New DHS Disinformation Head Dismissed Hunter Biden Emails as ‘Trump Campaign Product’

The head of a new Department of Homeland Security initiative to combat disinformation cast doubt on the New York Post‘s since-vindicated story on the content of Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election.

Nina Jankowicz, a Wilson Center fellow, will be the executive director of the DHS’s planned Disinformation Governance Board, Politico Playbook revealed on Wednesday. Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas revealed in congressional testimony earlier on Wednesday that the agency is creating the board to target disinformation in minority communities, Fox News noted.

Jankowicz has previously appeared to suggest that the Hunter Biden email story was part of a disinformation campaign. An Associated Press article released one day after the Post‘s report stated that “disinformation experts say there are multiple red flags that raise doubts about [the emails’] authenticity, including questions about whether the laptop actually belongs to Hunter Biden, said Nina Jankowicz…”

“We should view it as a Trump campaign product,” Jankowicz told the AP regarding the Post report.

In tweets later in October 2020, Jankowicz wrote that “the emails don’t need to be altered to be part of an influence campaign. Voters deserve that context, not a fairly tale about a laptop repair shop,” and shared a Time report that she wrote cast “yet more doubt on the provenance of the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story.”

Jankowicz on Wednesday defended a separate tweet from October 22, 2020, in which she wrote on a debate between then-President Trump and candidate Joe Biden.

“Back on the ‘laptop from hell,’ apparently- Biden notes 50 former natsec officials and 5 former CIA heads that believe the laptop is a Russian influence op,” Jankowicz wrote at the time. “Trump says ‘Russia, Russia, Russia.'” The former intelligence officials conceded in the letter that they had no evidence that the emails were the product of Russian disinformation.

Jankowicz wrote on Twitter on Wednesday that the tweet was not representative of “all my views.”

“For those who believe this tweet is a key to all my views, it is simply a direct quote from both candidates during the final presidential debate. If you look at my timeline, you will see I was livetweeting that evening,” Jankowicz wrote.

Emails first reported by the Post, allegedly taken from Hunter Biden’s laptop, were confirmed as authentic by the Washington Post and New York Times in March of this year. The emails reveal a concerted effort by Hunter Biden and President Biden’s brother James to trade on their family name. Some of the emails implicate the president himself in the influence peddling scheme.

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