A member of the internal board that reviews materials written for publication by present and former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped solicit signatures for the October 2020 letter claiming the Hunter Biden laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” according to a new congressional report.
The letter was signed by 51 former intelligence officials and appeared five days after the New York Post described in a news story based on materials found on a laptop once owned by Hunter Biden how President Joe Biden knew that his son was using access to his father’s position and influence to generate wealth for the family.
The letter was repeatedly cited by Biden and his surrogates during the concluding weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign against then-President Donald Trump and was used by social media giants Facebook, Twitter, and others to justify censoring the New York Post story and favorable responses to it.
Post-election research suggested that as many as one in five of Biden’s voters may have not voted for him had they known about the information reported by the New York Post and the Hunter Biden laptop.
The new congressional report adds important details to those already reported about the genesis of the letter, including the role of an unnamed member of the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board (PCRB) in obtaining signers.
“When the person in charge of reviewing the book called to say it was approved with no changes, I was told about the draft letter. The person asked me if I would be willing to sign. … After hearing the letter’s contents, and the qualifiers in it such as, ‘We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement …’ I agreed to sign,” former CIA analyst David Cariens told congressional investigators, according to the interim staff report for the House Committee on the Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
