How CIA interference with the ‘Spies Who Lie’ letter made Biden the president

According to a congressional investigation, former CIA director Gina Haspel was made aware of the "Spies Who Lie" letter that claimed The Post's reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images

It is chilling to contemplate that, if it had not been for the malign intervention of the CIA in the 2020 election, Donald Trump would have won a second term and the wars currently raging in Ukraine and Gaza would never have happened.

We now see that the CIA staged a domestic disinformation campaign to protect its favored candidate, the decrepit and pliable Joe Biden, from the political consequences of his corruption.

Now we are told that former CIA Director Gina Haspel was in on the “Dirty 51” letter in October 2020 that falsely claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.

This bombshell, revealed by the CIA former Chief Operating Officer Andrew Makridis to congressional investigators, will go down in history as an act of sabotage against the American people by a rogue intelligence agency.

What it tells us is that the CIA itself, not just 51 retired intelligence officials, colluded with the Biden campaign on the eve of the 2020 election to discredit the New York Post’s reporting of Biden’s involvement in his family’s international influence-peddling scheme, as documented on his crackhead son’s abandoned computer.

Political document

Makridis has testified to the House Judiciary Committee that he was sent a draft version of the letter by the CIA’s Publication Classification Review Board on Oct. 19, 2020, and recognized it as an inherently political document.

Because of its political sensitivity, he walked across the hall from his office to inform Director Haspel about the letter.

He testified that he 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 [Vaughn Frederick Bishop at the time] 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.

The letter claiming the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian intelligence operation” was instigated by Biden’s campaign adviser Antony Blinken (now secretary of state) in a phone call to Mike Morell, a former acting CIA director, five days after The Post began reporting damaging material from the laptop in October 2020.

Morell would testify that Blinken’s call prompted him to write the letter and organize 50 colleagues to sign it.

Five former CIA directors — Mike Hayden, Leon Panetta, John Brennan, John McLaughlin (acting) and Morell (acting) — signed, as well as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Forty-one of the 51 signatories were ex-CIA.

The Dirty 51 letter, as it came to be known, was timed to appear two days later, on the eve of the final presidential debate, to maximize its benefit to Biden by giving him a “talking point to push back on [President] Trump on this issue,” as Morell put it in an email obtained by the committee.

Sure enough, Biden used the letter in the debate to claim the laptop was a “Russian plant” and “garbage,” and successfully kill the issue.

The disclosures form part of a report by the House Intelligence Committee and the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released Tuesday.

It also reveals that some of the Dirty 51, including Morell, were on the CIA payroll as active contractors at the time they cooked up the dishonest letter.

Morell denies the claim, but his name appears on a list of contractors provided to the committees by Robert Dugas, CIA deputy general counsel for litigation and investigations.

Makridis has since walked back his testimony to say that he might not have shown the letter to Haspel but only to her deputy, Bishop.

The fact is that Haspel is culpable when it comes to her proximity to anti-Trump dirty tricks, beginning with Russiagate under her mentor Brennan, CIA director under President Barack Obama.

As the CIA’s London station chief under Brennan, she presided over the birth of Russiagate, a flimsy tip-off from Australian Ambassador Alexander Downer claiming that a lowly Trump adviser had told him over a drink about a Russian effort to discredit Hillary Clinton.

The tip was used to justify the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into the Trump-Russian collusion hoax and special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe which crippled Trump’s presidency for two years.

Refused to comply

Haspel also refused to comply with GOP Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley’s repeated requests for records related to Russiagate in July and October 2020.

“She wouldn’t even schedule a phone call to explain why!” Johnson complained in a post on X Tuesday.

“Instead, she allowed these 51 corrupt officials to interfere in the 2020 election to a far greater extent than anything Russia could have hoped for.”

Then, at the end of Trump’s presidency, Haspel successfully blocked the release of a “binder” of evidence on Russiagate that had been ordered declassified by Trump.

Three strikes and you lose the benefit of the doubt.

Kash Patel, the former deputy director of national intelligence who authored a Russiagate memo Haspel refused to release, says “she always hated Trump.”

The CIA’s election interference in 2020 was aided and abetted by the FBI, which warned social media companies about an impending “hack and leak” operation by Russia referring to Hunter Biden in the weeks before the election, thus coercing them to censor The Post as soon as we published our laptop stories.

It was effectively a regime-change operation that deprived voters of the unvarnished truth about the alternative candidate for president in 2020.

Polls show that if Biden voters had known the truth, enough would have changed their votes to alter the outcome of the election.

Among the terrible consequences is that we were left with a president who has allowed at least 8 million illegal aliens into the country, including sexual predators and terrorists to rape and kill Americans, and the very agencies that were supposed to keep us safe were complicit.