EXCLUSIVE — The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee says his investigation into a letter that sought to discredit reporting on Hunter Biden‘s laptop is key to exposing how President Joe Biden and ex-intelligence officials “lied” to sway an election.
Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), who took up the gavel early this year, has been running the joint investigation with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
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The duo has unearthed a host of new details about the letter, which was signed by more than 50 former intelligence officials, including that former acting CIA Director Mike Morell was “triggered” to arrange its writing by now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken to discredit the New York Post‘s reporting on the abandoned laptop hard drive, and that the goal of the letter was to give Joe Biden a “talking point” to deploy against now-former President Donald Trump in their final presidential debate.
“The problem that we’re trying to address is that people who were formerly in the government used their position as if they had present knowledge of something that they had no access to, and it was received by the media and even used by this president in a debate as evidence to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop,” Turner told the Washington Examiner. “As a matter of fact, of course, the president of the United States now [Joe Biden], when he was in the debate running for this office, knew the Hunter Biden laptop was real. So he stood in that debate and lied to the American public, knowingly.”
The swift organization of the letter by ex-intelligence officials came at a critical point in the 2020 election and contributed to the baseless narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop stories were nothing but a product of Russian disinformation — a talking point spread by some of the laptop letter signers and seized upon by Joe Biden’s campaign.
Joe Biden pointed to the laptop letter during the Oct. 22 debate after Trump brought up “the laptop from hell” in reference to Hunter Biden’s lucrative business dealings tied to Ukraine and China.
“There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan. 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,” Joe Biden said.
Trump replied, “You mean the laptop is now another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax?” Joe Biden replied: “That’s exactly what we’re told.” Trump lamented, “Here we go again with Russia.”
Joe Biden was referring to a Politico report about the letter titled “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”
Turner and Jordan said Morell received a call from then-Biden campaign chairman Steve Ricchetti after the presidential debate to thank him for “putting the statement out.” Ricchetti now works in the Biden White House.
A May report by the Turner-led House Intelligence Committee and the Jordan-led Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government revealed that “contemporaneous documents show that some of the signatories adopted Politico’s framing that the laptop was Russian disinformation.”
Morell had received the call from Jeremy Bash, a former chief of staff at the CIA and the Pentagon, who then handed the phone to Ricchetti. Bash, a laptop letter signer who was picked by Joe Biden to be part of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board in August last year, went on television to claim that the laptop was Russian disinformation.
“This looks like Russian intelligence, this walks like Russian intelligence, this talks like Russian intelligence. This effort by Rudy Giuliani and the New York Post and Steve Bannon to cook up supposed dirt on Joe Biden looks like a classic Russian playbook disinformation campaign,” Bash said on MSNBC on Oct. 19, 2020, calling them “mysteriously created emails — probably hacked through a Russian intelligence operation.”
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, “My analysis revealed 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.”
“Those who signed that letter knew that they were doing a political act, knew that they were politically using the credentials of their government positions to try to persuade the American public in a manner in which they had no knowledge of the substance at all,” Turner told the Washington Examiner.
The House chairman added, “It is wrong, and exposing it, one, will have an impact on those who view their professional positions more politically, but two, the next time this happens, maybe people will have less willingness to lie to the American public inside a letter, because they know that they’re going to be called in and put in a deposition and have to admit that they know nothing about which they stated in that letter.”
Between October 2021 and January 2023, 11 letter signers frequented the Biden White House a total of 24 times, White House visitor logs show. Three letter signers, Bash, Russell Travers, and Nicholas Rasmussen, went on to be tapped for top Biden administration positions, the Washington Examiner reported.
Turner and Jordan told CIA Director William Burns in May 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.
Morell’s own email to the CIA’s PCRB early the morning of Oct. 19 told the agency that “this is a rush job, as it needs to get out as soon as possible.” The former acting CIA director told investigators 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.
A CIA spokesperson previously told the Washington Examiner the letter “was reviewed only for classification, as is standard practice.”
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Turner and Jordan said in May the CIA has 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.
When asked if there should be consequences for the laptop letter signers, Turner told the Washington Examiner that “in this investigation, we’ll have to see where it goes.”
