Hunter Biden laptop ‘coordinated’ cover-up sparks FEC complaint against DNC
by Kaelan Deese, Supreme Court Reporter
October 24, 2023 03:46 PM
Suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in the days before the 2020 election was part of a “coordinated” effort between President Joe Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, according to a conservative legal group’s new complaint.
First Legal, the group headed by former President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller, filed the complaint at the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday against campaign committees — Joe Biden For President, the Biden Victory Fund, the Biden Action Fund — and the DNC over their alleged attempts to downplay the heavily censored New York Post report on Oct. 14, 2020.
“The Federal Election Commission’s charge includes election integrity. Americans have the right to know who is coordinating with federal candidates. But this right is only as effective as the agency that enforces it,” Reed D. Rubinstein, senior counselor and director of oversight and investigations at AFL, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
AFL accuses the pro-Biden entities of “failing to disclose the campaign’s role” in coordinating a “Letter of 51” former intelligence officials to dispel evidence of political corruption and influence peddling found on the first son’s personal laptop that was dropped off at a Delaware-based computer repair shop by the younger Biden.
The complaint alleges that then-senior Biden campaign adviser and now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken emailed former CIA acting Director Michael Morell twice on Oct. 17, 2020, to discuss the laptop story, according to Morell’s March 23 testimony before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees in Congress.
Morell, who was acting CIA director under President Barack Obama, said that before his contact with Blinken, he had no intention to write the Oct. 19 laptop letter asserting the information detailed in the New York Post’s reporting was likely a Russian disinformation campaign.
Morell also testified that one of the two reasons he helped put the letter together was to help Biden and defeat Trump.
“There are reasons to believe that the public statement by 51 former intelligence officials was a coordinated political operation to help elect Vice President Biden in the 2020 presidential election, as set forth below,” according to the AFL complaint.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to Blinken earlier this year pressing him for answers on his role in the inception of the intelligence letter downplaying the laptop story. They noted that “the very bottom of the email you [Blinken] sent to Morell included the signature block of Andrew Bates, then-director of rapid response for the Biden campaign.”
Bates is now a deputy press secretary in the Biden White House and deferred a request for a response from the Washington Examiner to the Biden campaign and the DNC.
On July 20, the House Judiciary Committee and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government conducted a transcribed interview of Laura Dehmlow, the section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. During her interview, Dehmlow testified that the same FBI personnel who warned social media companies about the possible Russian operation in the lead-up to the 2020 election were aware that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden.
“The FEC must act here,” Rubinstein said.
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The Washington Examiner contacted a representative for the DNC and Biden’s campaign for a response.
Read the complaint in full…