The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency both solicited signatures for and eventually approved the infamous 2020 letter claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop story was a Russian disinformation plot, recent congressional testimony suggests.
In a March 5, 2023, email to congressional investigators, Cariens stated that a CIA official tasked with reviewing and approving a memoir he planned to publish told him about the Hunter Biden laptop letter and even asked him if he would like to sign it.
According to the email, the CIA official also read specific language from the letter to Cariens to convince him to sign the letter.
In his email, Cariens stated that he did not remember the name of the CIA official who asked him to sign the Hunter Biden laptop letter.
Cariens' wife Janice, who retired from the CIA in 1995, also signed the letter.
The letter was first submitted to the PCRB by former CIA acting director and Joe Biden campaign surrogate Mike Morell at 6:34 a.m. on Oct. 19, 2020.
Just hours later, at 10:27 a.m., former CIA official Kristen Wood bcc'ed a distribution list of former intelligence officials asking them to sign the letter, which had been drafted by Morell and Marc Polymeropoulos, who retired from the CIA in 2019.
Emails obtained by the House weaponization subcommittee also revealed that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who repeatedly peddled false allegations that Trump had colluded with Russian President Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton, had a heavy hand in the drafting of the Hunter Biden laptop letter.
Morell directed the CIA review board to quickly review his letter so it could be released and publicized ahead of the Trump-Biden debates.
While the CIA has yet to provide House investigators with its records related to the agency review of the letter, contemporaneous communications from the letter's drafters suggest the approval came less than 12 hours after the letter was submitted.
Numerous polls taken since the 2020 election show that the coordinated efforts between U.S. intelligence agencies and social media tech companies, including Twitter and Facebook, may have even tipped the election to Biden by censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story and preventing voters from knowing the truth about the emerging Biden corruption scandal before they voted.
Nick Shapiro, another Biden campaign surrogate and former CIA deputy chief of staff, also testified a CIA official actively soliciting help for a Biden campaign initiative would be beyond the pale.
