Trump moves to revoke clearances of ex-intel officials who signed letter on Hunter Biden laptop

▶ Follow live updates on President Donald Trump’s return to Washington WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump says his administration will move to revoke the security clearances of the more than four dozen former intelligence officials who signed a 2020 letter saying that the Hunter Biden laptop saga bore the hallmarks of a “Russian information operation.” The action is an early indication of the president’s determination to exact retribution on perceived adversaries and is the latest point of tension between Trump and an intelligence community of which he has been openly disdainful. It was not clear how many of the former officials still maintain security clearances, though Mark Zaid, who represents eight people who signed the letter, said that he did not believe many did and that the Trump’s action functioned largely as a “public policy message to his right-wing base” He said he would sue the administration on behalf of any client who wanted to challenge the order. At issue is an October 2020 letter signed by former intelligence officials who raised alarms about the provenance of emails reported by The New York Post to have come from a laptop that President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, had dropped off at a Wilmington, Delaware, computer repair shop. The signatories of the letter wrote that they didn’t know whether the emails were authentic or not but that their emergence has “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” But Trump’s director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe — also his current pick to lead the CIA — contradicted that assessment by saying there was no intelligence to support the idea that Russia had anything to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop.