Hello, and welcome to the Byron York Sherman Leadership Chat Podcast.

We'd like to get right into it, and what we're going to get into today is some new knowledge,

some new clues we have about disinformation in the 2020 campaign.

So just to kind of set the scene, there's still a lot we don't know about the events surrounding

the appearance and then the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop in the final weeks of the 2020

campaign. Now, of course, you know that Twitter after Elon Musk purchased it revealed some key

information about the role of the FBI and other government agencies in the effort to censor the

Hunter Biden laptops contents. But there's still a lot more to discover. And what we're going to talk

about today is that statement. You probably remember it was a statement released four days after maybe

five days after the New York Post article on the laptop. And it was a statement from 51 former

national security officials. And it declared with great authority that the laptop had quote all the

classic earmarks of a Russian information operation. So it wasn't true. It just wasn't true.

And they even kind of admitted it in the letter of the statement that they didn't really know.

But it was enormously influential. This statement played a big role in the last few days of

the campaign. So the question is how did it originate? Now, we know that in truth, the laptop

was legitimately Hunter Biden's. We do know that it revealed enormous amounts of information

about his foreign business activities and the possible knowledge of his father, the then presidential

candidate Joe Biden. And it was not part of a Russian operation. Now, national security officials

who were actually in office at the time said, no, there's no evidence that the laptop was some sort

of Russian thing, Russian operation. But this statement, this statement from the 51 former

officials, they included James Clapper, Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, John Brennan, Michael Morrell,

former top, top officials in the US intelligence community. Many others, total of 51, it lent credibility

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