Hunter Biden investigation: Laptop letter organizer thought Blinken wanted Russia claims made public
Jerry Dunleavy
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A former top CIA official who helped organize the October 2020 Hunter Biden laptop letter testified he thought now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken wanted the baseless claims of Russian involvement in the saga made public.
Mike Morell, a former acting CIA director under President Barack Obama, said in a recent transcribed interview with congressional investigators that it was his “guess” that Blinken called him to talk about the Hunter Biden laptop because the future secretary of state wanted it “out” in public that “the Russians were somehow involved” in the saga.
EX-CIA CHIEF SAYS BLINKEN “TRIGGERED” HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP LETTER
“He asked me a specific question here. You know, he’ll have to tell you what his intent was, right, in asking me,” Morell said. “You know, my thinking was that, if I agreed, right, that the Russians were somehow involved, my guess was that he would want that out, but that is a guess, right. I do not know his intent.”
Morell also told House investigators that prior to his Oct. 17, 2020, phone call with Blinken, he had no intention to write the Oct. 19 Hunter Biden laptop letter and testified “yes” and “absolutely” when asked if the call with Blinken, who was then a top adviser for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, was what “triggered that intent in you.”
Morell also testified that one of the two reasons he helped put the letter together was to help now-President Joe Biden “because I wanted him to win the election” against former President Donald Trump.
The bombshell revelations came in a letter sent to Blinken on Thursday by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, as well as in a competing press release by House Democrats.
The October 2020 laptop letter contributed to the baseless narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop stories were nothing but a product of Russian disinformation — a narrative happily seized upon by Biden’s 2020 campaign and spread by some of the laptop letter signers. Hunter Biden himself later tried to claim falsely the intelligence community concluded his laptop was some sort of Kremlin smear campaign.
Jordan and Turner told Blinken that Morell revealed the secretary of state had “played a role in the inception of this statement while serving as a Biden campaign adviser” and that “according to Morell, although your outreach was couched as simply gathering Morell’s reaction to the New York Post story, it set in motion the events that led to the issuance of the public statement.”
State Department spokesman Vedant Patel refused to answer questions about the Blinken controversy on Friday, saying, “It is not a State Department issue, and I don’t really have a comment on this from the State Department.”
Morell explained that “Tony and I were fairly close,” including from working together in the Obama administration when Morell was the deputy director of the CIA from 2010 to 2013, as well as the acting director of the agency in 2011 and then again in 2012 and 2013.
“During our time in government when he was the vice president’s national security adviser and then when he was President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, I would be the person that he would reach out to with those kind of questions,” Morell said in an excerpt released by House Judiciary Democrats. “When we saw each other post the Obama administration, we would have conversations about what was going on in the world, he would ask me questions. So it was in part natural, you know, for him to do that.”
A House Judiciary Committee Democrats spokesman claimed Jordan had “released cherry-picked excerpts of a transcribed interview” in an effort to “smear” Blinken. The Democrats said that “no part of that interview demonstrates that Tony Blinken or any other Biden campaign official asked Mike Morell to write a letter about Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
Morell was also asked about Blinken’s call, specifically, “Did he direct, suggest, or insinuate in any way that you should write a letter or statement on this topic?”
The laptop letter organizer replied that “my memory is that he did not” and “my memory is that he asked me what I thought.”
Morell was also asked if Blinken said that “the campaign could use some help on this” and whether Blinken asked him, “Could you cook up something that we could use?”
“He did not say that,” Morell replied. “It’s not my memory that he said that.”
Jordan and Turner further wrote that the same day of the Blinken-Morell call, Blinken “also emailed Morell an article” published in USA Today the same day that alleged the FBI was examining whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a “disinformation campaign.” Jordan and Turner told Blinken that “the very bottom of the email you sent to Morell included the signature block of Andrew Bates, then-director of rapid response for the Biden campaign.” Bates is now a deputy press secretary in the Biden White House.
Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign quickly dismissed the laptop story as a Russian disinformation operation. After the New York Post published emails belonging to his son, Joe Biden called the story “garbage” and part of a “Russian plan” during an October 2020 debate with Trump.
Former senior CIA operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos said in 2020 that he and Morell helped put the letter together.
The congressional letter said Morell received a call from then-Biden campaign chairman Steve Ricchetti after the Oct. 22 presidential debate to thank him for “putting the statement out.” Ricchetti is now a counselor to President Joe Biden.
The phone call to Morell had come from Jeremy Bash, another Hunter Biden laptop letter signer, who then got Ricchetti on the line. Bash, a former chief of staff at the CIA and Pentagon, was picked by Biden to be part of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board last year. Bash had suggested on TV in October 2020 that the laptop story was “Russian disinformation.”
Biden said during the October 2020 debate with Trump: “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan. They have said this is, has all the — four, five former heads of the CIA. Both parties say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage.”
He was referring to a Politico report about the letter in an article titled “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” The title was a bit misleading because the letter never directly called the story Russian “disinformation.”
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Although the October 2020 letter hedged a bit at various times, it did repeatedly contend there was Russian involvement with the laptop stories, arguing that “if we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election” and expressing “our view that the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue.” The letter claimed the laptop saga “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” and that “our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”
Konstantinos “Gus” Dimitrelos, a cyber forensics expert and former Secret Service agent, conducted an examination of the laptop for the Washington Examiner last year, concluding that “there is a 100% certainty that Robert Hunter Biden was the only person responsible for the activity on this hard drive and all of its stored data” and that “the hard drive is authentic.”