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Rep Burchett Calls for Investigation into Blinken, 51 Intel Officials Regarding ‘Russian Disinfo’ Laptop


Remember the 51 intelligence officials that signed a letter in regards to Hunter Biden’s laptop?

They swore up and down in 2020 that it was Russian ‘disinformation’.

Thanks to Hunter’s gun trial this laptop is back in the spotlight.

Well, it turns out it was real all along.

And Rep. Tim Burchett is calling those 51 officials out.

It’s almost like they knew the whole time and were lying.

Let’s see, would that make them guilty of election interference?

Maybe worse?

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He posted on X:

I’m requesting an immediate investigation into

@SecBlinken (Secretary Blinken)

and the 51 intelligence officials for their role in interfering in the 2020 election.

We don’t give the intelligence community all these taxpayer dollars for them to undermine our democratic process.

New York Post reports:

The 51 former US intelligence officials who smeared The Post’s bombshell reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop as “Russian disinformation” in a 2020 letter are standing by their decision — with some referring to the move as “patriotic” — even after the FBI and Justice Department have confirmed the device’s authenticity, according to a new report.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, ex-intelligence heads of the CIA and other analysts and officers have all said they had no regrets about their involvement in the “Spies Who Lie” missive, Fox News reported on Monday.

Asked whether he was too hasty in signing onto the letter, Clapper told the outlet, “No,” and said he would not remove his name.

All other signatories were also contacted by Fox News and offered similar defenses or declined to comment.

“There continues to be by many a calculated or woefully ignorant interpretation of the October 2020 letter signed by fifty-one former intelligence officials concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop,” Mark S. Zaid, an attorney for seven other signatories, said in a statement to The Post first shared with Fox.

“A careful and objective reading of the document reflects that even today its content is accurate,” added Zaid, who is representing former CIA officers Ronald Marks, Marc Polymeropoulos, Emile Nakhleh, Paul Kolbe, John Sipher and Gerald O’Shea, as well as ex-Defense Intelligence Agency deputy director Douglas Wise.

“It served as nothing more than a warning letter of what we have known for decades: certain foreign governments — including Russia — continue to try and actively interfere in our domestic affairs and our guard must remain vigilant,” Zaid also said. “Every patriotic American should have signed that letter.”

The report comes as special counsel David Weiss’ prosecution of Hunter Biden for alleged gun and tax crimes continues this week after both the FBI and Department of Justice confirmed in court filings and proceedings this year that the laptop’s contents were authentic.

Panetta defended the letter in a CNN interview last July, saying he had “no” reservations about co-signing its dubious claims about the provenance of the so-called “laptop from hell.”

“I signed that letter for one reason, which was to make the American people aware that the Russians deliberately were engaged in a disinformation campaign in the United States and trying to impact on our election and trying to impact on our ability to have free and fair elections,” he told CNN’s Kaitlin Collins.

“This is very old news,” Greg Treverton, who served as chair of the National Intelligence Council, also told Fox News. “What we said was true, we were inferring from our experience, and it did look like a Russian operation. We didn’t, and couldn’t, of course, say it was a Russian operation. Enough said.”

The Post reached out to the 51 former intel officials in March 2022 and received similarly evasive responses.

Two of the letter’s signatories — former CIA senior intelligence officers Patty Brandmaier and Brett Davis — died in 2023.

In Hunter’s federal gun trial in Wilmington court last week, FBI Special Agent Erika Jensen verified the laptop’s contents and said the hard drive data were cross-checked against the 54-year-old first son’s Apple iCloud account pursuant to a subpoena.

The FBI even told content moderators at Twitter that emails from the laptop reported by The Post, which revealed Hunter cashed in on his dad’s public profile to rake in millions from foreign entities, were real when the first report was published on Oct. 14, 2020.



 

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