Hunter Biden investigation: Jordan pressures CIA on potential role in discrediting laptop
Jerry Dunleavy
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House Republican leaders are pressuring CIA Director William Burns to conduct an investigation and hand over records on its potential role with the Hunter Biden laptop letter which aimed to discredit Joe Biden’s son’s emails as a Russian plot.
One of the signers of the Hunter Biden laptop letter says he and his wife only signed on to the baseless October 2020 claims of Russian involvement after a CIA employee who was active within the agency asked him to sign the document that played a pivotal role in the 2020 presidential race between Joe Biden and then-President Donald Trump.
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Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Mike Turner (R-OH), chairmen of the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees, respectively, told Burns on Wednesday that they “have received evidence that the CIA, or at least an employee of the CIA, may have helped to solicit signatories for the statement about Hunter Biden.”
The Republicans told the Biden CIA chief that “if accurate, this information raises fundamental concerns about the role of the CIA in helping to falsely discredit allegations about the Biden family in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election.”
David Cariens, a former intelligence analyst for the CIA, told congressional investigators earlier this year that he and his wife Janice Cariens, a former operations support officer for the CIA, signed the letter with other former intelligence officials after a member of the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board, or PCRB, called him and asked him to.
The letter was designed to discredit New Post Post stories about the contents of a laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware repair shop and came at a critical point before Joe Biden debated Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Joe Biden did cite the letter onstage to deflect Trump’s criticisms over what Trump called the “laptop from hell.”
“Cariens’s revelation is potentially shocking,” a joint report authored by the GOP-led Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government and the House Intelligence Committee said last week.
Jordan and Turner argued Wednesday that the CIA has documents necessary for oversight and they “fully expect” the agency to hand over all relevant records “in unredacted form” no later than the end of May, warning that “if the CIA does not produce all responsive documents, the Committees may resort to compulsory process” to force the handover.
Cariens emailed House committee staff on March 5 this year in response to the Republican investigation into the Hunter Biden laptop letter signers.
“My last book, a memoir, entitled Escaping Madness, was before the PCRB in October 2020. When the person in charge of reviewing the book called to say it was approved with no changes, I was told about the draft letter,” Cariens told investigators of the alleged Hunter Biden laptop letter outreach to him by a CIA employee.
“The person asked me if I would be willing to sign. (I do not recall the person’s name or the exact date of the phone call.) After hearing the letter’s contents, and the qualifiers in it such as, ‘We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement …,’ I agreed to sign.”
More than 50 ex-intelligence officials quickly signed the laptop letter, which contributed to the unfounded narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop stories were nothing but a product of Russian disinformation — a narrative happily seized upon by Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and spread by some of the laptop letter signers.
The GOP report said Cariens’s statement “did not provide the precise timing of his communication” with the PCRB in October 2020 but that the GOP-led committees received an email exchange, produced by former CIA senior intelligence officer and laptop letter signer Kristin Wood, in which Cariens wrote that “yes, I want to sign” the letter on October 19 at 10:35 a.m., which was “eight minutes after Wood sent the mass distribution email soliciting signatures.”
Republicans said the PCRB was in possession of the laptop letter since 6:34 a.m. that day, which is when Mike Morell, a former Obama CIA director and the laptop letter’s co-author, had emailed the statement to the CIA for its approval. The PCRB acknowledged receipt of the statement at 7:11 a.m. and cleared it for publication at 12:44 p.m. the same day.
Morell’s email to the CIA’s PCRB on the morning of Oct. 19 told the agency that “this is a rush job, as it needs to get out as soon as possible.” Morell told House investigators this year that he was in a rush to have the CIA approve the letter because “we were trying to get it out before the debate” between Trump and Joe Biden. Morell testified to the House that the laptop letter was “approved” by the PCRB “as written.”
A CIA spokesperson told the Washington Examiner last week that the letter “was reviewed only for classification, as is standard practice.”
Morell told the House Republicans that “I did not coordinate with the CIA” and that he “would have reacted very negatively to this” if he had known about someone at the CIA allegedly encouraging Cariens to sign the laptop letter, calling it “inappropriate for a currently serving staff officer or contractor to be involved in the political process.”
Jordan and Turner noted Wednesday that “the CIA admitted that it did not perform a full and complete search of all agency records prior to” handing over the Morell email on May 9 to the PCRB and the PRCB’s email back to Morell. But the congressmen said that “the CIA committed to cooperating in full” in a May 12 phone call with committee staff.
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The Republicans said the CIA has now specifically committed to “conducting an agency-wide search for documents and communications with each of the names of the 51 signatories” during the entire month of October 2020.
The CIA also said it would look for “all CIA phone records” in October 2020 for any “communications between CIA employees and any of the 51 signatories to the public statement, including but not limited to David Cariens.”