Maggie's Farm

Go with Occam's Razor. A group of people whose job involved using lies to manipulate people, includes lying to congress, the president and the judiciary to manipulate and avoid accountability shouldn't be treated as credible when making dubious assertions about a partisan issue.

Everyone of the 51 were either establishment figures or LWers who viewed Trump as a threat, so may, like you might, simply resort to delusion in response to cognitive dissonance. But the premise that the laptop was Russian disinformation was absurd on its face. First, because the well known character of Hunter Biden made it entirely plausible. Secondly, because there was never the slightest chance that the Russians were stupid enough to prefer Donald Trump as US president to a transparently cognitively diminished and corruptible Joe Biden. Or, for that matter, H. Clinton, which makes believing the Steel Dossier equally absurd from the get-go. The respective positions on petroleum product production and use by and in the USA of Trump versus Clinton and Biden by themselves would have been adequate for Russia to have a strong preference for Clinton and Biden.

But back to the liars who signed the letter. Like you, they place no value on honesty. When you repeatedly insisted four years ago that Biden was not suffering from serious cognitive decline, you were either saying something you knew to be a lie or you are too stupid to be commenting on the issue. Likewise, these former intelligence officials were either lying or were so incompetent at basic factual analysis that they should have never been involved in working in the intelligence services.