Biden Campaign Collaborated with Intel Officials to Falsely Portray Hunter Emails as Disinformation: House Report

T he ballyhooed letter signed by 51 former U.S. intelligence officials, portraying the New York Post’s October 2020 reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop as the product of a Russian influence operation, was itself a classic disinformation campaign executed by former U.S. intelligence officials, and abetted by the CIA itself, at the behest of the Biden campaign and in coordination with Democrat-friendly media.

That is the conclusion of a joint interim report released today by investigators from two House committees — specifically, the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, run by Ohio Republicans Jim Jordan and Mike Turner, respectively — as well as Jordan’s newly formed Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government.

The 68-page report, supported by significant witness testimony and records of electronic communications, relates that the prime mover of the letter was Antony Blinken, then a Biden campaign adviser, who was later appointed secretary of state following President Biden’s election victory — which was given a substantial boost by the disinformation letter. While Blinken now poses as a scrupulous career diplomat above the grimy world of politics and bleats that he did not expressly direct the writing of a letter, he willfully set the project in motion.

The Post’s reporting, drawing on data from the laptop, especially Hunter Biden’s emails, demonstrated that Joe Biden, the former vice president and then Democratic nominee for president, was complicit in Hunter’s — indeed, the Biden family’s — lucrative business of monetizing Joe’s political influence. (Separately, the House Oversight Committee released a report on Biden influence-peddling today.) Though the family reaped millions of dollars from this enterprise, particularly from apparatchiks of the Communist Chinese regime, Vice President Biden had indignantly — if implausibly — denied both knowledge of it and discussions with Hunter about it. The Biden campaign was thus deeply concerned about the impact of the Post’s reporting, with the 2020 election less than three weeks away and polling showing that Trump was narrowing Biden’s lead.

According to the testimony of former acting CIA director Michael Morell, who was the main author of the letter and led the effort to recruit signatories, he was contacted by Blinken — the former deputy secretary of state with whom he worked in the Obama administration — three days after the Post broke the laptop story on October 14, 2020. Morell had not read the Post’s report and had no intention of getting involved or writing a letter until after speaking with Blinken. He was, nevertheless, being touted at the time as the potential CIA director if Biden won the election.

Morell recalled that Blinken did not direct him, in so many words, to write a letter. Yet they clearly discussed that it would be helpful for former vice president Biden to have ammunition to push back against what it was assumed would be then-president Trump’s highlighting of the Post’s reporting in the presidential debate that was coming a few days later — on October 22. Blinken also planted the seed in Morell’s mind that the most effective pushback would be to portray the Post’s reporting as the product of Russian disinformation. He pointedly asked whether Morell believed that Russian intelligence agents were involved in disseminating the Hunter Biden emails — notwithstanding that Morell had not read the reporting about the emails. Just in case Blinken’s elliptical words had failed to convey loudly and clearly enough what the campaign wanted, he also emailed Morell a USA Today article titled “A tabloid got a trove of data on Hunter Biden from Rudy Giuliani. Now, the FBI is probing a possible disinformation campaign.”

Morell proceeded to do some research of his own. He also consulted with Marc Polymeropoulos, the CIA’s former acting chief of operations for Europe and Asia — a credential that would lend credibility to a claim of Russian disinformation. Polymeropoulos agreed to co-write the letter, producing the first draft. He told the committees that Morell did not tell him with whom he was dealing in the Biden campaign, but “that someone from kind of the Biden world had asked for this.”

Morell maintained that he and others truly were concerned that Russia could be interfering in the election. They did not have any evidence, however, that Russia was in any way involved in the Hunter emails or their dissemination.

Meantime, Trump’s national-intelligence director, John Ratcliffe, issued a public statement to the effect that U.S. intelligence agencies had no indication that Russian intelligence services had played any role in the Post’s reporting. (Ratcliffe was responding to an unsupported claim by a top House Democrat, Adam Schiff, that the Russians were behind it.) Morell and his Biden-supporting colleagues sloughed off Ratcliffe’s statement, rationalizing that he lacked their depth of intelligence experience. Still, Morell conceded to the committees, he had no actual evidence of Russian involvement, just an inchoate sense that there were many ways Moscow could have been involved.

This is why, after Morell edited Polymeropoulos’s draft, the proposed letter he circulated to potential signers described the Post’s reporting as having the “feel” of a Russian operation. Former Obama director of national intelligence James Clapper, who similarly had no proof of Russian involvement, suggested that Morell “strengthen the verbiage” of the letter by amending this vague “feel” language. Clapper proposed instead an assertion that the Post’s reporting bore “all the classic earmarks of a Soviet/Russian information operation.” Morell made this “editorial” change, Clapper having said he’d “gladly sign on.” Former CIA director John Brennan, who had succeeded Morell and who worked closely with Clapper in the Obama-Biden administration, also signed on, congratulating Morell on a “good initiative.”

Morell conceded that he wanted the letter published because he wanted Biden to win the election. Potential signers were told that the authors “believe the Russians were involved in some way in the Hunter Biden email issue,” though no such way was actually explained. The email added, “We think Trump will attack Biden on this issue at this week’s debate.” The point, former intelligence officials were told, was to have Biden armed to respond to Trump with “perspectives on this from Russia watchers and other seasoned experts.”

