CIA, Biden conspired to blame Russia for Hunter laptop: House Panel

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Senior Biden administration campaign officials colluded with the CIA to debunk accusations against Hunter Biden and label them as "Russian disinformation" before the 2020 presidential election, a new report from the US House Judiciary Committee released on Wednesday said.

"Evidence suggests that senior Biden campaign officials, including now Secretary of State Antony Blinken, now Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates, and now Counselor to the President Steve Ricchetti, took active measures to discredit the allegations about Hunter Biden by exploiting the national security credentials of former intelligence officials," the committee said in a press release coinciding with the release of the report.

The committee discovered through its investigations that Blinken, who was then a key advisor to the Biden campaign, pushed for a letter to the public in which 51 former intelligence officials claimed that a New York Post article about Hunter Biden's laptop had "all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation."

The committee claimed that senior members of the Biden administration then "coordinated efforts to disseminate" the public letter to the media in an effort to refute the accusations made against Hunter Biden.

Moreover, it underlined how the testimonies, emails, and other evidence indicated that former CIA Deputy Director Micahel Morell helped with writing the public statement to get ex-intelligence officials to sign it.

According to the article, the open letter was a "political operation to help elect Vice President Biden in the 2020 election" with the intention of giving then-candidate Joe Biden a "talking point" to utilize in response to any assaults from his competitor, then-President Donald Trump.

Within three days of the letter's release, Joe Biden brought it up in a debate with Donald Trump, claiming that "there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what this, he's accusing me of, is a Russian plan."

Russia has continuously and vehemently rejected any intervention in US elections allegations made by US officials.

This comes after reports from April said California Republican Darrell Issa had underlined that his party had Hunter Biden's laptop and was poring over the "treasure trove" of data it had.

Meanwhile, Republican leaders are already planning to investigate the contents of the device – which the White House initially dismissed as "Russian disinformation".

"It's got to be traced all the way back to the big guy," Issa said, referring to an email from the laptop that described a business deal in China in which "the big guy," presumably referring to Joe Biden, would stand to gain 10%.

The computer, according to Issa, contains evidence of direct communication between Joe and Hunter Biden while the former was vice president, evidence that Joe Biden was making "sure his business deals went forward," including in Russia and China, and evidence of Hunter's drug use, which could have made the VP's son vulnerable to blackmail by foreign intelligence agencies.

The contents of the laptop were first reported on by the New York Post ahead of the 2020 US presidential election and were dismissed at the time by the Biden campaign, as well as a number of US intelligence figures and media outlets, as part of a "Russian disinformation" operation aimed at re-electing Donald Trump. Major social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, have prohibited the dissemination of laptop-based reports.

Hunter Biden has a long history of crime. In late 2020, Biden was subjected to federal investigation for "tax affairs" related to business dealings in Ukraine and China, and Fox News reported that he had failed to report $400,000 in income from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.

The announcement was preceded by a scandal in October 2020, when the New York Times published an article about two emails that the 52-year-old had supposedly received from a top Burisma executive while serving on the company's board of directors.

Burisma Board Advisor Vadym Pozharskyi allegedly asked Hunter Biden to "use [his] influence" to help the Ukrainian company gain political support in a May 2014 email, while Pozharskyi thanked the younger Biden for setting up a meeting with his father, then-US Vice President Joe Biden, in an April 2015 email.

Emails recovered from Hunter's abandoned laptop show that he played a major role in the acquisition of millions of dollars in funding for Metabiota, a Department of Defense contractor specializing in research on pandemic-causing diseases that could be used as bioweapons.