'How a circle of spies, Blinken covered up Biden scandals'

<https://nypost.com/2024/09/19/opinion/how-a-circle-of-spies-blinken-covered-up-biden-scandals-miranda-devines-new-book-exclusive/>

'Secretary of State Antony Blinken helped create the infamous "Dirty 51"
letter from former intelligence officials that claimed The Post's
reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation, Miranda
Devine reports in her new book.
AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Hunter Biden’s abandoned MacBook was a window into the Biden family
business, a secret international influence peddling operation. New York
Post columnist Miranda Devine, who exposed many of Hunter’s secrets in
her book “Laptop from Hell,” returns with “The Big Guy,” the story of
how the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, the IRS and the Department
of Justice conspired to protect Joe Biden and his family. Here, an
exclusive first excerpt:

With his floppy hair, European reserve, and bilingual fluency, Antony
Blinken’s foreign affairs pedigree could not have been designed better
to impress Joe Biden.

He’d grown up a world away from Scranton, Pa. — in Paris, in East
Hampton and in the tony River House co-op on New York’s Upper East Side,
which his father, Donald Blinken, an investment banker-turned-ambassador
to Hungary, once described as “a special island in the midst of
Manhattan” inhabited by “people who are not as exposed to the
vicissitudes.”

At the École Jeannine Manuel in Paris, where the lonely 9-year-old moved
in 1971, after his parents’ divorce, to live with his mother, Judith,
and her new husband, Samuel Pisar, a former adviser to John F. Kennedy,
Blinken found a kindred spirit in Robert Malley, the son of an Egyptian
journalist.

He would later recruit his childhood friend to be the Obama
administration’s lead negotiator on the ill-starred Iran nuclear deal,
only to suffer the embarrassment of Malley being suspended without pay
in 2023 during Biden’s presidency, the target of a mysterious FBI
espionage investigation which continues to this day.'

'Blinken’s career trajectory was rather more tranquil. After Harvard,
and Columbia Law School, he transformed himself into the consummate
Washington staffer, with a sideline as a guitarist in a rock band named
Cash Bar Wedding.

Joe Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
identified the urbane young staffer early on as a “superstar” and a
useful source of the erudition he lacked.'

'Working for Joe, Blinken learned the crude ways of Tammany Hall and
soon became embedded in the senator’s private life. He was an older
brother figure to Joe’s adult sons, Beau and Hunter, and a frequent
weekend visitor to his Delaware compound where he would join the family
and assorted staffers at the kitchen table as they plotted the
disastrous 2008 presidential campaign.

His wife, Evan Ryan, a comely former Hillary Clinton staffer, worked on
that campaign as deputy manager and went on to become White House
cabinet secretary in the Biden administration.

As different as they were, Blinken’s career became firmly entwined with
Joe’s over the decades. When Joe was tapped by Barack Obama to be his
running mate, Blinken became national security advisor to the vice
president and rose to deputy secretary of state. He waited out the Trump
years in a series of lucrative consultancies and ran Joe’s University of
Pennsylvania think tank, the Penn Biden Center.'

'linken has worked for Biden since his time in the Senate — when he
considered the staffer a “young superstar.”
Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
He would reach the summit of his profession under President Biden as
secretary of state at age 59. But first Blinken had to find a way to put
out the fire that threatened to destroy Joe’s candidacy.

Bombshell
On Oct. 14, 2020, three weeks out from the election, with Joe and
President Donald Trump neck and neck in the polls, the New York Post’s
first story about Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop exploded like a bomb.

The front page featured an email from Hunter’s Burisma paymaster, Vadym
Pozharskyi, thanking him for “the opportunity to meet your father.”

It was hard to square with Joe’s assertions throughout the campaign that
he knew nothing about Hunter’s seeming international influence-peddling
operation.'

'Candidate Biden had been lying low since the story broke,
self-isolating in his basement under cover of the COVID pandemic, but
behind the scenes his campaign struggled to find a coherent response to
explain the email away.

In a carefully worded statement to The Post, the campaign said there
were no meetings on Joe’s “official schedules” in 2015 with Pozharskyi.
But to other media outlets, they issued more emphatic denials.

The Biden campaign categorically denied a meeting ever happened. “They
never had a meeting,” Andrew Bates, a campaign spokesman, told USA
Today.

'Even as Twitter and Facebook, in collusion with the FBI, censored The
Post, and the mainstream media collectively looked the other way, the
Biden campaign knew that the sheer weight of the evidence would
eventually be impossible to ignore.

Blinken’s solution was to set in motion one of the most brazen dirty
tricks in US electoral history. Using the intelligence community to
sound the false alarm of “Russian disinformation,” ground already
prepared by corrupt elements inside the FBI, he set out to discredit the
whole laptop story.

A phony call away
First, he phoned CIA veteran Mike Morell for advice on combating The
Post’s reporting. Morell, 62, was thrilled the campaign was asking him
for help. After more than 30 years of loyal service to the CIA, he’d
never made it to the top. He’d come close — serving as acting director
twice.

The boyish, bespectacled, Ohio-born son of an autoworker and a homemaker
quit the CIA in 2013 after being passed over for the top job. But he
hadn’t given up hope of fulfilling his life’s ambition. When he got a
call from Blinken, he saw his chance, at last, to be CIA director in a
Biden administration.'

'Blinken contacted former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell to help
organize the letter.
AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
Morell could not have been more eager to please. He would later testify
to Congress that Blinken’s phone call prompted him to organize 50
intelligence colleagues to sign a letter falsely insinuating that the
damning material from Hunter’s laptop published by The Post was Russian
disinformation.

