During a recent interview, former Attorney General William Barr conceded that he knew that a letter from former U.S. intelligence officials claiming that news of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation “was baseless” and that he believed Joe Biden fully understood that it “was a lie.”
“Biden was citing published claims by intelligence officials that Barr now says he knew to be inaccurate at the time those claims were made. But, in contrast to his earlier actions regarding Trump’s tweets, Barr chose to stay silent on Biden’s claims,” Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke noted in a March 23 op-ed for The Epoch Times.
“In doing so, Barr decisively interfered in the election through his inaction.”
On May 18, 2020, it was Barr who appointed special counsel John Durham to investigate the origins of the Russiagate hoax. Barr said at the time the investigation wasn’t focused on either former President Barack Obama or former Joe Biden, stating that “I don’t expect Mr. Durham’s work will lead to a criminal investigation of either man.”
“The sharply differing stances that Barr took in those months preceding the 2020 presidential election are puzzlingly contradictory,” Carlson and Mahncke wrote.. “Barr apparently felt that it was necessary to make sure that U.S. citizens were aware that Biden wasn’t under investigation as a part of Durham’s probe, but he didn’t feel it was important to counter a false narrative from former intelligence officials, including four CIA directors, that Barr knew to be untrue.”
The differing treatment of Biden and Trump by Barr “leaves many questions unanswered. Although many in the media, along with Biden’s current spokeswoman Jen Psaki, have claimed that Hunter is a private citizen who wasn’t running for office, Hunter’s laptop directly implicated Joe Biden in a number of dubious foreign dealings. Biden repeatedly lied about these matters while on the campaign trail,” Carlson and Mahncke wrote.
The op-ed cited an instance where Joe Biden had personally met with Hunter’s Ukrainian business partner “only a few months before that same partner demanded that Hunter end the investigations into Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm that was paying Hunter $1 million per year. On the campaign trail, Biden declared that he had never talked to his son about his foreign business dealings.”
Not only did Barr choose to remain silent about Hunter’s laptop, but he had also, in fact, “instructed prosecutors and senior colleagues to prevent word of investigations into Hunter Biden from becoming public and keep the Justice Department out of campaign politics,” according to sources cited by The Wall Street Journal.
Carlson and Mahncke added: “As we now know, Hunter’s emails and laptop are real. Indeed, shortly after the election, Hunter Biden suddenly released a statement acknowledging that he was under federal investigation.”
Related: Hunter laptop called more evidence U.S. intelligence community interfered in 2020 election, March 27, 2022
A poll by Media Research showed that 45 percent of Biden voters were unaware of the allegations against Hunter and Joe Biden and that 16 percent – well over the margin of victory – wouldn’t have voted for him had they known the truth.
In 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign accused Russia of trying to help elect Trump. Then-CIA Director John Brennan played an important role in advancing the bogus narrative.
“In an eerie parallel to those events, the Biden campaign, again with the help of Brennan and other intelligence officials, falsely accused Russia of trying to help elect Trump in 2020,” Carlson and Mahncke noted.
In his book, “One Damn Thing After Another”, Barr argues that Trump’s claims about Biden “required Barr to insert himself because he didn’t want a repeat of the Russia collusion claims that plagued the 2016 election; that same argument, however, should have required Barr to speak out on Biden’s debate claims that Hunter’s laptop was a Russian plot,” Carlson and Mahncke wrote.
“If Barr was truly concerned about a potential repeat of the 2016 election, it would have been incumbent on him to step forward publicly as soon as Biden made his false accusations against Russia, particularly given the involvement of Brennan, who was himself entangled in the 2016 election interference.”
About . . . . Intelligence . . . . Membership
