Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) called out Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) and his fellow Democrats on Wednesday for falsely claiming in September that a report about the Biden family’s foreign business interests was “Russian disinformation.”
Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, spoke during a hearing about election security. He responded to Sen. Peters, the committee’s ranking minority member, who accused Republicans of spreading disinformation about voter fraud.
After that comment, Johnson noted: “Senior Democrat leaders, including Ranking Member Peters, were involved in a process of creating a false intelligence product — it was supposedly classified — that they leaked to the media that accused Senator [Chuck] Grassley, the President pro tem of the Senate, and myself, of accepting and disseminating Russian disinformation.”
Johnson was referring to a report by Peters and the Democratic minority, which attempted to dismiss allegations in a report by Johnson and Grassley that documented the Biden family’s pattern of using Joe Biden’s political profile to enrich themselves.
Peters and the Democrats claimed, falsely: “The Chairmen’s Investigation is an Outcome of a Russian Disinformation Campaign.”
Johnson declared: “That’s where the disinformation is coming — that’s where the false information — the lies, the false allegations [are from].”
Peters objected, but Johnson was having none of it: “You lied repeatedly in the press that I was spreading Russian disinformation, and that was an outright lie, and I told you to stop lying, and you continue to do it.”
Johnson also called out the 50 former intelligence officials who signed a letter suggesting that the Hunter Biden story in the New York Post — which indicated that Joe Biden had extensive knowledge of, and involvement in, his son’s foreign business affairs — was Russian disinformation.
After the election, Hunter Biden revealed that he was under federal investigation. The laptop, and the business relationships it documented, are central to that investigation.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.