A CIA official helped wrangle signatories to an October 2020 letter of 51 former federal intelligence officials discrediting information from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop as Russian disinformation, according to a new congressional report.
Former CIA analyst David Cariens, a signatory of the letter, told congressional investigators that a CIA employee affiliated with the agency’s Prepublication Classification Review Board (PCRB) informed him of the letter and asked if he would sign it, which he agreed to do.
The revelation shows the effort to support President Biden’s 2020 campaign by crushing the laptop story extended into the CIA, despite evidence that officials actively working in the intelligence committee should have known the laptop was authentic.
The letter was not an effort to thwart Russian mischief but a political operation to help get Mr. Biden elected, said the interim report produced jointly by the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees.
The report is titled “How Senior Intelligence Community Officials and the Biden Campaign Worked to Mislead American Voters.”
It explores how the Biden campaign took active measures to discredit the allegations about President Biden’s son Hunter Biden by exploiting the national security credentials of former intelligence officials. The report said an active employee within the CIA “may have helped in the effort to solicit signatures for the statement.”
A CIA spokesman in a statement to The Washington Times: “The role of CIA’s Pre-Publication Review Board is to review materials submitted by current and former officers to determine if the materials contain any classified information. In the case of the referenced letter, it was submitted to the PCRB in October 2020 and was reviewed only for classification, as is standard practice.”
The 2020 letter by the intel veterans falsely claimed that data retrieved from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was first reported by The New York Post, had the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
To generate the letter, former acting CIA Director Mike J. Morell coordinated with the Biden campaign to find signatories for the letter, gain approval from the CIA for its publication and promote it through the media, according to a new congressional report.
Mr. Morell told the committees that he did not “coordinate with the CIA.” When informed by the committees of Mr. Cariens’ allegation, he said that he would have “reacted very negatively to this” and would have reported it to the director of the CIA at the time.
The congressional investigators wrote to the CIA requesting documents relating to interactions between the agency and the letter’s signatories. The agency has not complied with the request.
On Oct. 19, 2020, Mr. Morell sent the CIA the final draft of the letter for the PCRB to review and requested a “rush job” for its approval, so it could be published before Mr. Biden debated then-President Trump and gave Mr. Biden “talking point” to swat away legitimate criticism of his family’s business practices, according to the report.
The Biden campaign trumpeted the letter to discredit the laptop and Mr. Biden cited it during the debate with Trump.
At the time, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said that Hunter’s laptop was “not part of a Russian disinformation campaign” and that the FBI and the intelligence community knew the information from the computer was authentic.
The congressional report also said that on Oct.18, 2020, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper emailed Mr. Morell about his plan to become a signatory and suggested adding a key phrase to the letter, which Mr. Morell ultimately included.
“I have one editorial suggestion for the letter: I think it would strengthen the verbiage if you say this has all the classic earmarks of a Soviet/Russian information operation rather than the ’feel’ of a Russian operation,” he wrote.
During testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Morell said that his Oct. 17 call with Antony Blinken, who was then a top campaign adviser and now serves as secretary of state, had “absolutely” triggered him to draft the letter.
“There were two intents. One intent was to share our concern with the American people that the Russians were playing on this issue; and, two, it was [to] help Vice President Biden,” he said.
Mr. Blinken disputed that account. He said he was not behind the letter that Republicans now say helped tip the political scales toward Mr. Biden in the last weeks of the 2020 campaign.
“One of the great benefits of this job is that I don’t do politics, don’t engage in it,” he said recently on Fox News. “But with regard to that letter -it wasn’t my idea, I didn’t ask for it, didn’t solicit it.”
The Times reached out to the State Department for comment.
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.
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