The Dirty 51 letter, as it came to be known, was timed to appear on the
eve of the final presidential debate, to maximize its benefit to Joe, by
giving him a “talking point to push back on [President] Trump on this
issue,” as Morell put it.

Blinken followed up his call a few hours later, emailing Morell a new,
anonymously sourced, thinly reported — but conveniently timed — USA
Today article claiming that the FBI was examining whether Hunter’s
laptop was part of a “smoke bomb of disinformation pushed by Russia” to
damage Biden.

see also

How CIA interference with the ‘Spies Who Lie’ letter made Biden the
president
At the bottom of Blinken’s email was the signature block of Andrew
Bates, the Biden campaign’s director of rapid response. The Biden
campaign was orchestrating the Dirty 51 letter. This was the real
disinformation operation — 51 of the most powerful people in the
intelligence world were uniting to deceive the American people and help
Joe win the 2020 election.

When his alleged role in the Dirty 51 letter was revealed some three
years later, Blinken denied all: “Didn’t ask for it, didn’t solicit it,”
he said.

But, until Blinken called and implanted the idea, Morell had not
considered floating the idea of Russian interference. “Prior to
[Blinken’s] call, you did not have any intent to write this statement?”
Morell was asked in a deposition for Congress. “I did not,” he replied.'

'Blinken had “triggered … that intent” in him. A purported hoax was
born.

Morell knew what he needed to do. He mobilized the intelligence
community to “help Vice President Biden … because I wanted him to win
the election.”

Fools Russian
To draft the letter, Morell enlisted the help of Marc Polymeropoulos,
51, a squat former CIA senior operations officer, who had retired early,
stating he was a victim of the mysterious “Havana syndrome.”

He would later boast that he “basically wrote” the letter, which claimed
that the material from Hunter’s laptop published by The Post “has all
the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” and “the
Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue.”'

'Moscow will “do anything possible to help Trump win and/or to weaken
Biden should he win. … A ‘laptop op’ fits the bill, as the publication
of the emails are [sic] clearly designed to discredit Biden. … It is
high time that Russia stops interfering in our democracy.”

Morell sent the draft letter to his network of intelligence contacts,
explaining in an email that he had “drafted the attached because we
believe the Russians were involved in some way in the Hunter Biden email
issue and because we think Trump will attack Biden on the issue at this
week’s debate and we want to give the VP a talking point to use in
response.”

see also
Hunter Biden, his wife Melissa Cohen Biden, and U.S. first lady Jill
Biden leave the federal court after the jury finds him guilty on all
three counts in his trial on criminal gun charges, in Wilmington,
Delaware, U.S., June 11, 2024.
editorial
Top ex-spies who (still) lie about Hunter Biden’s laptop are anything
but ‘patriots’
Over the next two days, he gathered signatures from 51 former
intelligence officials. Five former CIA directors signed — Mike Hayden,
Leon Panetta, John Brennan, John McLaughlin (acting), and Morell
(acting) would sign — as well as former Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper, eight CIA intelligence officers, seven
analysts and four chiefs of staff; 41 of the 51 signatories were former
CIA.

He asked them to “highlight your Russia work” in their affiliations when
they signed the letter and assured them that he would “clear the
statement with the Publication Review Board at CIA” in record time.

Extraordinarily, the letter appeared to have been approved at the very
highest levels of the CIA, although that unsavory matter was kept hidden
for more than three years, until it was prised out of the CIA’s email
archives by congressional investigators.

The Blob
Andrew Makridis, the CIA’s chief operating officer at the time the
letter was published, testified to the House Judiciary Committee that he
was sent a draft version by his agency’s Prepublication Classification
Review Board on Oct. 19, 2020, and recognized it as an inherently
political document.

Because of its political sensitivity, Makridis walked across the hall
from his office to inform then-CIA Director Gina Haspel about the
letter.

He testified in April 2024 that he’d 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 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.”

A congressional whistleblower claimed that the CIA also interfered in an
IRS investigation into Hunter Biden.
6 A congressional whistleblower claimed that the CIA also interfered in an
IRS investigation into Hunter Biden.
AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
After notifying Haspel, Makridis had his executive assistant send an
email to the PCRB stating that they “may notify Former DDCIA [Deputy
Director of the CIA] Morell.”

An hour later, the PCRB notified Morell that the letter could be
published. Internal CIA staff emails confirmed that at least some of the
letter signatories were under active contract with the CIA at the time
of its publication.

It wasn’t the first time the CIA had intervened to protect the Bidens. A
congressional whistleblower claimed that the CIA had interfered with the
IRS investigation into Hunter, his business partners had been asked to
become CIA informants, and Burisma had the whiff of a CIA operation.

Like Morell, the Dirty 51 were part of Washington’s cozy, bipartisan
consensus of the spook, military and foreign policy elite that Obama
officials dubbed the “Blob.”

These are the people responsible for the weapons-of-mass-destruction
intelligence hoax that justified the Iraq war, and the warrantless
spying on American citizens that followed 9/11. They are devotees of
color revolutions and regime change to preserve US global dominance.
They work together in the same think tanks and lucrative consultancy
firms. They speak at the same events and on liberal TV shows, write for
the same publications, pal around with the same journalists, and some
even pretend to be journalists. They retweet each other’s anti-Trump
memes and share hawkish views about Russia.

The Dirty 51 were the Blob, and Biden was their guy.

Excepted with permission from “The Big Guy: How a President and His Son
Sold Out America” by Miranda Devine, out Tuesday from Broadside Books.
Coming Sunday: Part 2, the Ukraine Operation.'