How many laws did Hunter Biden break?

Photos: Ap Images

Hunter Biden has proven the most fecund source of scandals of anyone in recent memory. Or at least, he should be — if not for all the major American institutions that have been caught trying to cover his tracks. The Department of Justice (DOJ), the FBI and CIA, the US intelligence community, the mainstream media — all of these formerly trusted entities have seen their image tarnished in the eyes of the public with the revelations of Hunter’s wrongdoing.

So numerous are those scandals that it is impossible to tell the players without a scorecard. Those scandals begin with the revelation, weeks before the 2020 presidential election, of the laptop Hunter left in a Delaware repair shop. But the laptop has proven to be only the tip of the iceberg.

The questions that are emerging now pertain to: how personally involved Joe Biden was in his son’s business dealings; why Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department ran interference for Hunter when questions of criminal culpability arose; and what Chinese and Ukrainian firms thought they were acquiring when they gave money to the Bidens.

Exhibit A: The Laptop

Why did the suppression of the Hunter laptop story reach so high into US intelligence echelons?

The laptop abundantly documented Hunter Biden’s dissolute lifestyle, involving multiple addictions. But far more relevant both to the 2020 election results and to the security of the US was what it revealed about the Biden family influence-peddling business.

Even before the first New York Post story about the laptop appeared, the FBI and other government agencies leaned hard on both Twitter and Facebook to not allow dissemination of the Post stories. (See “Beware the Government-Industrial Censorship Complex,” Mishpacha, Issue 965). The night before the first Post story, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sent ten messages to Twitter executives and almost certainly did the same with Facebook, implying that it was likely Russian disinformation.

Amazingly, even as the FBI worked feverishly to suppress reporting of the laptop, it knew that the laptop was not Russian disinformation. The FBI had possession of the laptop from late 2019. Laura Dehmlow, the current chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, related in an interview with the House Judiciary Committee that when a Twitter executive asked whether the FBI knew the laptop was real, when the first Post story broke, a junior FBI officer on the call started to answer affirmatively, when he was cut off by a more senior official, who said, “No further comment.”

(As a consequence, inter alia, of the suppression of New York Post reporting of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Federal District Court Judge Terry Doughty has now entered a preliminary injunction, in Missouri v. Biden, against any further government involvement in what is posted on social media platforms.)

But the efforts at suppression of the Post story were not confined to the FBI. No less shocking is the signing of a letter attesting that the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop bore “all the earmarks of a Russian information operation,” by 51 former senior US intelligence officials, including Obama’s CIA director John Brennan and his director of national intelligence, James Clapper.

That letter was solicited by the Biden campaign as a talking point to deploy if Donald Trump raised the laptop issue in the upcoming presidential debate. Predictably, Trump did point to the contents of the laptop, including Hunter Biden’s lucrative position on the board of directors of a thoroughly corrupt Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, at a time when his father held the Ukrainian portfolio in the US government. And Biden pointed to the Letter of 51 to dismiss the laptop as completely debunked.

According to Mike Morell, the former acting director of the CIA, who drafted the letter, the solicitation came from current secretary of state Anthony Blinken, who was then a senior Biden campaign advisor. (Blinken denies it.) The 51 senior intelligence officials lent their prestige and aura of expertise to a purely political gesture, without a scintilla of evidence linking the laptop to Russia — even though Hunter Biden never denied that the laptop was his.

And, even more troubling, this letter had input not only from retired intelligence officials, but from currently active CIA personnel — ostensibly part of the executive branch, headed by President Trump. Mike Morell took the trouble to submit the letter to the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board on October 19, 2020, and received immediate clearance. Within hours the letter was published by Politico.

Another ex-CIA official, David Cariens, also revealed the assistance of active CIA employees. Cariens had an unrelated matter then pending before the same Classification Review Board; he was seeking security clearance from the board for a book he had written. A CIA official called him to convey the message that his book had been cleared, but also took the opportunity to ask Cariens whether he would like to sign the Letter of 51. He did. In short, a CIA employee, at a time Donald Trump was still president, acted to aid the Biden campaign.

Between the Letter of 51 and the suppression of the New York Post reporting on Twitter and Facebook, senior US security officials and the FBI managed to tilt the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. Prominent atheist talk show host Sam Harris approvingly described their skullduggery as “a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump.” And Daily Beast national security reporter David Rothkopf wrote a laudatory book, American Resistance, with the subtitle “The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation” — from a second Trump term.

The mainstream media soiled itself once again in studiously avoiding all comment or attention to the contents of Hunter’s laptop being reported in the New York Post. Even when Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner of Hunter’s, confirmed an email specifying the allocation of profits from a deal between Hunter and friends and a Chinese energy company with close ties to the ruling Communist Party, and identified “the big guy,” who was supposed to receive 10 percent of the proceeds, as former vice president Biden, not one MSM outlet followed up with Bobulinski or pursued the story.