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House GOP’s latest Hunter Biden laptop theory is less than meets the eye

Jim Jordan and company allege the Biden campaign got former intelligence officials to help suppress the story

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) questions witnesses during a House Oversight Committee hearing in February about Twitter's handling of a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden and his laptop. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
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House Republicans’ attempts to claim government officials played a role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story have often gone well beyond the established facts. Now they’re turning to the Biden campaign’s role.

As before, though, the evidence isn’t as compelling as advertised.

In a new letter, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) reveal details of a recent interview with former acting CIA director Michael Morell. At issue is an Oct. 19, 2020, statement from 51 former intelligence officials that Morell spearheaded. The statement suggested that the laptop story, published in the New York Post, might be part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

Morell said in his testimony that he had spoken with Biden campaign senior adviser (and now secretary of state) Antony Blinken about the Hunter Biden laptop story two days earlier, on Oct. 17, and he agreed that conversation “triggered” his intent to write the statement. Morell also said Blinken that day shared with him a USA Today story about the FBI investigating whether the story was tied to a Russian disinformation campaign.

Morell told an associate that the Biden campaign had suggested the statement be shared with a particular reporter for The Washington Post. (The Washington Post did not initially write about the statement, which Politico was the first to report on.) He also said part of his motivation was to “help Vice President Biden.”

The implication of the letter — which Jordan spelled out more explicitly Thursday night on Fox News — is that the Biden campaign was creating a pretext for suppressing the story, using the former intelligence officials.

“Then, quickly, it turns into this political operation — that letter that became the basis for suppressing the story and keeping it from the American people just days before the most important election we have: election for president of the United States,” Jordan said on Fox.

The Jordan-Turner letter connects this to social media companies blocking or limiting the sharing of the story, saying of the Oct. 19 statement, “Social media companies simultaneously restricted access to the [New York] Post story.”

But the letter appears to have omitted key context, including whether Blinken actually pushed for such a statement.

On Friday afternoon, House Democrats released an excerpt from Morell’s interview in which Morell actually addressed that. Asked whether Blinken had directed, suggested or insinuated that he should write such a statement, Morell said, “My memory is that he did not.”

“Mr. Morell testified that Mr. Blinken did not hint that the Biden campaign ‘could use some help on this’ or suggest that Mr. Morell should ‘cook up something’ that the campaign should use,” the House Judiciary Democrats said.

The Republicans’ claim of suppression also doesn’t really comport with the timeline, insofar as this is about social media suppression.

In fact, the Oct. 19 statement came five days after the initial New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Twitter and Facebook had begun restricting the story shortly after it was published, citing concerns about the provenance of the information and whether it was hacked. This had been an issue late in the 2016 campaign, when Russia interfered on Donald Trump’s behalf.

But Twitter actually apologized for its decision and said it had stopped blocking links to the story and documents by Oct. 16. In testimony to Jordan’s committee in February, former Twitter chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde said, “Twitter changed its policy within 24 hours and admitted its initial action was wrong. This policy revision immediately allowed people to tweet the original articles with the embedded source materials.”

(Twitter would continue to block the New York Post’s Twitter account for two weeks. Former top officials have said both moves were mistakes.)

Facebook’s restrictions took the form of decreasing distribution of the story, rather than blocking it. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has said this lasted for “five or seven days when it was basically being determined whether [the story] was false.” That would place the end point on Oct. 19 or a couple days later.

The other issue is the content of the statement. While the Jordan-Turner letter describes it as being “infamous,” the statement was more nuanced than it was initially described both in the media and by Joe Biden himself, as The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler recently wrote.

The statement said that the situation “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” while saying that it didn’t have direct evidence of that. It also allowed that the contents of the laptop could be genuine. But the Oct. 19 Politico headline stated more categorically, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” Joe Biden then said at an Oct. 22 debate that the intelligence officials had said this was “a Russian plan.”

As Kessler wrote, “In fact, the letter mainly argues that Russia may have had a role in obtaining and disseminating Hunter Biden’s emails — which could mean as little as Russian bots spreading awareness on social media.”

Perhaps the argument could be that the intelligence officials’ statement wasn’t the “basis” for the social media restrictions, but rather for later alleged suppression of the story in the broader media.

But the statement was merely one of numerous data points that existed at the time and led to caution about the story.

Before the New York Post’s story, the Trump administration had repeatedly warned about possible Russian interference in the 2020 campaign to help Biden. As early as August 2020, it traced such an effort to pro-Russian Ukrainian politician Andrii Derkach. At the time, Derkach was known to have worked with Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who was the source of the hard drive that the New York Post reviewed and had sought dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine. By September, Trump’s Treasury Department flatly labeled Derkach an “active Russian agent for over a decade.”

After the New York Post story ran Oct. 14, then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) claimed on Oct. 16, “We know that this whole smear on Joe Biden comes from the Kremlin.” (There remains no evidence for this.) Then on Oct. 17 came the USA Today story about the FBI investigation.

There were also errors in the New York Post’s initial reporting, as Kessler noted the same day. One was in the first paragraph of the story, which falsely stated that Joe Biden as vice president “pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating” a company for which Hunter Biden worked.

What’s more, Giuliani himself didn’t exactly put fears about the information’s provenance at ease. The day after the story broke, on Oct. 15, the Wall Street Journal quoted Giuliani as saying, “Could it be hacked? I don’t know. I don’t think so. If it was hacked, it’s for real. If it was hacked. I didn’t hack it. I have every right to use it.”

He told the New York Times in an Oct. 18 story that he had given the hard drive to the New York Post because “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.” The implication was apparently that he didn’t want too much scrutiny. Giuliani refused to share the hard drive with other outlets, including The Washington Post and the Times.

By last year, The Washington Post was able to confirm the authenticity of thousands of emails purportedly from Hunter Biden’s laptop. But the verdict on most of the information was inconclusive. The story also noted that three new folders had been created on the hard drive after it had been in FBI custody. And the owner of the store where Hunter Biden allegedly dropped the laptop off for repairs has also said some of the information represented as coming from the laptop wasn’t there when he reviewed its contents. So these matters are hardly settled.

There is no question that the statement from the former intelligence officials was a key entry in the debate over the matter — and one that was exploited politically. Joe Biden mischaracterizing the statement at a debate was a significant moment.

But the statement itself was more careful. And the restriction of and caution about the story clearly predated it and had plenty to do with other factors. Indeed, even when Joe Biden made the claim about the letter at the Oct. 22 debate, The Washington Post wrote, “But the former intelligence and defense officials who penned the letter explicitly said they had no evidence of Russian involvement.”

It should also be no surprise that the Biden campaign had an interest in calling this story into question and might even have reached out to allies for help in that process — though Morell says that isn’t even what he remembers this being about. (Morell was pegged as a potential CIA director in a Biden administration, but he was not nominated.)

Morell has not commented on the letter. But the White House on Thursday night accused Republicans of “weaponizing their power to re-litigate the 2020 election in a wacky strategy to get on Fox News.” And Mark Zaid, a lawyer who says he represents more than a half-dozen signers of the statement, echoed that.

“What [the] GOP is doing is far greater politicization than what they allege of Dems,” Zaid said. “Origins of letter do not detract from fact content remains 100% accurate. Focus on facts.”

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