Has one of the signatories on the infamous “Russia disinformation” letter used by Joe Biden to dismiss the Hunter Biden laptop story recanted? Not exactly, but Douglas Wise has at least admitted that the reality of that story was significantly more nuanced than he and his fifty colleagues let on.

In an interview with The Australian, Wise now argues that all of the signatories knew a great deal of the information “had to be real” in order for a disinformation campaign to be “credible.” The New York Post picked up on the admission last night:

Douglas Wise, a former Defense Intelligence Agency deputy director, was one of 51 erstwhile intelligence brass who issued the public letter on Oct. 19, 2020 — five days after The Post began a series of reports on the now-first son’s shady overseas business dealings.

“All of us figured that a significant portion of that content had to be real to make any Russian disinformation credible,” said Wise — who didn’t respond when The Post reached out for an explanation in March of last year, but found his tongue when he spoke to The Australian.

The Oct. 19 letter — whose signatories included former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, former Director of National intelligence James Clapper, and former CIA Director John Brennan — went out of its way to cast doubt on the legitimacy of The Post’s scoop, devoting five paragraphs to explaining “factors that make us suspicious of Russian involvement” while slipping in the caveat that “we do not know if the emails … are genuine or not and … we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.”

Wise has retreated to a fallback position that the letter got misunderstood:

“The letter said it had the earmarks of Russian deceit and we should consider that as a possibility,” Wise told The Australian. “It did not say Hunter Biden was a good guy, it didn’t say what he did was right and it wasn’t exculpatory, it was just a cautionary letter.”

Ahem. The Post rebuts that by quoting the letter’s conclusion:

In fact, the letter referred to “[o]ur view that the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue” and concluded with the message: “It is high time that Russia stops interfering in our democracy.”

Wise’s explanation now, after the Department of Justice eventually validated the laptop, amounts to nothing more than defensive spin. If Wise and his cohort wanted to make the case for not jumping to conclusions, they failed miserably at it. Their own letter jumped to a conclusion of a Russian plot, was leaked to Politico to further that narrative, and did so on the basis of absolutely no evidence at all.

Furthermore, the Post actually produced corroboration at the time of the laptop’s validity. For just one example: Tony Bobulinski, one of Hunter’s business contacts, practically did jumping jacks for the media at the time to get their attention to his testimony validating the e-mail chains found on the laptop. Bobulinski also declared at the time that Joe Biden was much more involved in Hunter’s business deals than Biden admitted, the conclusion that the Biden campaign desperately wanted buried.

None of the 51 intel geniuses apparently thought to contact others on those e-mail chains first before going public with their claims of election interference from Russia, even with Bobulinski validating the report. They didn’t appear to do anything to research the issue or test their knee-jerk hypothesis. In the absence of any real investigation, they didn’t even have the good sense to keep quiet. Instead, they played the part of political stooges or hacks in pronouncing themselves “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case” based on nothing at all.

And the media ate up the Russia hysteria on the same basis, just as they did in 2017 and 2018. Most importantly, the media ate it up because these signatories knew they would, and designed this letter to spoon-feed a false narrative into the election. Wise and his cohort knew exactly what they were doing, and whom they served in their actions.

So who actually was “interfering in our democracy”? Was it Russian intelligence services …. or American intelligence service establishment? Because right now, Wise’s spin aside, the evidence looks much more damning for the latter.