An ex-CIA head who testified that he was influenced by then-senior Biden campaign adviser Antony Blinken to coordinate signatories for an influential letter falsely claiming Russian involvement with the Hunter Biden laptop twice hosted the now-secretary of state on his podcast — including just before the letter was published.
Michael J. Morell, the CIA’s former deputy director and acting director in the Obama administration, has come under fire following the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee publishing testimony in which he said Blinken called him in October 2020 to convince him to speak up about debunked claims that the Russians were involved with the laptop.
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Morell, who organized the October 2020 letter with 50 ex-senior intelligence officials casting doubt on the authenticity of New York Post stories based on Hunter Biden’s emails, had hosted Blinken in January 2019 and September 2020 on his CBS News Radio “Intelligence Matters” podcast.
The October 2020 laptop letter contributed to the baseless narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop stories about Joe Biden’s son’s business dealings in Ukraine and China were nothing but a product of Russian disinformation — a narrative happily seized upon by Biden’s 2020 campaign and spread by some of the laptop letter signers. Emails from the laptop, which were reviewed by the Washington Examiner, show Blinken held a 2015 meeting with Hunter Biden, then on the board of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, while he was deputy secretary of state under Obama.
Hunter Biden himself later tried to falsely claim in 2021 that the intelligence community concluded his laptop was some sort of Kremlin smear campaign.
“The Biden campaign had connections to people who were close to the intelligence community and they were able to motivate them to come out with that information so they could generate a media and political narrative that was going to be to their advantage for the election,” Steve Friend, an ex-FBI special agent and whistleblower, who was put on leave in August 2022 after taking issue with the bureau’s Jan. 6 Capitol riot investigations, told the Washington Examiner.
In September 2020, Blinken notably joined Morell’s podcast to “discuss a potential Biden administration's foreign policy priorities and its likely approach to top global security challenges, including climate change, armed conflicts, and strategic threats from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea,” according to an episode description.
Blinken noted to Morell that a future President Joe Biden would “immediately” send a message, upon being elected, that he will “not politicize intelligence” and “insist that truth always be spoken to power.”
“[He] will demand that people bring their best analysis and best judgment and not in any way shape it to what they perceive to be the political desires or interests of the incumbent,” said the now-secretary of state.
"I hope this encourages the Trump team to provide a person to outline President Trump’s thinking on these important foreign policy and national security issues," Morell told Blinken on the 2020 podcast, referring to their conversation surrounding intelligence practices. The ex-CIA official testified to Congress earlier this month that he thought Blinken wanted the claims of Russian involvement in the saga made public.
Morell told House investigators that, prior to his Oct. 17, 2020 phone call with Blinken, he had no intention to write the Oct. 19 Hunter Biden laptop letter, and testified “yes” and “absolutely” when asked if the call with Blinken, who was then a top advisor for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, was what “triggered that intent in you.” Morell also said in a recent transcribed interview with congressional investigators that it was his “guess” Blinken called him to talk about the Hunter Biden laptop because the future secretary of state wanted it “out” in public that “the Russians were somehow involved” in the saga.
Among these claims, one portion of his testimony has earned arguably the most ire among Republican lawmakers: Morell said that one of the reasons he crafted the letter was to help Biden, since he "wanted him to win the election" against former President Donald Trump.
During the 2020 podcast episode, Blinken claimed he knew Biden “would be a voracious consumer of intelligence” as president, and said that “that stands in rather stark contrast to President Trump.” Blinken repeatedly brought up reports of “intelligence about Russia paying bounties to the Taliban to kill our troops” and claimed Trump “either didn’t read it or ignored it.” He vowed that “that would not happen in a Joe Biden administration."
The Biden administration revealed in early 2021 that the intelligence community only had “low to moderate confidence” in the Russian bounty claims. The Taliban took over Afghanistan following a chaotic and disastrous U.S. military withdrawal that August.
As far as the January 2019 podcast episode, Blinken and Morell largely discussed foreign adversaries. Speaking about Chinese President Xi Jinping, Blinken claimed he has sought “to assert himself as a leader of the global community who is in favor of a free and open trading system.”
“Putin is playing a losing hand brilliantly," Blinken also said. "Russia, by virtually every metric, is actually in decline. And, yet, he succeeded in reasserting Russia on the world stage, to some extent to distract from problems at home, to some extent to try to realize a vision that he has of a greater Russia, but mostly I think for this reason -- the biggest threat to Putin's continued leadership in Russia is really the success of democracy."
Morell’s bombshell revelations concerning the Hunter Biden intelligence letter came in a letter sent to Blinken on Thursday by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
Jordan and Turner wrote that, the same day of the Blinken-Morell call, Blinken “also emailed Morell an article” published in USA Today on Oct. 18, 2020, which alleged that the FBI was examining whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a “disinformation campaign.”
Biden said during the October 2020 debate with Trump: “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan. They have said this is, has all the — four, five former heads of the CIA. Both parties say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage.”
He was referring to a Politico report about the letter in an article titled "Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say."
The congressional letter said Morell received a call from then-Biden campaign chairman Steve Ricchetti after the debate to thank him for "putting the statement out."
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The October 2020 letter repeatedly contended there was Russian involvement with the laptop stories, arguing that “if we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election” and expressing “our view that the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue.”
Konstantinos "Gus" Dimitrelos, a cyber forensics expert and former Secret Service agent, conducted an examination of the laptop for the Washington Examiner last year, concluding that “there is a 100% certainty that Robert Hunter Biden was the only person responsible for the activity on this hard drive and all of its stored data” and that “the hard drive is authentic.”