Former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper are scheduled to testify before a Congressional panel this month as House Republicans investigate the effort to discredit negative stories about President Joe Biden’s son right before the 2020 election.
A representative from the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), confirmed to The Epoch Times that it will conduct a transcribed interview with Brennan on May 11 and Clapper on May 17.
Brennan and Clapper, both longtime government officials, were harsh critics of former President Donald Trump and held their most recent jobs under former President Barack Obama.
The pair were among the 51 ex-intelligence officials who signed the October 2020 letter (pdf) discouraging confidence in the content of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
This letter helped spread the now-proven false idea that the stories about the laptop’s content were just Russian disinformation, an idea that Biden’s 2020 campaign promoted.
Controversy has continued to swirl over the open letter that Clapper, Brennan, and former CIA deputy director Michael Morell signed, along with 48 other former intelligence officials.
The letter made the rounds following the New York Post’s explosive report from October 2020 on a laptop later proven to belong to Hunter Biden, son of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.
The letter said that the “arrival on the U.S. political scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter, much of it related to his time serving of the Board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
The also laptop contained photographs of Hunter Biden, including one allegedly depicting him passed out while smoking a crack pipe.
Biden’s presidential campaign at the time cited the letter as evidence that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation. Polling indicates that if voters had known the laptop’s contents, some would have voted differently, which could have altered the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
