Matt Taibbi pointed this out last Friday. There’s currently another round of dueling memos taking place in Washington that is reminiscent of the Nunes-Shiff memo battle you may remember from back in 2018. I won’t walk through all of that again but the gist was that Nunes memo was basically right and Schiff’s memo was clearly wrong. But you wouldn’t have know it at the time from looking at the media coverage, because of course the media took Schiff’s side and presented him as more credible.

So here we are once again. Rep. Jim Jordan released a letter last week pointing out that some pre-election activity designed to discredit the Hunter Biden story was prompted by a call from someone on Biden’s campaign staff. Specifically Antony Blinken (now Sec. Blinken) made a call to Mike Morell to ask his opinion of the Hunter Biden story published by the NY Post. Blinken wanted to know if Morell thought the Russians might be behind it.

Within five days of the article, on October 19, 2020, 51 former intelligence officials released a public statement attempting to discredit the contents of the New York Post’s reporting about Hunter Biden, stating that the story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” News publications immediately ran with the statement, with Politico publishing a story with the conclusive headline, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former officials say.” Social media companies simultaneously restricted access to the Post story, including Twitter locking the Post’s and then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s accounts for sharing a link to the article…

The Committees recently conducted a transcribed interview with Michael Morell, a former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and one of the 51 signatories of the public statement. In his transcribed interview, Morell testified that on or around October 17, 2020, you reached out to him to discuss the Hunter Biden laptop story.8 At the time you served as a senior advisor to the Biden campaign. According to Morell, although your outreach was couched as simply gathering Morell’s reaction to the Post story, it set in motion the events that led to the issuance of the public statement. Morell testified:

In the same interview, Morell also admitted he created the letter because, in part, he wanted Biden to win the election.

So that’s the gist of Rep. Jordan’s letter to Antony Blinken. But as Taibbi points out, Democrats have responded (just as they did with the Schiff memo) claiming Jordan’s statements are misleading. To prove it they released their own memo with another segment of the interview in which Morell denies that Blinken asked or even insinuated that he should create the letter from 51 former intel officials about the Hunter Biden laptop. My own take is that this response may do more harm than good for the claims Democrats are making. Here’s the relevant portion.

So Morell’s story is that his buddy in the Biden campaign called to ask if he thought the Hunter Biden story might be Russian disinformation. Morell obviously agreed. However, did you catch the last bit of his answer. “You know, [Blinken will] have to tell you what his intent was, right, in asking me. You know, my thinking was that, if I agreed, right, that the Russians were somehow involved, my guess was that he would want that out, but that is a guess, right. I do not know his intent.”

So Blinken didn’t ask for anything specific but Morell’s guess was that Blinken’s motive was to get the word out. You might say that Morell took the hint from the Biden campaign. He then went above and beyond by creating this letter from 51 former intel people saying exactly what he guessed Blinken/Biden wanted said. He did it, by his own admission, because he wanted Biden to win the election. And Biden then used the letter during a national debate to dismiss the story (after which another Biden administration figure called Morell to thank him for producing the letter).

And don’t forget, the letter was wrong. The laptop had nothing to do with Russian disinformation. As Taibbi says, this seems like sort of a big deal even if you don’t think the laptop story itself was a big deal.

By any marker, this is an enormous news story. If we go by the usual measuring stick of American scandal, the Watergate story, this potentially meets or exceeds that, on almost every level. Does it reach into the current White House? Check. Was it a craven attempt to subvert the electoral process? Check again. Did a presidential candidate engineer a massive public deception? Yes, resoundingly. Did it involve intelligence agencies? Yes, and these weren’t amateurs like Nixon’s plumbers. These were 50 of the most powerful people in the intelligence world — including five former heads or acting heads of the Agency in Morell, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and John McLaughlin — conspiring to meddle in domestic politics on a grand scale.

The seriousness of the actual laptop story, at least what’s been disclosed so far, is still not clear. I’ve long thought the suppression of it by Facebook and Twitter had clearer import, being a historic censorship first. However, if it can be proven that this “Russian Disinfo” whopper was laid on the public at the behest of the Biden campaign, with the aid of the intelligence community, that escalates things to a new level of scandal, far above the censorship issue.

The coverup is always worse than the crime. In this case, no one was dumb enough to literally ask for a bogus letter with the imprimatur of the intel agencies to allow Biden to dismiss the whole story. But the reason they didn’t have to ask is because everyone involved knew what was needed and was happy to comply, even if it turned out to be complete nonsense.