During the closing days of the 2020 presidential campaign, on October 14, 2020, the "Post" published a front-page story purporting to reveal "smoking gun" emails recovered from a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden at a computer repair store in Wilmington, Delaware. The only sources named in the story were Republican operatives Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani. The story came under heavy criticism from other news sources and anonymous reporters at the "Post" itself for "flimsy" reporting, including questions about the reliability of its sourcing and the lack of outreach to either Hunter Biden or the Biden campaign for comment. More than fifty former U.S. intelligence officials signed an open letter stating that they were "deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role" in the story, but emphasized that "we do not know if the emails... are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement". The Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe attempted to dispel these rumors, emphasizing that "the intelligence community doesn’t believe that emails originated from Russian disinformation because there is no intelligence that supports that." The FBI has had possession of the laptop since late 2019 and reported that they had "nothing to add" to Ratcliffe's remarks concerning Russian disinformation. A later publication by "The New York Times" emphasized that "no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation," and that, after mounting pressure, the FBI wrote to Senator Ron Johnson (WI) and suggested that they have not found any Russian disinformation on the laptop. It is unclear what, if anything, the Justice Department officials knew at the time. Fox News reported that the laptop was seized as part of an investigation into money laundering, but did not make clear if the investigation involved Hunter Biden. "The New York Times" reported in December 2020 that investigators had initially examined possible money laundering by Hunter Biden but did not find evidence to justify further investgation.