On Mon, 26 Aug 2024 17:30:54 +0000, Mitchell Holman <noemail@aol.com> wrote:

>Blue Lives Matter <Iron_White@Systemic_Patrriotism.KMA> wrote in
>news:mq0pcjd3q6h84milocbgbpd85qlnfuurs1@4ax.com:
>
>> On Mon, 26 Aug 2024 12:54:39 +0000, Mitchell Holman <noemail@aol.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>Blue Lives Matter <Iron_White@Systemic_Patrriotism.KMA> wrote in
>>>news:fvbocjdap42leafckdlbrhanfvqfe5gs0g@4ax.com:
>>>
>>>> On Mon, 26 Aug 2024 02:05:06 +0000, Mitchell Holman
>>>> <noemail@aol.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>pothead <pothead@snakebite.com> wrote in
>>>>>news:vagft2$24sb6$5@dont-email.me:
>>>>>
>>>>>> It's the Hunter Biden laptop cover up all over
>>>>>> again.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Who "covered up" the Biden laptop?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Look it up, Dumbass.
>>>>
>>>
>>> So you don't know either.
>>>
>>
>>
>> <Sigh>Hollowhead is incapable of looking it up.
>>
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/us/politics/republicans-hunter-biden-laptop.html
>>
>
> Paywall

Officials Who Cast Doubt on Hunter Biden Laptop Face Questions
Dozens of former intelligence officials signed a letter discounting the laptop’s
contents. Republicans say the missive was part of a Biden campaign operation.

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Hunter Biden, right, hugs President Biden. Both men are wearing baseball caps
and dark jackets at night.
Republicans argue that a public letter sent during the 2020 presidential
campaign was written at the behest of President Biden’s allies to distract from
salacious material found on the abandoned laptop of his son Hunter
Biden.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Luke Broadwater
By Luke Broadwater
Reporting from Washington

May 16, 2023
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When James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence,
testifies on Wednesday behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, he will be the sixth
former intelligence official to be hauled before Congress as part of what has
become an intense focus of House Republicans: a public letter sent during the
height of the 2020 presidential campaign.

Republicans have seized on the document, signed by 51 former intelligence
officials whom the G.O.P. has taken to calling the “spies who lie,” as a prime
piece of evidence for their claims that officials inside the federal government
have tried to smear and damage conservatives. They argue that the missive was
written at the behest of President Biden’s allies to distract from salacious
material found on the abandoned laptop of his son Hunter Biden, and that it
ultimately helped the elder Mr. Biden defeat former President Donald J. Trump.

In the letter, reported at the time by Politico, former intelligence officials
holding impressive national security credentials wrote that they believed that
the contents of the laptop — full of evidence of drug use, prostitution and
foreign business deals — could be part of a Russian campaign aimed at
influencing the election, though they emphasized that they had no knowledge that
was true.

Three days later, Mr. Biden cited the letter during a presidential debate to
rebut Mr. Trump’s criticisms, asserting that “there are 50 former national
intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan.”

Image
James R. Clapper Jr. and Sally Q. Yates testifying before Senate Judiciary
subcommittee. They are sitting at a table with name cards in front of them and
bottles of water.
James R. Clapper Jr. will be the sixth former intelligence official to testify
in front of Congress as part of Republicans’ focus on the
letter.Credit...Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Three years later, no concrete evidence has emerged to confirm the assertion
that the laptop contained Russian disinformation, and portions of its contents
have been verified as authentic.

Republicans now say they have uncovered evidence that the letter was part of a
Biden campaign operation. According to closed-door testimony and emails, Biden
campaign officials, including Antony J. Blinken, now the secretary of state,
played a role in the creation of the letter. They also said a C.I.A. employee
“may have” been involved in soliciting at least one signature for it.

“The public statement by 51 former intelligence officials was a political
operation to help elect Vice President Biden in the 2020 presidential election,”
an interim report released last week by the Republican-led House Judiciary and
Intelligence Committees concluded. The report cited an email that said the
letter was intended to create a “talking point to use.”

The report concluded: “The American people deserve to know that Hunter Biden’s
laptop and emails were real. They always were real. The allegations that they
were the product of Russian disinformation were false.”

The investigation into the signers of the letter comes as Republicans are
digging into multiple aspects of the Hunter Biden story: Why social media
companies suppressed it; whether his father was involved in any of his business
deals; and whether anyone in government interfered with any inquiries into the
younger Mr. Biden, who is currently under federal investigation.

As Justice Department officials weigh the matter, the investigator overseeing
the Internal Revenue Service’s portion of the case has also come forward with
allegations of political favoritism in the inquiry. On Monday, a lawyer for that
investigator sent a short letter to Congress that said the investigator and the
rest of his team were being removed from the inquiry, which is reaching its end
as officials weigh whether to pursue charges. A spokesman for the president said
he was committed to the Justice Department’s independence “free from any
political interference by the White House.”

Democrats argue that the Republicans are wasting time and resources
investigating the 51 former intelligence officials, who were private citizens at
the time of the letter and wanted Mr. Biden to be victorious in the campaign.
The former intelligence officials stress that their letter stated that they had
no evidence of a Russian disinformation campaign, and that they were merely
stating an opinion.

Several said they did not regret their actions.

“The Congress is wasting its time and our money by investigating the First
Amendment rights of private citizens,” Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents seven
signers of the letter, said in an interview.

Democrats also argue that the letter must be understood in its proper context.
Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani — whose credibility had become
shaky — had been shopping around the contents of the laptop to different news
media outlets, not long after a top Trump intelligence official warned that
Russia was seeking to “primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden” and that
“some Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump’s
candidacy.”

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The Democrats also note that Facebook and Twitter decided to censor or limit the
sharing of a New York Post article about the laptop’s contents five days before
the letter’s publication in Politico.

In a statement submitted to Congress on behalf of Michael J. Morell, the former
deputy director of the C.I.A., Mr. Morell said he “organized and helped draft”
the statement “because of his honest and well-founded belief that Russia was
involved in some way in the emergence of the Hunter Biden emails for the purpose
of interfering in the 2020 presidential election.”

“The public statement was careful not to claim that the New York Post story was
disinformation or that the information it reported was untrue, and Mr. Morell
was careful to confirm his suspicions with public source information and the
views of multiple experts in the field,” the statement said.

But Republicans are hoping to escalate the inquiry and have scheduled at least
two more transcribed interviews. Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio
and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, also suggested in an interview that
he would be investigating whether any of the signers had retained their security
clearances and whether Congress could pass legislation to revoke them.

“The 51 people who signed that now-famous letter, my guess is they probably all
had their security clearances?” he said. “Does that make sense?”

>
>
>> https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/08/politics/twitter-hearing-house-oversight
>> /index.html
>>
>
>".....the executives told Congress they
>did not receive any requests from the
>government to temporarily suppress the
>story."
>
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> So who suppress what story?
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#NEVERtrump