New York Times opinionista Michelle Goldberg complained bitterly this week that she had trekked all the way to Wilmington, Del., at the brutal hour of 7 a.m. to watch the Dominion-vs.-Fox News defamation trial, only for the parties to settle before the show began.
“Deeply disappointing” was her reaction.
But here’s a thought.
All the disappointed media operatives huddled at Wilmington’s Superior Court, like Goldberg and CNN’s crestfallen Oliver Darcy, could make themselves useful in the president’s hometown. They could investigate a story that is bigger than Watergate but which they have shamefully avoided or downplayed for almost three years: Biden family corruption and the associated coverup, including by the FBI and Big Tech.
After all, the House Oversight and Judiciary committees have given them plenty of ammo.
Take the bombshell this week from former acting CIA Director Mike Morell.
In sworn interview, Morell has admitted it was Joe Biden’s presidential campaign that prompted the infamous letter in which Morell and 50 fellow former intelligence officials falsely claimed that material from Hunter Biden’s laptop published by The Post before the 2020 election was Russian disinformation, sources in the House Judiciary Committee have confirmed.
Tony Blinken, now secretary of state, was the Biden-campaign foreign-affairs adviser who urgently phoned Morell in October 2020 to suggest the laptop was a Russian plant.
“We can prove that the entire purpose of this letter at the outset was to influence a presidential election with some of the most senior people who have ever been in our intelligence community using the imprimatur of their security clearances to pave the way for Joe Biden’s presidency,” Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz told Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast this week.
Morell, now a CBS contributor (Hey, “60 Minutes,” scoop in your backyard!), was deposed last week by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
He admitted that, after the call from Blinken, he solicited signatures for his letter from 50 other former intelligence officials.
The letter, published in Politico on Oct. 19, 2020, two weeks before the election, falsely claimed that emails from the laptop published by The Post had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation . . . Moscow [will] pull out the stops to do anything possible to help Trump win and/or to weaken Biden should he win.”
The letter was successfully used by candidate Biden three days later, in his final debate against Donald Trump, to deflect accusations about Joe’s involvement in his family’s international influence-peddling operation, which had garnered millions of dollars from China and Ukraine while he was vice president.
“Morell wanted to be Joe Biden’s CIA director, got a phone call from Tony Blinken, who was representing the Biden campaign, saying ‘Gee, Mike, doesn’t this Hunter Biden laptop look like Russian disinformation?’ ” said Gaetz.
“Morell testifies that then triggers him to be the ringleader of an enterprise to go to others and to put together a letter for the specific purpose of use by Joe Biden in the presidential debate . . . We can prove that and much more.”
The committee has also interviewed a former adviser to ex-CIA director John Brennan and Obama White House alum Nick Shapiro, who cooked up the letter with Morell and delivered it to Politico.
2020 elex interference
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan will release a report in the next couple of weeks tracing the origins of the “Dirty 51” letter, showing it constituted corrupt interference in the 2020 presidential election.
Meanwhile, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer this week revealed that newly accessed financial records from the Treasury Department show “the Biden family enterprise is centered on Joe Biden’s political career and connections, and it has generated an exorbitant amount of money for the Biden family.”
Comer’s team has identified “six additional members of Biden’s family who may have benefited from the Biden family’s businesses that we are investigating, bringing the total number of those involved or benefiting to nine.”
Then there is the IRS whistleblower.
It was only last week that the president, 80, conspicuously took his 53-year-old son with him on Air Force One on a state visit to Ireland, despite the fact that Hunter is under criminal investigation over his overseas business dealings.
He must be feeling pretty cocky that the probe, now in its fifth year, by Delaware US Attorney David Weiss into tax evasion, money laundering, and other allegations won’t result in indictments for Hunter.
A clue to the cockiness came Wednesday when a career IRS criminal supervisory special agent who has been investigating Hunter Biden for three years came forward with claims that federal prosecutors are preventing tax charges from being brought against the president’s son.
The IRS whistleblower’s attorney, Mark Lytle, alleged in a letter to Jordan and eight other House and Senate committee chairs that “preferential treatment and politics [are] improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law-enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected.”
What’s more, the whistleblower has evidence that will “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee” — who is Attorney General Merrick Garland, according to congressional sources.
In sworn testimony to a Senate oversight hearing on March 1, Garland was grilled about the Delaware investigation into Hunter by Sen. Chuck Grassley. Garland was asked whether Weiss had “sought permission of another US Attorney’s Office, such as in the District of Columbia or California [both places where Hunter has lived], to bring [tax-related] charges? If so, was it denied?”
Garland replied that he did not know but went on to insist that Weiss has been “advised that he has full authority . . . to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it necessary . . . He is not to be denied anything that he needs, and if that were to happen, it should ascend through the department’s ranks, and I have not heard anything from that office to suggest that they are not able to do everything that the US attorney wants to do.”
Grassley pointed out that “without special-counsel authority, [Weiss] could need permission of another US attorney . . . to bring charges outside the district of Delaware.”
Garland replied: “I promised to leave the matter of Hunter Biden in the hands of the US attorney in the district of Delaware . . . I pledged not to interfere with that investigation, and I have carried through on that pledge.”
However, as Grassley told him, if Weiss “must seek permission from a Biden-appointed US attorney [in California or DC] to bring charges, then the Hunter Biden criminal investigation isn’t insulated from political interference, as you’ve publicly proclaimed.”
Watch this space. But don’t expect the same from The New York Times or CNN.
