WASHINGTON — Call it the C-Y-A.
President Biden lied during his most recent debate against Donald Trump when he claimed a group of former intelligence operatives had determined files from his son Hunter’s abandoned laptop were “garbage” and a “Russian plant” — so signers of the “Spies Who Lie” letter told Congress in testimony made public Thursday, just hours before the first Biden-Trump debate of 2024.
The former spies, whose letter was drafted specifically to give Biden, now 81, a “talking point” at the second and final debate of the 2020 campaign, said they merely suggested that files from Hunter’s hard drive were bogus, but didn’t assert it as a fact — days after bombshell reports by The Post showed the elder Biden was involved in his family’s Chinese and Ukrainian business relationships.
“When he said that it is a Russian plan or whatever — garbage — that’s not what we said in there,” said former CIA Director John Brennan, who was among the best-known signers.
“What he said was not an accurate reflection of what the statement said,” Brennan added in a May 11, 2023, deposition before the House Judiciary Committee.
Asked if Biden had been “accurate” with his debate claim, James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, said, “Not exactly.”
“If he had said ‘could have’ or ‘may have,’ that would comport with what the intent, as I felt it was, of
the public statement, not a definitive statement [that] this was Russian interference,” Clapper said in a May 17, 2023, deposition.
The controversial letter said the laptop files had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” and was organized by former CIA acting director Michael Morell, who wrote in an email acquired by House investigators that “we think Trump will attack Biden on the issue at this week’s debate, and we want to give the Vice President, VP, a talking point to use in response.”
“I wanted [Biden] to win the election,” Morell said in his own April 4, 2023, desposition.
Biden claimed in the Oct. 22, 2020, debate in Nashville that voters should not trust reporting on documents from Hunter’s laptop that showed the then-VP met in 2015 with an executive from Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings, which paid Hunter up to $1 million per year despite no relevant industry experience, and that the elder Biden — referred to as the “big guy” — was at one point in 2017 penciled in for a 10% cut of a proposed joint venture with the Chinese state-linked company CEFC China Energy.
“There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant,” Biden said that night. “Five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except [Trump’s] good friend Rudy Giuliani.”
Trump, 78, is expected to blast Biden during Thursday night’s CNN debate for falsely denying the authenticity of the files.
The CIA recently told the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees that Morell and at least some other letter-signers had active contracts with the agency at the time — raising new questions about whether they could have verified the authenticity of the laptop, which the FBI had by then already confirmed was Hunter’s, and heightening concern about the politicization of federal agencies.
Morell this week denied that he had an active contract with the CIA when he drafted the letter.
Biden has steadfastly insisted he “never” discussed foreign ventures with his relatives and claimed to The Post in March that he “did not interact with their partners” — despite photos, emails and witness testimony to the contrary.
Biden actually interacted with his son and brother James Biden’s associates from two Chinese government-linked business ventures and their patrons from Kazakhstan, Mexico, Russia and Ukraine, according to news reporting and records produced by the House impeachment inquiry into alleged Biden family corruption.
Files from the Hunter Biden laptop have been broadly corroborated and federal prosecutors used the device to help convict Hunter, 54, this month of felony gun crimes — ahead of a second looming trial in Los Angeles for allegedly failing to pay $1.4 million in taxes between 2016 and 2019 on income from foreign ventures in which he involved his father.