Ex-intelligence officials who undermined Hunter Biden laptop story included active CIA contractors – Washington Examiner

Former intelligence officials who wrote a controversial public letter 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 letter, 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.

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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.

The Washington Examiner reached out to the CIA for comment.

This story is developing.