"Intel does not participate in anyone’s efforts to decrease security in technology." - This does look to me to be a pretty strong denial.
A strong denial: "Absolutely not"
What he wrote (in part):
First, let me be clear that Intel doesn’t participate in the NSA programs
described in recent news reports. Intel does not participate in anyone’s
efforts to decrease security in technology. We don’t provide methods for
unauthorized access to our products….we don’t create back doors.
No matter what he had said and regardless of how true or false it had been, people would be reading in lies. He's too detailed, he's too vague, he's too forceful, too weak, too formal, too informal — once somebody is convinced you're a liar, there is very little you can say to change their mind.
...hopefully they do a better job at keeping their hardware backdoors (if they exist) off the "market" than they do at press releases. Nobody needs this for their dirty deeds anyway considering the current state of software security, and even a state agency would be stupid to use such capability even if they had it, for obvious reasons.