From Washington Examiner.com (June 25):
Former intelligence officials who wrote a controversial public statement casting doubt on Hunter Biden’s laptop data ahead of the 2020 presidential election included active contractors working for the CIA, a report published Tuesday reveals.
The report, released by two Republican-led House committees, provides the most direct link yet between the government’s premier intelligence agency and the infamous statement. It also shows several internal emails about the matter, which include two CIA employees expressing reluctance about the political nature of the statement.
“This frustrates me. I don’t think it is helpful to the Agency in the long run. Sigh,” one CIA employee, whose name is redacted, wrote to a colleague on Oct. 20, 2020, about the statement, according to the report.
The colleague, whose name is also redacted, responded minutes later, saying that some of the 51 signers were actively working for the CIA.
“I also love that at least a few of the random signatures belong to individuals currently working here on contracts…,” the colleague wrote.
The House Judiciary and Intelligence committees, which compiled the report, wrote that they asked the CIA to identify the contractors who wrote the statement, and that the agency provided names of two of them: former CIA acting Director Michael Morell and former CIA Inspector General David Buckley. Morell was also the lead organizer of the statement, according to emails and testimony included in the committees’ report.
Despite providing those two names, the CIA has not declassified a “complete list of individuals” who were on contract on Oct. 19, 2020, the day the statement was made public in Politico, because of “purported operational security,” the committees wrote.
The 51 officials who wrote and signed the statement included intelligence community heavyweights such as Morell, former CIA Directors John Brennan and Leon Panetta, and former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper.
They wrote days after the New York Post published a story containing a damning narrative about the Biden family that the “arrival on the US political scene” of the information in the story “had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The New York Post story was based on data from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop.
The remark, coming from officials who once worked at the highest and most classified levels of government, carried significant weight at the time, and many, including then-candidate Joe Biden, relied on the statement to dismiss the New York Post’s story as a Russian attempt at election interference.
“This revelation shows that Morell, Buckley, and likely other signatories were receiving U.S. taxpayer funds while engaged in a politicized project to mislead American voters on behalf of the Biden campaign,” the committees wrote in the report.
The Hatch Act prohibits CIA employees from participating in campaign activity, but it does not apply to contract workers. The committees recommended in the report that Congress “consider” incorporating CIA contractors into the statute.
The statement from the former intelligence officials has long been a source of scrutiny for the impact it may have had on the 2020 election. It received a renewed round of criticism this year when the Department of Justice used various forms of Hunter Biden’s computer data as evidence in a prosecution against the first son, effectively verifying that the data on the laptop was authentic.
The DOJ revealed that it had obtained some of the data by subpoenaing Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and external hard drive from a repair shop. The New York Post wrote in its story that the repair shop owner made a copy of the hard drive and handed the copy off to Republican operatives, who, in turn, gave it to the New York Post.
Morell, who drafted the statement, said he and the co-author of it, Marc Polymeropoulos, wrote it in part to provide Joe Biden a “talking point” in the final presidential debate that was coming up in four days. Joe Biden did indeed use it to dispute the New York Post’s story, which alleged the now-president worked to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor to help Hunter Biden maintain a lucrative board position in the country.
While several witnesses involved in U.S. policy on Ukraine have since rejected the notion that Hunter Biden had any impact on their work, the emails and photos from Hunter Biden’s data that the New York Post used to raise the idea have repeatedly been corroborated and no one has ever brought forth evidence to dispute them.
“The October 19, 2020, statement on Hunter Biden’s laptop signed by 51 former senior intelligence community officials served to interfere in the American electoral system in the final weeks before the 2020 presidential election,” the committees concluded in their report on Tuesday.
A CIA spokesperson addressed the statement that its former officials and contract workers wrote, telling the Washington Examiner that an agency board reviewed it, which was in line with CIA policy. The spokesperson noted that the board’s approval of published content is “never an endorsement” of it.
“CIA officers, as a condition of their employment, are required to sign a secrecy agreement that includes a lifelong obligation to submit any and all intelligence-related materials to CIA’s Pre-Publication Review Board (PCRB) before they are published,” the spokesperson said. “That process was followed in this case. The PCRB reviews material to determine if they contain any classified information. The PCRB’s confirmation that information is unclassified is never an endorsement of the reviewed content or its veracity. These former officers were not speaking for CIA.” [source]
Not surprising, since the CIA heads are never-Trumpers, why wouldn't the contractors be never-Trumpers too? Even if the contractors are exempt from the Hatch Act, they should still be fired (and probably won't be) because they interfered with the election.
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