to use better judgment,” Kuhns said.  

“And I just don't think there's a place for that, whether you're working for an agency or whether you have that skill set and you stepped out of the agency, but I think that this goes beyond a hoax,” he added. 

In the October 2020 open letter – released as voters were making final decisions about whether to reelect Trump or elect Democrat Joe Biden – 51 former intelligence officials warned that the public reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s personal laptop bore the “hallmarks of a Russian information operation.” 

The letter was signed by big names from the Obama administration, such as former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and former CIA Director John Brennan. 

Then-candidate Joe Biden used the letter to fend off public criticism about his son’s overseas business dealings, drug use, and alleged influence peddling, labeling it a plot by Russia. 

Used as an excuse for censorship

Social media companies also used the letter as justification for censoring The New York Post’s blockbuster reporting in October 2020 showing how Hunter Biden had introduced his father to his Ukrainian business partner, a senior executive at Burisma Holdings. Joe Biden was vice president at the time. 

Hunter Biden’s tenure at Burisma has come under scrutiny for years from the media and Congress over allegations that he used his influence with his father to assist Burisma in escaping a corruption investigation in Ukraine. 

Kuhns told Just the News that he had “unplugged from D.C. politics” after departing the Intelligence Community in 2016, but recently started looking into what he had missed in the intervening years after the shocking assassination attempt against then-candidate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024. 

“I just thought, you know, what, let me go back and look at some of the things that I hadn't been paying attention to, and just by chance I looked at the Hunter Biden laptop letter first, and as soon as I read the letter, it was so poorly written that I was flabbergasted to learn that Mike Morell was the primary author,” Kuhns told the Just the News, No Noise TV show. 

“I know Mike Morell. He's the former head of CIA analysis. He's a former acting director of the CIA. I know that there's no way that he put that product out thinking that it was a solid analytic or communicative product,” he added. 

This prompted Kuhns to review the October 2020 letter, which raised several red flags for the ex-intelligence officer. What he found eventually spurred him to write a report to the Intelligence Community Inspector General, which he submitted earlier this year. 

“This analysis is grounded in my expertise applying analytic integrity standards and intelligence trade craft to evaluate raw and finished intelligence assessments/judgements. Those standards provide a framework to identify politicization, bias, and analytic weaknesses, as well as to identify whether intelligence trade craft itself has been misapplied or misused,” Kuhns wrote.

Ultimately, by “applying this framework,” he concluded that “the planning, drafting, and dissemination” of the Hunter Biden laptop letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials “exhibit characteristics consistent with coordinated intelligence deception operations and tradecraft [...]" according to the memo.  

You can read the memo below: 

“[M]ost damning to me was the evidence of actual deception trade craft and techniques in the written document itself,” Kuhns told Just the News. 

“I identified at least ten different textbook deception techniques in what was about a 650-word document [...] to produce multiple, multiple mutually exclusive and reinforcing deception trade craft techniques compressed into a small document,” he said. 

Last week, the Intelligence Community Inspector General informed Kuhns that it had referred his report to the Justice Department’s Inspector General for further review.