Secretary of State Antony Blinken in an interview on Monday denied that it was his idea to have 51 former intelligence officials publish a letter before the 2020 election calling the Hunter Biden laptop story Russian disinformation, but he did not deny reaching out to former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell, who spearheaded the effort.
“[W]ith regard to that letter, I didn’t — it wasn’t my idea, didn’t ask for it, didn’t solicit it. And I think the testimony that the former Deputy Director of the CIA Mike Morell put forward confirms that,” Blinken said in his first remarks addressing the issue during an interview with Fox News.
Last month, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH) revealed that Morell testified that he decided to write the letter after Blinken reached out to him about the story.
Morell said Blinken did not ask him to do it, but that his reaching out to him is what prompted him to do it, because he wanted to help the Biden campaign. Blinken was a senior Biden campaign adviser at the time, calling into question whether the Biden campaign orchestrated the letter, which was then cited by Joe Biden himself on the campaign trail to cast the story as Russian disinformation.
Blinken also claimed in the interview that “one of the great benefits of this job is that I don’t do politics and don’t engage in it.” However, his potential involvement in the campaign to discredit an American news media outlet for an unflattering political story has called into question whether he can act as a credible representative of America overseas.
“How does he interact with counterparts in the Chinese Communist Party, Russia, Ukraine or whatever,” Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WI) said in an exclusive interview with Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Saturday.
“What this is demonstrating is that the corruption goes extremely deep, but the [bigger] question is, how does he interact with his own boss when he knows the level of corruption in the White House? How does he protect America’s interests abroad, when he’s doing the bidding of a man that he knows is absolutely corrupt [and] absolutely compromised?” she added.
“[Blinken] knew what was on that laptop, and he knew that laptop belonged to Hunter Biden. And he knew and he knows now that the Chinese Communist Party has paid the Biden family millions of dollars. Who does he choose? Does he pick the Biden crime family to support and defend and protect them? Or does he protect the United States of America? We now know what the answer is,” she said.
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