Republicans look to target former intelligence officials who voiced doubts over Hunter Biden email story

Key members of the incoming House Republican majority have signalled their intent to target a group of former US intelligence officials who signed on to an open letter voicing doubts over the veracity of an October 2020 New York Post article alleging that President Joe Biden had met with one of his son Hunter’s business associates during his time as vice president.

On Sunday, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy accused the more than four dozen ex-officials — including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, ex-Central Intelligence Agency directors John Brennan, Michael Hayden and Leon Panetta, and former acting CIA director John McLaughlin — of having “lie[d] to the American public” when they warned that reporting based on data from a cache of evidence purportedly copied from a laptop belonging to the president’s son could be furthering a Russian disinformation campaign.

Mr McCarthy also said the 51 officials would be receiving subpoenas for their testimony before congressional committees after the Republican majority takes over the House on 3 January.

“Those 51 Intel agents that signed a letter that said the Hunter Biden information was all wrong, was Russia collusion, many of them have a security clearance. We're going to bring them before Committee. I'm going to have them have a hearing, bring them, and subpoena them before Committee: Why did they sign it? Why did they lie to the American public?” he said.

He specifically called out Mr Clapper and Mr Brennan and accused them of using “the reputation that America was able to give” to them “for a political purpose”.

The open letter that has Republicans incensed more than two years after the fact was first reported on by Politico the week after the Post published a story which included an email sent to the younger Mr Biden by Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the Ukrainian gas company that hired the Yale-educated lawyer to serve on its’ corporate board. In the short message, Mr Pozharskyi thanked Hunter for inviting him to Washington and introducing him to his father.

The Post’s report was based on what it described as “a massive trove” of data purportedly from a laptop Mr Biden had abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop. The owner of the shop, a supporter of former president Donald Trump, provided a copy of the laptop’s hard drive to Mr Trump’s then-attorney, Rudolph Giuliani. Mr Giuliani, a former New York City mayor, also became a key figure in the run-up to Mr Trump’s first impeachment trial by pushing the president of Ukraine to announce sham investigations into the Biden family.

Citing the timing of the report and Mr Giuliani’s involvement, the signatories to the letter argued that the “arrival” of the alleged emails “on the US political scene” just weeks before the 2020 election had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”.

While the intelligence officials who signed the letter took pains to stress that they had no evidence that Russia was involved in the chain of events leading to the Post story and took no position on the emails’ veracity, they pointed out that Mr Giuliani had recieved materials from a Russian intelligence agent who had recently been sanctioned by the US government for interfering in the 2020 election.

James Comer, the incoming chairman of the powerful House Oversight Committee, said on Monday during an appearance on Fox News that Republicans are “very concerned” because the US intelligence community has “made a lot of mistakes,” such as estimating that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 US invasion, and the more recent predictions regarding Afghanistan’s military’s willingness to fight the Taliban following America’s withdrawal from that country.

He said those intelligence failures were akin to the former officials’ opinion regarding the 2020 story about the president’s son, and suggested that current US intelligence officials could be caught up in hearings as well.

“They knew that that laptop was legitimate. They knew it was authentic but they discredited the story and said it was Russian disinformation. There is a lack of trust in Congress — they make too many mistakes and now we don’t trust them,” he said. “We’ll bring them in and they will have an opportunity to explain themselves to us and explain why they continue to make so many mistakes”.

The intent on the part of top Republicans to make an issue over the former intelligence officials’ decision to render an opinion on a news story Mr Trump’s supporters had hoped would upend the election is just one part of what is shaping up to be long campaign of vengeance against public figures for the failure of the US media to treat the Biden laptop revelations the same way as the WikiLeaks email dumps from the Democratic National Committee four years earlier.

Prominent Republicans have suggested hauling in former Twitter and Facebook executives to answer for the decision to restrict distribution of the Biden email story, and have accused the social media companies of acting out of a desire to prevent Mr Trump from winning a second term in the White House.

But both social media executives and US law enforcement experts have said the platforms acted out of an abundance of caution to avoid becoming complicit in a repeat of what happened in 2016 because it was later revealed that the WikiLeaks email dumps were part of a wide-ranging Russian operation to swing the election to Mr Trump.