FIRST ON FOX: South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham sent a letter to each of the 51 former intelligence officials who signed a memo suggesting the Hunter Biden laptop had the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. 

“In your letter, you claimed that the laptop story was ‘Russia trying to influence how Americans vote,’” Graham’s letter read to former CIA directors Leon Panetta and Michael Hayden, former Director of National Intelligence [DNI] James Clapper and 48 others. 

“I ask you to respond publicly to one simple question: if you knew then what you know now about the laptop, would you still have signed the October 19, 2020 letter?” 

Graham, a Republican, has previously suggested yanking the security clearances of officials who signed the letter. 

Vice President-elect JD Vance pledged during the campaign that the incoming Trump administration would strip the clearances of all 51 signatories. 

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Over the summer, Fox News Digital asked all 51 officials whether they regretted signing on to the now-debunked letter. 

“No,” Obama-era DNI James Clapper responded. 

Mark Zaid, an attorney representing seven of the signatories, said it was “patriotic” for his clients to sign on to the letter. 

“There continues to be by many a calculated or woefully ignorant interpretation of the October 2020 letter signed by fifty-one former intelligence officials concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop,” Zaid said. 

Greg Treverton, a signatory who previously served as chair of the National Intelligence Council, defended the letter in a statement to Fox News Digital. 

Over the summer, Fox News Digital asked all 51 officials whether they regretted signing on to the now-debunked letter claiming Hunter Biden’s laptop appeared to be Russian disinformation. (Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

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“This is very old news,” Treverton said. “What we said was true, we were inferring from our experience, and it did look like a Russian operation. We didn’t, and couldn’t, of course, say it was a Russian operation. Enough said.”

The now-infamous letter had said their national security experience had made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”

“If we are right,” they added, “this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”

Despite claims from former officials that the laptop had the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, Fox News Digital reported that federal investigators with the Department of Justice knew in December 2019 that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “not manipulated in any way” and contained “reliable evidence,” but were “obstructed” from seeing all available information, according to an IRS whistleblower involved in the probe – nearly a year before the former intelligence officials and President Joe Biden declared it was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

The laptop was introduced into evidence in a Delaware courtroom last week by prosecutor Derek Hines and handed to FBI agent Erika Jensen, who had earlier explained how the FBI authenticated the laptop and extracted data. In the gun trial, she testified about dozens of text messages, metadata, photos and short videos found on phones and iCloud accounts belonging to Hunter Biden. 

An Orange County congressional race that has become the closest in the country currently has such a slim margin of victory that it feels more like a small-town city council contest than a race for the House of Representatives.

On Thursday, Republican Rep. Michelle Steel led the race by 58 votes. Her challenger, Democrat Derek Tran, took the lead Friday by 36 votes and widened his lead Monday to 102 votes as ballots continue to be counted.

“People who have been watching closely and feel like the race is on a knife’s edge are anxious to see this one get called,” said Paul Mitchell, whose firm Political Data, Inc. tracks voter trends.

The earliest votes counted in the 45th Congressional District showed Steel leading by more than 5 percentage points, but that lead vanished as elections officials counted ballots deposited in drop boxes and sent by mail. California law requires that ballots be counted as long as they are postmarked by election day and arrive at the registrar’s office within a week of the election.

The shift from comfortably red on election night to uncomfortably purple two weeks later has been held up by right-wing agitators as evidence of voter fraud. Elon Musk reshared a post on X alleging that Tran took the lead 11 days after the election because California was “corrupt as hell,” while Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said that Democrats are “stealing a House seat right out from under us.”

Experts say there’s nothing amiss in the district beyond California’s typically poky counting speeds and what’s known as the “red mirage” or the “blue shift.” The phenomenon occurs in districts where in-person voting on election day is skewed toward Republicans, while mail ballots counted later trend toward Democrats.

Tran, a first-time candidate, is hoping to be the first Vietnamese American candidate to represent the Congressional district that includes Little Saigon.

Tran’s campaign manager, Gowri Buddiga, said Monday that voters need to be patient, but the campaign is “confident that as the remaining vote-by-mail, provisional, and conditional ballots are tallied, Derek Tran will emerge victorious.” Steel’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The Tran campaign thanked county elections workers who “continue to do their essential work in the face of lies, hostility and bomb threats.”

Republicans have won 218 seats, just enough to control the House of Representatives. Whether it will be a whisper-thin majority or a little more comfortable is still up in the air: Five seats have yet to be called, two of them in California.

