AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Hunter Biden’s abandoned MacBook was a window into the Biden family business, a secret international influence peddling operation. New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, who exposed many of Hunter’s secrets in her book “Laptop from Hell,” returns with “The Big Guy,” the story of how the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, the IRS and the Department of Justice conspired to protect Joe Biden and his family. Here, an exclusive first excerpt:
With his floppy hair, European reserve, and bilingual fluency, Antony Blinken’s foreign affairs pedigree could not have been designed better to impress Joe Biden.
He’d grown up a world away from Scranton, Pa. — in Paris, in East Hampton and in the tony River House co-op on New York’s Upper East Side, which his father, Donald Blinken, an investment banker-turned-ambassador to Hungary, once described as “a special island in the midst of Manhattan” inhabited by “people who are not as exposed to the vicissitudes.”
At the École Jeannine Manuel in Paris, where the lonely 9-year-old moved in 1971, after his parents’ divorce, to live with his mother, Judith, and her new husband, Samuel Pisar, a former adviser to John F. Kennedy, Blinken found a kindred spirit in Robert Malley, the son of an Egyptian journalist.
He would later recruit his childhood friend to be the Obama administration’s lead negotiator on the ill-starred Iran nuclear deal, only to suffer the embarrassment of Malley being suspended without pay in 2023 during Biden’s presidency, the target of a mysterious FBI espionage investigation which continues to this day.
Young ‘superstar’
Blinken’s career trajectory was rather more tranquil. After Harvard, and Columbia Law School, he transformed himself into the consummate Washington staffer, with a sideline as a guitarist in a rock band named Cash Bar Wedding.
Joe Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, identified the urbane young staffer early on as a “superstar” and a useful source of the erudition he lacked.
Working for Joe, Blinken learned the crude ways of Tammany Hall and soon became embedded in the senator’s private life. He was an older brother figure to Joe’s adult sons, Beau and Hunter, and a frequent weekend visitor to his Delaware compound where he would join the family and assorted staffers at the kitchen table as they plotted the disastrous 2008 presidential campaign.
His wife, Evan Ryan, a comely former Hillary Clinton staffer, worked on that campaign as deputy manager and went on to become White House cabinet secretary in the Biden administration.
As different as they were, Blinken’s career became firmly entwined with Joe’s over the decades. When Joe was tapped by Barack Obama to be his running mate, Blinken became national security advisor to the vice president and rose to deputy secretary of state. He waited out the Trump years in a series of lucrative consultancies and ran Joe’s University of Pennsylvania think tank, the Penn Biden Center.
He would reach the summit of his profession under President Biden as secretary of state at age 59. But first Blinken had to find a way to put out the fire that threatened to destroy Joe’s candidacy.
Bombshell
On Oct. 14, 2020, three weeks out from the election, with Joe and President Donald Trump neck and neck in the polls, the New York Post’s first story about Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop exploded like a bomb.
The front page featured an email from Hunter’s Burisma paymaster, Vadym Pozharskyi, thanking him for “the opportunity to meet your father.”
It was hard to square with Joe’s assertions throughout the campaign that he knew nothing about Hunter’s seeming international influence-peddling operation.
Candidate Biden had been lying low since the story broke, self-isolating in his basement under cover of the COVID pandemic, but behind-the-scenes his campaign struggled to find a coherent response to explain the email away.
In a carefully worded statement to The Post, the campaign said there were no meetings on Joe’s “official schedules” in 2015 with Pozharskyi. But to other media outlets, they issued more emphatic denials.
The Biden campaign categorically denied a meeting ever happened. “They never had a meeting,” Andrew Bates, a campaign spokesman, told USA Today.
Even as Twitter and Facebook, in collusion with the FBI, censored The Post, and the mainstream media collectively looked the other way, the Biden campaign knew that the sheer weight of the evidence would eventually be impossible to ignore.
Blinken’s solution was to set in motion one of the most brazen dirty tricks in US electoral history. Using the intelligence community to sound the false alarm of “Russian disinformation,” ground already prepared by corrupt elements inside the FBI, he set out to discredit the whole laptop story.
A phony call away
First, he phoned CIA veteran Mike Morell for advice on combating The Post’s reporting. Morell, 62, was thrilled the campaign was asking him for help. After more than 30 years of loyal service to the CIA, he’d never made it to the top. He’d come close — serving as acting director twice.
The boyish, bespectacled, Ohio-born son of an autoworker and a homemaker, quit the CIA in 2013 after being passed over for the top job. But he hadn’t given up hope of fulfilling his life’s ambition. When he got a call from Blinken, he saw his chance, at last, to be CIA director in a Biden administration.
Morell could not have been more eager to please. He would later testify to Congress that Blinken’s phone call prompted him to organize 50 intelligence colleagues to sign a letter falsely insinuating that the damning material from Hunter’s laptop published by The Post was Russian disinformation.
