Secretary Blinken in Tense Stand-Off With House GOP Over Hunter Biden Letter, Secret Afghanistan Cable

Were each Biden administration official asked, maybe just for fun, to choose his/her/their closest kindred mythological Greek deity, Secretary Blinken would have a lock on Eris, goddess of discord and strife. That is because despite the gift of projecting a cool-as-a-cucumber image when cameras are present, the former foreign policy advisor for Mr. Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign is emerging as a chaos magnet: keywords Hunter Biden, laptop, letter, CIA, Afghanistan. The GOP-led House Judiciary and Intelligence committees this week released an interim report unambiguously titled, “The Hunter Biden Statement: How Senior Intelligence Community Officials and the Biden Campaign Worked to Mislead American Voters.” At issue is a 2020 letter signed by 51 current and past intelligence officials that ahead of the presidential election sought to discredit a New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop by suggesting it was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. As the Sun has reported, a former CIA deputy director, Michael Morrell, agreed in testimony that a phone call from Mr. Blinken “triggered” the intent to formulate the letter. Mr. Blinken, now America’s top diplomat, has distanced himself from the letter that wrongly discredited the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Because the laptop contained lurid details pertaining to Hunter Biden’s life, Republicans contend, an unvarnished story about it risked elevating the electoral prospects of Donald Trump while jeopardizing those of Joe Biden. According to the report, new evidence suggests that senior Biden campaign officials, “including now Secretary of State Antony Blinken, now Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates, and now Counselor to the President Steve Ricchetti, took active measures to discredit the allegations about Hunter Biden by exploiting the national security credentials of former intelligence officials and coordinated efforts to disseminate the statement with members of the media.”Another finding is that Mr. Morrell “rushed the statement” though a prepublication approval process in order for Vice President Biden to have a handy talking point ready to go during the October 22, 2020, presidential debate. Even though the interim report found that “an employee of the CIA may have helped in the effort to solicit signatures for the statement,” the invisible arrows of inspiration still point to Antony Blinken. That is because, the report found, “although he denied asking Morell to write the statement, Secretary Blinken did not dispute that his communication was the impetus for the statement.”The carefully constructed but ultimately specious letter set off a chain reaction of press coverage favorable to candidate Biden. The report found that Mr. Morell tasked his former deputy chief of staff at the CIA, Nick Shapiro, with “placing the statement” in major publications. He told Mr. Shapiro that “[b]etween us,” the campaign wanted “a specific reporter with the Washington Post to run the statement first.” Mr. Shapiro, though, found a more “willing partner,” the report found, in Politico, which published an article under the headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”The problem, of course, is that it wasn’t. None of the people who signed the letter had even a scrap of evidence that pointed to Russian disinformation campaigns.That dichotomy, between political agenda and the facts, is apparently what has some of the 51 individuals who glommed on to the letter lawyering up. The New York Times reported that a Washington-based attorney, Mark Zeid, represents seven signatories to the letter. On social media, Mr. Zeid defended his clients by stating that they were private citizens lawfully exercising First Amendment rights and that he knows of “no signatory who retracts a single word.”Of course, everyone has a right to his/her/their opinion, including Mr. Blinken, who incidentally claimed in a 2020 deposition that he had never had email communication with Hunter Biden, even though he did: At least some of those emails were found in the laptop. A Republican senator of Minnesota, Ron Johnson, has accused Mr. Blinken of lying to Congress and along with Senator Grassley, the Republican of Iowa, has demanded that Mr. Blinken produce all the records he has related to Hunter Biden following his “false testimony” to Congress. So far, there is no indication that Mr. Blinken has complied with that request, thus complicating the work of the permanent subcommittee on investigations. With respect to the now infamous letter, he has also provided none of the documents that the judiciary committees requested of him. That’s not all: The secretary is also refusing to hand over state department cables pertaining to the disastrous American withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. Earlier this week the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul of Texas, threatened to hold Mr. Blinken in contempt of Congress if the state department did not turn over the cables by Thursday. The core of the matter is ongoing tussle between Congress and the state department over a “dissent cable” from July 2021 that reportedly warned Mr. Blinken that Kabul was likely to fall to the Taliban. In March, Mr. McCaul stated, “Unfortunately, Secretary Blinken has refused to provide the Dissent Cable and his response to the cable, forcing me to issue my first subpoena as chairman of this committee.”If, as Republican lawmakers suspect, the cable gave fair warning of imminent chaos in Afghanistan and the state secretary failed to act on that information in a timely and appropriate fashion, the implications are enormous. In the run-up to the shambolic American withdrawal from Afghanistan at the end of August 2021, 13 Marines and more than 100 Afghans were killed in a bomb attack at Kabul Airport. Could that disaster have been avoided with a more clear-eyed management of a crisis that did not, after all, appear out of the blue? Could $7 billion of American military equipment have been saved from the clutches of Taliban warlords?One thing is certain: If the state department is stonewalling, that is only because the agency’s chief, Antony Blinken, is too. A lot of chaos brews under that deceptively slick Foggy Bottom hood, but it is now being pried open on the Hill, one subpoena at a time.

Secretary Blinken in Tense Stand-Off With House GOP Over Hunter Biden Letter, Secret Afghanistan Cable

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