Last week, in an effort to smear now Secretary Blinken, Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan and Intel Committee Chair Mike Turner released cherry-picked excerpts of a transcribed interview with former Deputy CIA Director Mike Morell.
Jordan and Turner claimed that the transcript showed that now Secretary Blinken and the Biden campaign somehow acted inappropriately in 2020. This claim didn’t stand up to scrutiny and was quickly debunked as soon as the House Democrats released more expansive excerpts of the testimony.
Below find key points from The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake debunking the GOP’s latest desperate political stunt:
House Republicans’ attempts to claim government officials played a role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story have often gone well beyond the established facts. Now they’re turning to the Biden campaign’s role. As before, though, the evidence isn’t as compelling as advertised.
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The implication of the letter — which Jordan spelled out more explicitly Thursday night on Fox News — is that the Biden campaign was creating a pretext for suppressing the story, using the former intelligence officials.
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But the letter appears to have omitted key context, including whether Blinken actually pushed for such a statement.
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The Republicans’ claim of suppression also doesn’t really comport with the timeline, insofar as this is about social media suppression.
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The other issue is the content of the statement. While the Jordan-Turner letter describes it as being “infamous,” the statement was more nuanced than it was initially described both in the media and by Joe Biden himself, as The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler recently wrote.
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There were also errors in the New York Post’s initial reporting, as Kessler noted the same day. One was in the first paragraph of the story, which falsely stated that Joe Biden as vice president “pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating” a company for which Hunter Biden worked.
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What’s more, Giuliani himself didn’t exactly put fears about the information’s provenance at ease. The day after the story broke, on Oct. 15, the Wall Street Journal quoted Giuliani as saying, “Could it be hacked? I don’t know. I don’t think so. If it was hacked, it’s for real. If it was hacked. I didn’t hack it. I have every right to use it.”