While much attention Wednesday was focused on revelations of President Joe Biden’s shady deals to line his and his family’s pockets with cash grifted from foreign interests, House Republicans also issued a report showing how the intelligence community worked to undermine former President Donald Trump in 2020.
The Republican-led House Judiciary and Intelligence committees, as well as the special subcommittee investigating the “weaponization” of the federal government, issued a joint interim report of their probe of how former members of the U.S. intelligence community worked to suppress the damaging story of Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020.
“The American people deserve to know that Hunter Biden’s laptop and emails were real. They always were real. The allegations that they were the product of Russian disinformation were false,” the report noted.
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“On November 3, 2020, the American people went to the polls to elect the president of the United States with the false impression that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. The American people cannot get back the 2020 election, but they have every right to demand reforms from Congress so that the 2024 election will not be similarly compromised.”
Much information in the report about those former intel officials’ collaboration with Biden in 2020 was known.
But one “potentially shocking” revelation, as the GOP lawmakers noted in the report, was that at least one active-duty CIA official participated in recruiting others to attack Trump.
The issue is a letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials who smeared the New York Post story about Hunter’s laptop as part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
The letter generated attacks against the Post, and its story was suppressed on social media, thus helping shield Biden from criticism about misconduct just days before the election.
Moreover, Biden himself cited the statement in a debate with Trump in an effort to discredit the Post’s reporting.
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Yet since then, the Post has been vindicated as liberal publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, have verified its reporting.
The report released Wednesday looked in detail at how former Central Intelligence Agency Acting Director Michael Morell rounded up colleagues to attack the Post on behalf of the Biden campaign. That effort was led by current Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who was a senior adviser to Biden in the 2020 election.
Morrell told congressional investigators that he had “no intention” of drafting such a letter until Blinken contacted him. Morrell was reportedly being considered to lead the CIA if Biden won.
Much of that has been reported, including by The Free Press.
One significant new fact was that a CIA employee who reviewed the statement signed by Biden’s supporters “may have assisted in obtaining signatories for the statement,” the report noted.
That came courtesy of former CIA analyst David Cariens.
Cariens, a 50-year veteran of the intelligence community, was writing his memoir and submitted the manuscript to the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board, which reviews such materials to ensure no classified information is released.
Cariens, who signed Morrell’s statement, told investigators that a member of the PCRB told him about the statement and asked if he would sign it.
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That request was so egregious that Morrell and other witnesses denounced it. Morrell called it “inappropriate” for a current CIA employee to seek such support, while other witnesses told lawmakers it was “incredibly unprofessional” and “really bad.”
“The Committees have requested additional material from the CIA, which has ignored the request to date,” the report noted.
Another major update included the fact that 26 of 36 people who were contacted by Morrell refused to sign the statement.
“Although the precise reasons they declined are not yet known, these facts cast doubt on Morell’s intended perception that a groundswell of Russia experts organically concluded that the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian intelligence operation,” GOP lawmakers wrote.
“Americans deserve to have confidence that their government, particularly its premier intelligence agency, is free from politicization. The infusion of bare-knuckle partisan politics into America’s intelligence agencies is cause for grave concern,” the report noted.
“Former federal employees have a right to engage in the political process—a fundamental right that the Committees do not dispute. Here, however, the signers of the Hunter Biden laptop statement relied on their national security credentials and used their official titles to lend heft to their statement and to insinuate access to secretive information unavailable to other Americans. And these signers did so in coordination with a political campaign for the explicit purpose of giving a candidate for office a ‘talking point’ to dismiss legitimate criticism of his family’s business practices.”
The report’s author noted that the investigation into the origin of the statement continues.
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