When Mike Morell, the co-author of the infamous letter dismissing Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation, was recruiting former intelligence officials to sign onto it in October 2020, it was pitched as a means to give Joe Biden a “talking point” in his upcoming presidential debate with Donald Trump.
This new development comes in the wake of the House Intelligence Committee revealing that Morell told Congress that the Biden campaign and current Secretary of State Antony Blinken were the main instigators behind the letter.
According to a report from the Washington Examiner, the letter, which was co-authored by Morell and former senior CIA operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos, was attached to a recruitment email sent by Morell to former intelligence officials.
“We want to give the VP a talking point to use in response,” Morell told them.
Related: FBI Officials Instructed Agents Not to Investigate Hunter Biden’s Laptop Before 2020 Election
Ultimately, 51 former intelligence officials decided to sign on to the letter to give Biden a debate talking point. The letter was published three days before Biden’s debate with Trump, and he did reference it.
“Look, there are 50 former National Intelligence folks who said that what this, he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan,” Biden said in the debate. “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. Nobody believes it except him, his, and his good friend Rudy Giuliani.”
The letter wasn’t just used as a Biden talking point either. Social media platforms like Twitter also restricted the sharing of news articles covering the laptop over this bogus pretense. Between Joe Biden using the letter his own campaign instigated as a talking point, and social media platforms using it to justify suppressing the story, the letter is, by far, the most significant example of genuine election interference in our nation’s history.
Since the GOP regained control of the House, at least two signatories have tried to backtrack on the letter. Douglas Wise, a former Defense Intelligence Agency deputy director, said he knew a “significant portion” of the recovered Hunter Biden laptop files “had to be real.”
“All of us figured that a significant portion of that content had to be real to make any Russian disinformation credible,” Wise said.
James Clapper, who was Obama’s director of national intelligence, claimed earlier this year that he never called the laptop Russian disinformation and blamed Politico for distorting the contents of the letter by presenting it as definitive, not merely a suggestion. “There was message distortion,” Clapper said. “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.”
But what neither of them ever admitted was that they were recruited specifically to give Joe Biden “a talking point.”
Flashback: McCarthy Pledges Big Move Against 51 Intel Agents Who Dubbed Hunter Biden Laptop Misinformation
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