Another case of dueling memos, this time over Antony Blinken's call to Ex-CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell

Hotair ^ | 04/24/2023 | John Sexton

[SeekAndFind]

Matt Taibbi pointed this out last Friday. There’s currently another round of dueling memos taking place in Washington that is reminiscent of the Nunes-Shiff memo battle you may remember from back in 2018. I won’t walk through all of that again but the gist was that Nunes memo was basically right and Schiff’s memo was clearly wrong. But you wouldn’t have know it at the time from looking at the media coverage, because of course the media took Schiff’s side and presented him as more credible.

So here we are once again. Rep. Jim Jordan released a letter last week pointing out that some pre-election activity designed to discredit the Hunter Biden story was prompted by a call from someone on Biden’s campaign staff. Specifically Antony Blinken (now Sec. Blinken) made a call to Mike Morell to ask his opinion of the Hunter Biden story published by the NY Post. Blinken wanted to know if Morell thought the Russians might be behind it.

Within five days of the article, on October 19, 2020, 51 former intelligence officials released a public statement attempting to discredit the contents of the New York Post’s reporting about Hunter Biden, stating that the story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” News publications immediately ran with the statement, with Politico publishing a story with the conclusive headline, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former officials say.” Social media companies simultaneously restricted access to the Post story, including Twitter locking the Post’s and then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s accounts for sharing a link to the article…

The Committees recently conducted a transcribed interview with Michael Morell, a former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and one of the 51 signatories of the public statement. In his transcribed interview, Morell testified that on or around October 17, 2020, you reached out to him to discuss the Hunter Biden laptop story.8 At the time you served as a senior advisor to the Biden campaign. According to Morell, although your outreach was couched as simply gathering Morell’s reaction to the Post story, it set in motion the events that led to the issuance of the public statement. Morell testified:

In the same interview, Morell also admitted he created the letter because, in part, he wanted Biden to win the election.

So that’s the gist of Rep. Jordan’s letter to Antony Blinken. But as Taibbi points out, Democrats have responded (just as they did with the Schiff memo) claiming Jordan’s statements are misleading. To prove it they released their own memo with another segment of the interview in which Morell denies that Blinken asked or even insinuated that he should create the letter from 51 former intel officials about the Hunter Biden laptop. My own take is that this response may do more harm than good for the claims Democrats are making. Here’s the relevant portion.

So Morell’s story is that his buddy in the Biden campaign called to ask if he thought the Hunter Biden story might be Russian disinformation. Morell obviously agreed. However, did you catch the last bit of his answer. “You know, [Blinken will] have to tell you what his intent was, right, in asking me. 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.”

So Blinken didn’t ask for anything specific but Morell’s guess was that Blinken’s motive was to get the word out. You might say that Morell took the hint from the Biden campaign. He then went above and beyond by creating this letter from 51 former intel people saying exactly what he guessed Blinken/Biden wanted said. He did it, by his own admission, because he wanted Biden to win the election. And Biden then used the letter during a national debate to dismiss the story (after which another Biden administration figure called Morell to thank him for producing the letter).

And don’t forget, the letter was wrong. The laptop had nothing to do with Russian disinformation. As Taibbi says, this seems like sort of a big deal even if you don’t think the laptop story itself was a big deal.

By any marker, this is an enormous news story. If we go by the usual measuring stick of American scandal, the Watergate story, this potentially meets or exceeds that, on almost every level. Does it reach into the current White House? Check. Was it a craven attempt to subvert the electoral process? Check again. Did a presidential candidate engineer a massive public deception? Yes, resoundingly. Did it involve intelligence agencies? Yes, and these weren’t amateurs like Nixon’s plumbers. These were 50 of the most powerful people in the intelligence world — including five former heads or acting heads of the Agency in Morell, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and John McLaughlin — conspiring to meddle in domestic politics on a grand scale.

The seriousness of the actual laptop story, at least what’s been disclosed so far, is still not clear. I’ve long thought the suppression of it by Facebook and Twitter had clearer import, being a historic censorship first. However, if it can be proven that this “Russian Disinfo” whopper was laid on the public at the behest of the Biden campaign, with the aid of the intelligence community, that escalates things to a new level of scandal, far above the censorship issue.

The coverup is always worse than the crime. In this case, no one was dumb enough to literally ask for a bogus letter with the imprimatur of the intel agencies to allow Biden to dismiss the whole story. But the reason they didn’t have to ask is because everyone involved knew what was needed and was happy to comply, even if it turned out to be complete nonsense.

[No name given]

Anthony Blinken is a traitor, no ifs ands or buts about it!

[Paladin2]

I’ll give a nod to the thought that Blinkyn is winkyn at the truth.

