The now-secretary of state tried to dismiss Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation. He told the Senate he never emailed Hunter, but their emails were on the laptop.
Tomorrow, as I’ve noted, the GOP-controlled House Oversight Committee is expected to roll out evidence Chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) says will illustrate a labyrinthine maze of banking channels and corporate entities exploited by no fewer than nine members of the Biden family to rake in piles of foreign money by peddling the now-president’s political influence.
The bulk of the evidence comes from financial records. Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) did yeoman’s work running that information down prior to the 2020 election, and Comer’s committee has been running with the ball since Republicans took over the House, and its subpoena power, this past January. Some of this evidence is corroborated and amplified by data derived from Hunter Biden’s notorious laptop.
The laptop has taken on greater significance in recent weeks, having been the subject of one of the great political dirty tricks in recent American history – which is saying something given how Hillary Clinton set the bar in manufacturing the Trump-Russia “collusion” farce that beset the country for several years (though even it wasn’t enough to drag Mrs. Clinton, an epically lousy candidate, across the finish line).
We now know that based on the deftly worded inspiration of Antony Blinken (i.e., enough to get the point across while maintaining deniability), former CIA acting director Michael Morell crafted a letter baselessly framing the laptop as Russian disinformation and then lined up over four dozen former U.S. national-security officials to sign on. The 51 shamefully politicized their credentials, which are based on privileged access to intelligence secrets, to give then-candidate Joe Biden a debate “talking point” to use against then-president Trump. And presto, he did precisely that in a presidential debate – when confronted by Trump, Biden claimed that the consensus position of our intelligence veterans was that that laptop was a Russian plot to influence the election.
It was a good deal for Blinken: when Biden won, he was appointed to the secretary of state post he coveted. It now emerges, however, that there may have been more to his motives than Biden’s, and his own, political advancement.
It turns out that Blinken communicated with Hunter Biden by email when he was deputy secretary of state in the Obama-Biden administration. Blinken obscured some of his correspondence with the then-vice-president’s son by conducting it via a private email account, thus ensuring that it wouldn’t be recorded in the government’s record-keeping system. But, alas, it was recorded on Hunter’s laptop. Blinken’s correspondence with Hunter was thus found when the Washington Examiner caused the laptop data to be scrutinized.
The correspondence is intriguingly timed. In mid-2015, while Biden and his sidekick Devon Archer were raking in money hand-over-fist after curiously being appointed to the board of the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma, Biden contacted Blinken to get his “advice on a couple of things.” They proceeded to set up a lunch meeting.
This was during the time when the Obama administration had gotten itself neck-deep involved in Kyiv’s affairs after the State Department encouraged the revolution that drove then-president Viktor Yanukovych to flee to Russia (after being squeezed by Vladimir Putin to spurn a trade deal with the European Union in favor of Russian accommodations). Biden then became the Obama administration’s point-man on Ukraine policy, working closely with Blinken and Secretary of State John Kerry (Biden’s old Senate ally who later falsely claimed he hadn’t been informed about Hunter and Archer’s positions on Burisma’s board . . . notwithstanding that their business partner, Kerry’s stepson Christopher Heinz, had informed Kerry’s chief of staff, who testified that he briefed Kerry accordingly).
The lunch meeting between Hunter Biden and Blinken occurred on July 22, 2015. Blinken told Senate investigators in late 2020 testimony that he had a vague memory of a lunch meeting with Hunter. I know you’ll be shocked to hear that, although Hunter wanted his “advice on a couple of things,” all Blinken could remember was that they talked about the May 30, 2015, death from cancer of Beau Biden – the then-VP’s older son and Hunter’s brother. (Blinken: “The only thing I remember was talking about Beau, talking about the impact on the family. It’s kind of seared into my — into my memory even how raw that was.”)
The death of the president’s older son was a tragic event. Still, there is no discernible indication that it slowed the Biden family influence-peddling operation – though it does seem to arise as the point of all-consuming concentration whenever the Biden camp finds itself in a tight spot.
In his testimony, Blinken denied having ever had email communications with Hunter. The laptop demonstrates that this testimony was untrue. Republicans wonder why Blinken would steer them wrong.
It is also worth asking whether Blinken’s knowledge that his own emails were probably on Hunter’s laptop might have factored into his part in the deceptive political scheme to portray the laptop and its contents as Russian disinformation.