Miranda Devine Traces CIA's Role in That '51 Former Intelligence Officials' Letter

The smothering of the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020 is one of the biggest scandals of our time. Twitter blocked sharing of the New York Post's exclusive and then locked the Post out of its Twitter account for six weeks because it wouldn't take down its tweet about the story. NPR came right out with a statement saying you wouldn't be hearing about the laptop on NPR because they didn't want to waste listeners' time with "distractions." I mean, talk about election interference.

The fake Steele dossier came straight from the Hillary Clinton campaign. I remember one reporter saying how the dossier story had been shopped around to just about every media outlet, but they all passed on it because there was no way to verify it. That didn't matter to Ben Smith at Buzzfeed, who decided to publish the whole thing.

Now we know that the idea for the letter from 51 former intelligence officers testifying that the laptop had all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign came from the Biden campaign's Antony Blinken, who was rewarded with the secretary of state job. We're still learning about who was involved in that letter.

NEW: Ex-CIA official Marc Polymeropoulos, one of the 51 signatories of intel letter falsely claiming Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation, testified: "Biden world asked for this"
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) June 27, 2024

Damn right they did. Those signatories didn't come up with the idea themselves. But they went along with it, and Joe Biden happily referenced the letter in his debate with President Donald Trump who brought up the laptop story. But Trump's supposed to go to prison for election interference.

The Post's Miranda Devine has a great column out Thursday about the letter and the CIA's involvement with it.

We now see that the CIA staged a domestic disinformation campaign to protect its favored candidate, the decrepit and pliable Joe Biden, from the political consequences of his corruption.
Now we are told that former CIA Director Gina Haspel was in on the “Dirty 51” letter in October 2020 that falsely claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.

[Former CIA chief operating officer Andrew] told Congress that he ran the letter past Haspel.

Makridis has testified to the House Judiciary Committee that he was sent a draft version of the letter by the CIA’s Publication Classification Review Board on Oct. 19, 2020, and recognized it as an inherently political document.
Because of its political sensitivity, he walked across the hall from his office to inform Haspel about the letter.
He testified that he felt at the time that the letter “rises to the level where I felt that I wanted to make sure the director and the deputy director [Vaughn Frederick Bishop at the time] were aware. [But] we had no discussion other than the notification that this was coming …
“I mean, it’s talking about President Trump, Vice President Biden. I mean, you can’t read that and say there isn’t politics involved of some nature,” he testified in April 2024.

Devine says polls say that the laptop story would have swung the election to Trump. I'm not sure if I believe that, but I know election interference when I see it. And look at the trustworthy names on that letter: John Brennan and James Clapper (who now has a gig at CNN).

We now know that the Post's story was 100 percent correct. The laptop contained evidence of Biden's influence peddling for The Big Guy as well of photos of himself with possibly trafficked prostitutes, smoking crack, and holding the gun he illegally obtained.

"OK, I won't vote for Hunter Biden," quipped a lot of Democrats. But the House Oversight Committee Republicans, led by James Comer, have released so much evidence about foreign money and influence peddling, and the mainstream media again refuses to pick up on it. Again, election interference.

Whatever happened to that House impeachment inquiry into Biden, anyway?

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