Because CIA officers sign lifetime agreements that prohibit the unauthorized dissemination of classified information, Morell had to ensure that the letter go through a review by CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board (PCRB). As the CIA’s former top official who was seen as its potential future boss, Morell told the agency’s PCRB component in a 6:34 a.m. email that this was a “rush job” because he needed to get the letter out “as soon as possible.” He got an acknowledgment shortly after 7 a.m., and the letter was approved for publication as written by around 5 p.m. — warp speed by government standards.

Though the CIA is a government agency that is supposed to refrain from politics, it appears that the PCRB recruited at least one former intelligence official to sign on to the letter orchestrated by the Biden campaign. Former CIA official David Cariens happened to have written a book that was being reviewed by the PCRB at the same time Morell’s letter was being reviewed. The CIA official who was in charge of reviewing Cariens’s book told him about the Morell letter and encouraged him to sign. Cariens told the official that he and his wife, also a former CIA agent, would sign on, and they are in fact among the 51 signatories.

Morell conceded to the committee that it would be “inappropriate” for the CIA to have promoted the letter, and Polymeropoulos added that such an action by the CIA would be “incredibly unprofessional” — particularly if Cariens had been led to believe his agreement to sign the letter would influence the PCRB’s approval of his manuscript. (Moreover, the PCRB process is supposed to be a confidential one, in which information about one applicant’s writing project is not shared with other applicants.) The letter’s principal authors told the committees that they did not seek or encourage that kind of assistance from the CIA.

At present, it appears that the Carienses signed on because they wanted to, not because they thought approval of David Cariens’s book hinged on signing the letter. The committees are continuing to investigate the CIA’s actions, but they report that the agency is stonewalling their demands for production of relevant files.

Once the letter was final and 51 signatures had been gathered, Morell and his colleagues worked with the Biden campaign to shop it to preferred media outlets. For this purpose, Nick Shapiro, who had communications experience at the CIA and the White House, was recruited. The imperative was to get the letter published before the Trump–Biden debate. They initially offered an exclusive to the Washington Post, and when it didn’t bite, to the Associated Press. The AP also declined, but Shapiro finally hit pay dirt with Politico’s Natasha Bertrand (who’d reported prodigiously on scantly supported claims of Trump collusion with Russia).

The letter’s drafters and signers knew their statement would be spun as a finding that it was Russian disinformation. Lacking proof that this was the case, they realized their reputations would suffer if they were seen as baselessly branding the Hunter emails as a Russian intelligence operation for Biden’s political benefit (i.e., if they were seen as doing exactly what they were doing). Many of them thus wanted Morell to build in some deniability. As a result, a caveat was buried in the letter: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.”

The caveat was strictly CYA. Morell admitted to the committees that he knew this nuance would be lost in the publication of the letter because “hyperbole” is the coin of the political realm. In the event, the screaming headline on Bertrand’s October 19 Politico report on the letter was “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”

Far from trying to correct Bertrand’s misstatement, Morell sent the signatories a self-congratulatory October 20 email, observing that “Politico did a nice job getting out the story of our letter.” The committees note that Morell “expressed no concern about the story’s conclusory headline that the laptop was Russian disinformation.” The Politico story was widely shared by such Biden campaign cheerleaders as Jen Psaki (who would soon become the Biden White House press secretary). One signatory, Thomas Fingar, a former Bush-43 national-security official, tried to get colleagues at Stanford University to promote the letter because it “conveys our judgment that the Hunter Biden emails story . . . is actually Russian disinformation.”

The letter had the desired effect. It was reported in major media outlets as an authoritative assessment that the Hunter Biden emails were a Russian disinformation operation. More to the point, on the evening of October 22, at the last presidential debate, when Trump brought up “the laptop from hell,” Biden was ready, replying:

Look, there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what this, he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan. They have said that this has all the characteristics — four–five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage.

Biden made no mention of the fact that his campaign had orchestrated the letter and worked to arrange its media publication and dissemination. The committees’ report reproduces email traffic in which the letter’s signatories pat themselves on the back over Biden’s “really cool” use of the letter to deflect Trump’s criticism. After the debate, Morell was called by Biden campaign chairman Steve Ricchetti, who thanked him for putting out the statement.

Remarkably, after they exploited their former government positions for partisan purposes, some of the most prominent signatories on the letter, including Brennan and former NSA director Mike Hayden, expressed outrage that Congress was investigating, as if all they had done was exercise their First Amendment rights to participate in politics as private citizens. They discussed the possibility of a coordinated response. The committees recount that, “to his credit,” Morell rejected that idea, opining that coordination would make signatories vulnerable to a claim of complicity in “a conspiracy to obstruct a congressional investigation.”

The three House committees are continuing their investigation. In closing the interim report, they concluded that there is a direct line between the former intelligence officials’ letter deceptively depicting the Post’s reporting as Russian disinformation and the suppression of that reporting by major social-media platforms in the critical final days of the 2020 campaign.