House GOP’s latest Hunter Biden laptop theory is less than meets the eye

Morell said in his testimony that two days earlier, on Oct. 17, he spoke to senior Biden campaign adviser (and now Secretary of State) Antony Blinken about Hunter Biden’s laptop story, and he agreed that that Conversation “triggered” his intention to write the statement. Morell also said Blinken told him a USA Today story that day about the FBI investigating whether the story was linked to a Russian disinformation campaign.

Morell told a staffer that the Biden campaign had suggested sharing the statement with a certain Washington Post reporter. (The Washington Post did not initially write about the statement, which Politico first reported.) He also said part of his motivation was to “help Vice President Biden.”

The implication of the letter — which Jordan spelled out more clearly on Fox News Thursday night — is that the Biden campaign created a pretext to suppress the story using the former intelligence operatives.

“Then it quickly becomes this political operation — this letter that became the basis for suppressing history and withholding it from the American people, just days before the most important election we have: the election for President of the United States.” said Jordan on fox.

The Jordan-Turner brief ties this to social media companies blocking or restricting story sharing, saying in the Oct. 19 statement, “Social media companies have concurrent access to the [New York] post story.”

But the letter appears to have left out important context, including whether Blinken actually pushed for such a statement.

On Friday afternoon, House Democrats released an excerpt of Morell’s interview, in which Morell actually addressed it. When asked whether Blinken directed, suggested or implied writing such a statement, Morell said, “As far as I can remember, he did not.”

“Mr. Morell testified that Mr. Blinken did not imply that the Biden campaign “could use some help with this” or suggested that Mr. Morell “invent something” for the campaign to use,” the Justice Democrats said of the House of Representatives.

Also, the Republican claim of oppression doesn’t really fit the timeline as far as social media oppression is concerned.

In fact, the Oct. 19 statement arrived on Hunter Biden’s laptop five days after the first New York Post story. Twitter and Facebook had begun to denigrate the story shortly after it was published, citing concerns about where the information came from and whether it had been hacked. This was an issue at the end of the 2016 election campaign when Russia intervened in favor of Donald Trump.

But Twitter did apologize for its decision, saying it stopped blocking links to the story and documents by October 16. In a testimony before the Jordanian committee in February, former Twitter chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde said: “Twitter changed its policies within 24 hours and admitted that its initial action was wrong. This policy overhaul immediately allowed people to tweet the original articles with the source materials embedded.”

(Twitter would suspend the New York Post Twitter account for two weeks. Former top officials said both moves were mistakes.)

Facebook’s restrictions were to reduce the spread of the story rather than blocking it. Founder Mark Zuckerberg said it took “five or seven days to basically determine if [the story] was wrong.” That would put the endpoint on October 19 or a few days later.

The other question is the content of the declaration. While the Jordan-Turner letter describes it as “infamous,” the statement was more nuanced than originally described, both in the media and by Joe Biden himself, as The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler recently wrote.

The statement said the situation “shows all the classic hallmarks of a Russian information operation,” while there is no direct evidence to back it up. It also allowed the contents of the laptop to be genuine. But the Oct. 19 Politico headline was more categorical: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinformation, say dozens of former intelligence officials.” Joe Biden then said at a debate on Oct. 22 that the intelligence officials said it was “a Russian one Plan”.

As Kessler wrote, “Indeed, the main argument of the letter is that Russia may have played a role in acquiring and disseminating Hunter Biden’s emails – which could mean as little as Russian bots spreading awareness on social media.”

Perhaps the argument could be that the intelligence officials’ testimony was not the “basis” for the social media restrictions, but rather the later alleged suppression of the story in the broader media.

But the statement was just one of numerous data points that existed at the time that prompted caution about the story.

Prior to the New York Post story, the Trump administration had repeatedly warned of possible Russian interference in the 2020 campaign to help Biden. As early as August 2020, it attributed such an effort to pro-Russian Ukrainian politician Andrii Derkach. At the time, Derkach was known to have worked with Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who was the source of the disk reviewing the New York Post, and who had smeared the Bidens in Ukraine. By September, Trump’s Treasury Department roundly described Derkach as “an active Russian agent for over a decade.”

After the New York Post story ran Oct. 14, then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) claimed Oct. 16, “We know that this whole smear of Joe Biden came from the Kremlin (There is no longer any evidence of this.) Then, on October 17, came the USA Today story about the FBI investigation.

There were also errors in the New York Post’s initial reporting, as Kessler noted on the same day. One was in the first paragraph of the story, which falsely claimed that as vice president, Joe Biden “pressured government officials in Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was conducting investigations,” a company Hunter Biden worked for.

What’s more, Giuliani himself hasn’t exactly allayed fears about the source of the information. The day after the story broke, on Oct. 15, The Wall Street Journal quoted Giuliani as saying, “Could it be hacked? I don’t know. I don’t believe. If it’s hacked, it’s real. If it was hacked. I didn’t hack it. I have every right to use it.”

He told the New York Times in an October 18 article that he gave the hard drive to the New York Post because “either nobody else would take it, or if they did, they would spend all their time looking at it.” to try to disagree before they publish it.” The implication, apparently, was that he didn’t want too much control. Giuliani refused to share the hard drive with other media outlets, including The Washington Post and The Times.

Over the past year, the Washington Post has been able to confirm the authenticity of thousands of emails claiming to have come from Hunter Biden’s laptop. But judgment on most of the information was inconclusive. The story also noted that three new folders were created on the hard drive after it was in FBI custody. And the owner of the store where Hunter Biden allegedly took the laptop to be repaired also said that some of the information presented as coming from the laptop was not there when he checked its contents. So these matters are hardly resolved.

There is no question that the former intelligence officials’ statement was a central entry in the debate on the matter – and one that was politically exploited. Joe Biden mischaracterizing the statement in a debate was a significant moment.

But the statement itself was more cautious. And the caveat and caution of the story clearly preceded her and had a lot to do with other factors. Even as Joe Biden made the allegation about the letter at the Oct. 22 debate, The Washington Post wrote: “But the former intelligence and defense officials who wrote the letter specifically said they had no evidence of Russian involvement. “

It should also come as no surprise that the Biden campaign has had an interest in challenging this story, and may have even reached out to allies for help in the process — although Morell says that’s not even what he’s about . (Morell was identified as a potential CIA director in a Biden administration, but he was not nominated.)

Morell did not comment on the letter. But the White House on Thursday night accused Republicans “weaponizing their power to take the 2020 election back to court in a mad strategy to get on Fox News.” And Mark Zaid, an attorney who says he represents more than half a dozen signers of the declaration, echoed that.

“What [the] GOP is doing far more politicization than what they claim Dems are doing,” Zaid said called. “The origin of the writing does not detract from the facts, the content remains 100% correct. Focus on facts.”