[semimojo]

Blinken was a private citizen helping run a presidential campaign.

Morell and the 50 former intelligence officials were also private citizens wanting to help a candidate.

This is what (competent) campaigns do. I'm struggling to see the scandal.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: Blinken was a private citizen helping run a presidential campaign.

And he was amply rewarded after his scheme worked.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: I’m struggling to see the scandal.

So, a blatant lie is not a scandal ?

[semimojo]

So, a blatant lie is not a scandal ?

In a political campaign?

Are you serious?

[semimojo]

So, a blatant lie is not a scandal ?

Besides, they hedged and said it had the hallmarks of disinformation, not that it absolutely was.

Politics ain't beanbag and this is mild stuff.

[SeekAndFind]

I think this is somewhat different.

They were all using the institutional weight of their former esteemed roles to sign a dishonest letter to mislead voters 15 days before the election.

If each one of them does not publicly apologize for what they did, then it simply means that our intelligence agencies through the men who were leading them, have been politicized and yes, IT IS A SCANDAL.

We have to view this thing HOLISTICALLY. Add to that the non-action by the FBI on Hunter Biden’s laptop and it is evidence of an institutional conspiracy to derail Trump.

[Major Matt Mason]

So Morell’s story is that his buddy in the Biden campaign called to ask if he thought the Hunter Biden story might be Russian disinformation

With the Democrats, it's always Russia, Russia, Russia.

[semimojo]

They were all using the institutional weight of their former esteemed roles to sign a dishonest letter to mislead voters 15 days before the election.

We don't know what, if anything, they knew about the laptop.

Don't forget, pretty much everyone, including most media and many at the NY Post, were leery of the story.

I mean, Hunter's laptop shows up in the hands of Bannon and Rudy days before the election?

[lepton]

It was another instance of an actual ‘Worse than Watergate’ act against a sitting President, as it not only shielded Biden, but brought disrepute on Trump for bringing it up.

[lepton]

I mean, Hunter’s laptop shows up in the hands of Bannon and Rudy days before the election?

---

Even then it was known that it had been around for months. The media wasn’t ‘leery’, they were using the letter as a fig-leaf to pretend that there was cause to dismiss the laptop’s contents despite there being no evidence that it was ‘Russian disinformation’. The media *studiously avoided* forcing Biden to actually state that the laptop wasn’t Hunter’s, which Biden refused to say for some time, specifically leaning on the letter as pretense.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: Don’t forget, pretty much everyone, including most media and many at the NY Post, were leery of the story.

The FBI already had the contents of the laptop in 2019. They did NOTHING and SAT on it. The Delaware office of the FBI issued a subpoena for the laptop and the hard drive and took possession of them in December 2019 ( almost a YEAR before the election ).

Having heard nothing from the FBI by the following August, the computer shop owner gave a copy of the hard drive to Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani gave a copy of the hard drive to the New York Post, and the FBI knew this because the bureau had Giuliani under surveillance.

Now we know that the FBI aggressively sought to discredit the story both before and after it ran.

The FBI ran a full-blown influence operation to convince U.S. news and social media outlets that the scoop they were about to read about the Biden family was merely Russian propaganda.

We also know that they visited Twitter and Facebook to WARN them about any reports regarding the laptop as possible Russian disinformation knowing full well that it was not.

These 51 officials should AT LEAST have done their due dilligence before jointly issuing the statement.

They abused their former higher authority. They did not do any due diligence. They peppered the end of the letter with weasel words so that they could have plausible deniability now, but it doesn’t wash.

Again, where is the public apology? This simply shows that the higher ups in our intelligence agencies( especially the CIA where the majority of the signatories were from ) were the ones colluding to prevent Trump from winning.

Your argument is they were not in office so it’s not a scandal. Has it not occured to you that those STILL in office are also in on the CONCERTED effort to stop Trump?

And please don’t try to excuse the media.... they were all IN on it to suppress this news. The least an honest journalist could do is INVESTIGATE if the NY Post report was true or not.

Well, Since then, the formerly skeptical news organizations, most recently CBS News, have verified and admitted that the laptop and the emails were authentic and not hacked.

The FBI knew that the whole time, and continues to mislead the American people about its role in the suppression of truthful information immediately before a presidential election.

[usnavy_cop_retired]

But they all knew, or could easily have found out, that the FBI had the laptop hard drive since Dec 2019 and DNI Ratcliff had already stated that the laptop was not Russian disinformation the very next day after the existence of the laptop was revealed by the Washington Post. The fact that “Rudy and Bannon” had some involvement in how the Washington Post got ahold of it so “no one wanted to touch it” is a red herring. Journalist do fact checking on the story regardless of the source.

[kiryandil]

   

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