Election interference comes in many forms. The party controlling the White House could, say, collude with the attorney general to stage a raid on the leader of the opposition party’s home ahead of an important midterm election . A sitting president could announce an executive order to cancel $400 billion in student debt to entice younger voters to the polls. He might even paint the opposing party as fascists who are intent on "destroying American democracy" in a nationwide address.

Interference could also take the form of a letter, signed by dozens of former government officials, dismissing a shocking story about a presidential candidate and his family’s alleged influence peddling as foreign disinformation.

Last week, we learned that Secretary of State Antony Blinken, then a top adviser to the Biden campaign, allegedly served as the “impetus” behind the October 2020 letter signed by 51 prominent former intelligence community leaders ahead of the presidential election. The signers, you will recall, claimed that the New York Post’s devastating story about Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

This was no small thing. Their pivotal letter arguably saved Biden’s candidacy. The Biden campaign and the spies who signed the letter knew that the leftist media would pick up their narrative, and they were not disappointed. Politico immediately published the letter with the headline, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former officials say.”

Just days after the letter was released, then-candidate Joe Biden used it to shut down questions from then-President Donald Trump, who had raised the matter of the Biden family’s alleged overseas influence-peddling operations in a critical debate.

House Republicans revealed Blinken’s role in the scheme in a letter last week, saying they had it on record from former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell and Nick Shapiro, a former adviser to ex-CIA Director John Brennan, that Blinken was the one who raised the idea of the letter in the first place.

They wrote, “Morell testified that on or around October 17, 2020, you reached out to him to discuss the Hunter Biden laptop story. … According to Morell, although your outreach was couched as simply gathering Morell’s reaction to the Post story, it set in motion the events that led to the issuance of the public statement.” Morell testified:

According to the Republicans, Morell told the committee he received a phone call from Steve Ricchetti, chairman of the Biden campaign, following the debate to thank him for writing the letter. Morell also admitted that “one of his two goals in releasing the statement was to help then-Vice President Biden in the debate and to assist him in winning the election.”

While acknowledging that “the statement’s signatories have an unquestioned right to free speech and free association,” Republicans argued that the spies’ “reference to their national security credentials lent weight to the story and suggested access to specialized information unavailable to other Americans. This concerted effort to minimize and suppress public dissemination of the serious allegations about the Biden family was a grave disservice to all American citizens’ informed participation in our democracy.”

It should be noted that both Blinken and Morell had strong personal interests in a Biden victory. Blinken had his eye on the secretary of state position in a possible Biden administration, and Morell was hoping to become the next CIA director. According to CNN, “Morell had long been considered a top candidate for CIA director in a Biden administration … but key Democrats objected, claiming he publicly supported the CIA’s enhanced interrogation methods after the Sept. 11 attacks.“

At any rate, much as a defense attorney works to create reasonable doubt in the face of incriminating evidence, these highly credentialed intelligence officials provided a very plausible explanation for the devastating material against the Biden family. By coordinating this letter to blunt the effects of the New York Post’s accurate report, the former national security officials abused their power to carry out a manipulation of profound proportions, which arguably swayed the outcome of a presidential election. Their strategy worked out precisely as they had hoped.

Elizabeth Stauffer is a contributor to the Washington Examiner, Power Line, the Western Journal, and AFNN and a past contributor to RedState, Newsmax, and Bongino.com . Her articles have appeared on many sites, including RealClearPolitics, MSN, and the Federalist. Please follow Elizabeth on  Twitter  or  LinkedIn .