An agency employee helped to collect signatures for a letter calling the scandal “Russian disinformation,” a report says
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) may have been instrumental in downplaying the Hunter Biden laptop scandal ahead of his father’s election as president in 2020, a new interim report by the House Judiciary Committee suggests.
It says the agency may have particularly assisted in garnering support for an open letter authored by a host of former intelligence officials, which falsely claimed the whole affair was a Russian disinformation operation.
The report, which was released on Wednesday, cites one of the letter’s signatories, former CIA analyst David Cariens, who said he was approached by an employee of the intelligence agency and “asked” if he would sign the document.
Cariens was in contact with the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board (PCRB) about his own memoir in October 2020, when he was made…