The latest allegations that Antony Blinken “played a role’ in duping the public on the Hunter Biden laptop story shows just how deep the Biden administration corruption runs, U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) told The Star News Network in an exclusive interview.
The Wisconsin Republican said Blinken, President Joe Biden’s Secretary of State, who was a top adviser to Biden’s 2020 campaign, has much to explain to Congress about his role in the U.S. intelligence community’s disinformation drive on the Biden’s and the damning laptop.
If Blinken truly was the “impetus” of the claims, as former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell testified, Johnson said the Secretary of State should resign.
“And if he doesn’t resign, he should be impeached,” said the senator, whose committee has been investigating allegations of Biden family corruption for years. “Again, so many members of the Biden administration have this level of deceit, dishonesty and corruption. This is a lawless administration.”
Johnson said a much larger story of coordination, collusion and corruption needs to be exposed.
Morrell testified before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, asserting that Blinken drove the discussions that led to the public statement signed by 51 “former” intelligence officials in October 2020 that the laptop belonging to Hunter Biden was a Russian “disinformation campaign.”
Weeks before the 2020 presidential election, the officials endorsed a letter claiming Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The list of ex-security officials included then-President Donald Trump haters John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s CIA director, and former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH-04) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH-10) sent Blinken a letter Thursday, informing him that the panels are “conducting oversight of federal law-enforcement and intelligence matters within our respective jurisdictions.”
“We are examining that public statement signed by 51 former intelligence officials that falsely discredited a New York Post story regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop as supposed Russian disinformation,” they wrote. “As part of our oversight, we have learned that you played a role in the inception of this statement while serving as a Biden campaign advisor, and we therefore request your assistance with our oversight.”
Johnson said Blinken needs to “answer an awful lot of questions.” The senator, who serves as Ranking Member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said the panel will supply the House oversight committees with the transcript of a previous interview conducted with Blinken.
The Star News Network has obtained a transcript of the December 2022 interview with Blinken, who at the time was Biden’s nominee for the top cabinet position. The interview was conducted by the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired at the time by Johnson, and the Finance Committee, then chaired by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
Blinken said he had met with Hunter Biden for lunch on July 22, 2015. He said they discussed Hunter’s brother Beau, who had recently died. Blinken served as Obama’s deputy Secretary of State at the time. Before then, he was national security adviser to then-Vice President Joe Biden. “This was the continuation of a long professional relationship that stretched back to 2002, when Mr. Blinken began his six-year stint as Democratic staff director for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Then-Senator Biden was the chair of that committee from 2001 to 2003 and 2007 to 2009,” according to Blinken’s bio.
Asked what he and Hunter discussed at the meeting, Blinken said the conversation was all “about the loss the family had suffered.”
But Blinken originally had planned to meet with Hunter in late May, clearly to talk about something. Asked if he discussed anything else at the July meeting, Blinken said the only thing he remembers talking about was Beau. “It’s kind of seared into my — into my memory,” he said, according to the transcript.
He claimed that, “to the best of my recollection,” he had just the one meeting with Hunter, at his State Department office, and no calls. They “didn’t discuss business.” Blinken said he had a “friendly acquaintanceship” with Hunter, and that he’d only seen him two other times. Then he said he said he head seen Hunter on a “handful of occasions,” that they were in “overlapping social circles.”
The July 2015 meeting was well after Hunter landed a sweetheart seat on th board of Ukraine-based Burisma, earning at least $600,000 a year for his “services,” but long before an email revealed Burisma official thanked Hunter for inviting I’m to meet with his powerful Vice President father at the time. Said father was deeply involved in U.S. foreign policy, particularly in Ukraine, as Obama’s Vice President.
The laptop popped up publicly in October 2020, in The New York Post’s bombshell story that accurately reported the laptop and its curious emails belonged to Hunter Biden. That’s when the Biden disinformation campaign, with the help of the former anti-Trump intelligence officials, sprang into action, Morrell testified.>
Johnson, whose committee in September 2020 had issued a report — Hunter Biden, Burisma and Corruption: The Impact on U.S. Government Policy and Related Concerns — was visited by FBI agents more than a month before. Suddenly, a subsequent leak falsely labeled the investigation as advancing Russian disinformation. That phony narrative intensified following the New York Post story.
“The FBI was laying the groundwork,” Johnson told The Star News Network. “They knew that computer existed, they knew it was real and they set us up.”
It worked. Johnson’s committee was offered the laptop as evidence for its investigation. The committee deferred to the advice of the FBI, and the rest, he said, is disinformation history.
And the left-leaning so-called mainstream media were in on the campaign, Johnson said.
“What you have is an indication of the larger sorts of corruption, from a compliant, complicit and corrupt media that runs through all of these issues,” the senator said. “The cooperation, coordination and collusion of Big Tech social media giants and the Biden campaign censored these stories as much as the mainstream media, a media that screams Trump supporters and anyone connected to the Jan. 6 riots are insurrectionists.
“The real danger to our democracy is a horribly biased media who are just advocates for the left.”
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