The 45th District was one of the country’s most expensive races, and a key target for Democrats, because although Steel is a Republican, voters there supported President Biden in 2020. Former President Clinton visited Orange County to campaign for Tran, a sign of how much the Democratic Party prioritized the race.

Steel and Tran both focused heavily on outreach to Asian American voters, who make up a plurality of the district that runs through 17 cities including Garden Grove, Westminster, Fountain Valley, Buena Park and Cerritos.

Born to South Korean parents and raised in Japan, Steel broke barriers in 2020 when she became one of three Korean American women elected to the House. She leaned heavily on anti-communist messaging to reach out to older voters who fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.

Tran, who was born in the U.S. to Vietnamese refugee parents, also focused heavily on Vietnamese Americans, hoping that his family’s story would help win over voters who were once loyal to the Republican Party.

Mitchell said his analysis of the 45th District shows that there are about 13,000 ballots left to be counted in the district. He said ballots cast before election day had a 5.1% advantage for Democrats, in-person voting on election day had a Republican advantage of 15%, and votes counted after election day skewed blue by 18.5%.

That pattern is driven by young voters, Mitchell said, who “end up voting later than everyone else,” and tend to lean more liberal.

Mitchell said there are more than 4,600 ballots in the 45th District that weren’t counted initially because of clerical issues, including ballots that weren’t signed, or signed with a signature that didn’t match the voter information on file.

Voters whose ballots were not initially counted have been notified by county elections officials, along with instructions on how to make their ballots count. So far, Mitchell said, 1,170 of those votes have been counted through a process known as “curing,” in which voters can correct the error and attest to elections officials that the flawed ballot is really theirs.

Volunteers for Steel and Tran have mounted labor-intensive campaigns to find those voters and get them to turn in their forms. Voters cannot change their votes during the curing process, and have until Dec. 1 to fix any technical issues.

California does not have automatic recounts. Any voter or campaign can request a recount within five days of the election being certified, but must foot the costs, which could be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for a Congressional race. Elections officials refund the money if the recount changes the result.

California Republican Party chair Jessica Millan Patterson said last week that the party recruited and trained thousands of volunteers to monitor the state’s ballot counting process and work on reaching out to voters whose ballots were flagged because of technical errors.

“I know how frustrating it can be to wait on results during this long process,” she said in a public video. “But please know that the California Republican Party and our partners are committed to ensuring that our elections are fair and your vote is safe and secure. We won’t rest until the last legal ballot is counted.”

She added: “We knew this was coming, as we’ve seen it before.”

Two years ago, it took nearly a month for the dust to settle in California’s congressional races. The race between Democrat Adam Gray and now-Rep. John Duarte in the Central Valley was decided by 564 votes and wasn’t called by the Associated Press until Dec. 2.

A group of House Republicans is pushing to overhaul how funds are organized at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to more quickly get aid to communities devastated by Hurricane Helene.

Rep. Gary Palmer, R-Ala., chair of the House GOP Policy Committee, is leading a new bill that would move unspent funds the agency has from the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as certain unspent funds earmarked for previous natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, into the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund.

It comes just hours before the House Oversight Committee is set to hold a high-stakes hearing over accusations that FEMA aid was politicized, with FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell expected to testify.

“Millions of Americans were impacted by devastating hurricanes, and many are still seeking assistance and aid from FEMA to this day. Reports have now surfaced that a FEMA official recently instructed relief workers to avoid homes displaying support for President Donald Trump,” House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., said last week when announcing the hearing.

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“Not only are these actions by a FEMA employee completely unacceptable, but the committee remains deeply concerned that this is not an isolated incident at the agency.”

Palmer’s bill is backed by a wide spectrum of GOP lawmakers, from House Freedom Caucus members, like Reps. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., and Byron Donalds, R-Fla., to more moderate Republicans, like Reps. Don Bacon, R-Neb., and Young Kim, R-Calif.

It’s one of several solutions proposed in Congress to help get more immediate dollars to FEMA’s disaster fund. 

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Parts of North Carolina, like Chimney Rock, were hit hard by Helene. (Getty Images)

Criswell told reporters on Monday that her agency “will need additional funding of approximately $40 billion beyond its 2025 budget request to support the ongoing recovery efforts to these storms and meet our overall mission requirements through the end of the fiscal year.”

The White House also requested $98 billion in additional disaster relief funding from Congress.

Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle have pledged to act swiftly once getting a formal request from the Biden administration.

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Helene ravaged part of the U.S. Southeast in late September, killing more than 100 people in North Carolina alone.

It’s estimated to have caused billions of dollars worth of damage as well.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., previously told Fox News Digital that he believed it could be one of the most expensive storms in U.S. history.