House Republicans have intensified their investigation into a letter that was employed to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story in the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election.
As part of their efforts, they have issued a subpoena threat to the CIA, aiming to gather more information on the matter, according to The Daily Wire.
Committees “may resort to compulsory process” if the intelligence agency does not voluntarily comply with requests for information, Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH) wrote to CIA Director William Burns on Wednesday.
The GOP investigators, building upon last week’s staff report that exposed the potential involvement of an active CIA employee in obtaining the signature of a former intelligence official, have set a deadline of May 30 for the production of records. The investigators have requested the records to be provided “in unredacted form.”
The Daily Wire added:
The laptop letter, which ultimately boasted the signatures of 51 intelligence veterans, warned the “arrival” of a laptop full of emails purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Then-candidate Joe Biden, Hunter’s father, used the statement to cast doubt on the laptop story during a debate against former President Donald Trump.
Jordan and Turner said the CIA made a “minimal production” of documents on May 9 in response to their March request for records concerning the laptop letter. They also said the CIA “admitted” that it did not perform a complete search and afterward “committed” to conducting various sweeps for relevant information.
In addition to seeking CIA phone records and communications from October 2020 with the 51 former intelligence officials who signed the letter, the committee chairmen have requested the agency to conduct a thorough search for all documents pertaining to the approval of David Cariens’ memoir by the Pre-Publication Classification Review Board (PCRB) within the agency, which also reviewed the letter before it was published.
According to a written statement provided by David Cariens to congressional investigators, an active CIA employee involved in reviewing his memoir “asked” him to sign the letter in October 2020. Cariens agreed to do so after being informed of the letter’s contents, as detailed in the staff report.
Several former intelligence officials who played a key role in initiating the letter, including former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, acknowledged that it would be inappropriate for an active CIA official to recruit signatures for such a purpose, the Daily Wire noted.
House Democrats have since accused their GOP colleagues of releasing a “cherrypicked” report, claiming that there “is substantial reason to question Mr. Cariens’ recollection of what happened, given the evidence and testimony on hand.”
Democrats published a bullet-point list that said Cariens got the same invitational email from a former CIA official as the other signatories before contendning that the GOP lawmakers “are making expansive claims that CIA ‘promoted’ the letter without hearing Cariens’ testimony or taking any steps to corroborate or refute the single email they received from the witness directly.”
