The watchdog group Judicial Watch has sued the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in federal court over the agency’s failure to provide documents regarding its involvement in efforts to suppress news of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in the run up to the 2020 presidential elections. Judicial Watch is known for utilizing the Freedom of Information Act to relentlessly pursue transparency in government.
In October, 2020, the New York Post published an article alleging that Hunter Biden used his father’s position during his vice presidency for personal gain – and did so with his father’s knowledge. The article was based on several emails found on a laptop, found abandoned in a repair shop, which ostensibly belonged to the junior Biden. The emails also suggested that the vice president may have personally profited from his son’s scheming.
Several days after the Post article appeared and three days before the upcoming presidential debate – when then-President Trump would be expected to seize on the laptop story – 51 former intelligence officials suddenly released a letter signed by the group stating that the laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.”
The lawsuit seeks the release of documents that Judicial Watch argues would shed light on how it came about that the agency’s Pre-Publication Classification Review Board fast-tracked approval of the letter. The clearance process is mandatory for former CIA officials seeking to go public about intelligence-related matters and it usually takes several weeks, if not months; yet in this case, somehow, it was conveniently completed within five hours of a “rush job” request by Mike Morrell, a former CIA director, and it became immediately available to the Biden campaign. Morrell later testified at a congressional hearing that he actually drafted the letter and requested expedited approval at the behest of the Biden campaign, and that he did so because he wanted Joe Biden to win.
The accusation that the laptop story was Russian disinformation has been debunked, but the former officials still defend their letter: they didn’t flat-out claim that the Post story actually was the work product of Russian intelligence, they say, only that it looked like it might be one. In reality, however, most of the media took the bait and reported that the Post’s Hunter Biden story was based upon Russian disinformation; social media companies followed suit by sharply restricting access to the story. During the final presidential debate on October 22, 2020, candidate Joe Biden even went so far as to cite the letter from the former intelligence officials to rebut Trump’s criticism of the Biden family’s overseas business dealings.
The real story here is that there were decision makers at the CIA who knowingly and willfully colluded to advance and facilitate the election of Joe Biden as president. They were not averse to willfully suppressing information that would have likely been significant to many voters.
We – and we suspect many others – would like to know who was responsible for this travesty and how to prevent a recurrence.