The Dirty 51 letter, as it came to be known, was timed to appear on the eve of the final presidential debate, to maximize its benefit to Joe, by giving him a “talking point to push back on [President] Trump on this issue,” as Morell put it.
Blinken followed up his call a few hours later, emailing Morell a new,an anonymously sourced, thinly reported — but conveniently timed — USA Today article claiming that the FBI was examining whether Hunter’s laptop was part of a “smoke bomb of disinformation pushed by Russia.” to damage Biden.
At the bottom of Blinken’s email was the signature block of Andrew Bates, the Biden campaign’s director of rapid response. The Biden campaign was orchestrating the Dirty 51 letter. This was the real disinformation operation — 51 of the most powerful people in the intelligence world were uniting to deceive the American people and help Joe win the 2020 election.
When his alleged role in the Dirty 51 letter was revealed some three years later, Blinken denied all: “Didn’t ask for it, didn’t solicit it,” he said.
But, until Blinken called and implanted the idea, Morell had not considered floating the idea of Russian interference. “Prior to [Blinken’s] call, you did not have any intent to write this statement?” Morell was asked in a deposition for Congress. “I did not,” he replied.
Blinken had “triggered . . . that intent” in him. A purported hoax was born.
Morell knew what he needed to do. He mobilized the intelligence community to “help Vice President Biden . . . because I wanted him to win the election.”
Fools Russian
To draft the letter, Morell enlisted the help of Marc Polymeropoulos, 51, a squat former CIA senior operations officer., who had retired early, stating he was a victim of the mysterious “Havana syndrome.”
He would later boast that he “basically wrote” the letter, which claimed that the material from Hunter’s laptop published by the Post “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” and “the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue.”
Moscow will “do anything possible to help Trump win and/or to weaken Biden should he win. . . . A ‘laptop op’ fits the bill, as the publication of the emails are [sic] clearly designed to discredit Biden. . . . It is high time that Russia stops interfering in our democracy.”
Morell sent the draft letter to his network of intelligence contacts, explaining in an email that he had “drafted the attached because we believe the Russians were involved in some way in the Hunter Biden email issue and because we think Trump will attack Biden on the issue at this week’s debate and we want to give the VP a talking point to use in response.”
Over the next two days, he gathered signatures from 51 former intelligence officials. Five former CIA directors signed — Mike Hayden, Leon Panetta, John Brennan, John McLaughlin (acting), and Morell (acting) would sign — as well as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, eight CIA intelligence officers, seven analysts and four chiefs of staff; 41 of the 51 signatories were former CIA.
He asked them to “highlight your Russia work” in their affiliations when they signed the letter and assured them that he would “clear the statement with the Publication Review Board at CIA” in record time.
Extraordinarily, the letter appeared to have been approved at the very highest levels of the CIA, although that unsavory matter was kept hidden for more than three years, until it was prised out of the CIA’s email archives by congressional investigators.
The Blob
Andrew Makridis, the CIA’s chief operating officer at the time the letter was published, testified to the House Judiciary Committee that he was sent a draft version by his agency’s the Prepublication Classification Review Board on Oct. 19, 2020, and recognized it as an inherently political document.
Because of its political sensitivity, Makridis walked across the hall from his office to inform then-CIA Director Gina Haspelabout the letter.
He testified in April that he’d felt at the time that the letter “rises to the level where I felt that I wanted to make sure the director and the deputy director were aware. [But] we had no discussion other than the notification that this was coming. . . . I mean, it’s talking about President Trump, Vice President Biden. I mean, you can’t read that and say there isn’t politics involved of some nature.” he testified in April 2024.
After notifying Haspel, Makridis then had his executive assistant send an email to the PCRB stating that they “may notify Former DDCIA [Deputy Director of the CIA] Morell.”
An hour later, the PCRB notified Mr. Morell that the letter could be published. Internal CIA staff emails confirmed that at least some of the letter signatories were on active contract with the CIA at the time of its publication.
It wasn’t the first time the CIA had intervened to protect the Bidens. A congressional whistleblower claimed that the CIA had interfered with the IRS investigation into Hunter, his business partners had been asked to become CIA informants, and Burisma had the whiff of a CIA operation.
Like Morell, the Dirty 51 were part of Washington’s cozy, bipartisan consensus of the spook, military and foreign policy elite that Obama officials dubbed the “Blob.”
These are the people responsible for the weapons-of-mass-destruction intelligence hoax that justified the Iraq war, and the warrantless spying on American citizens that followed 9/11. They are devotees of color revolutions and regime change to preserve US global dominance. They work together in the same think tanks and lucrative consultancy firms. They speak at the same events and on liberal TV shows, write for the same publications, pal around with the same journalists, and some even pretend to be journalists. They retweet each other’s anti-Trump memes and share hawkish views about Russia.
The Dirty 51 were the Blob, and Biden was their guy.
Excepted with permission from “The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America” by Miranda Devine, out Tuesday from Broadside Books. Coming Sunday: Part 2, the Ukraine Operation.