The National Tragedy of Hunter Biden’s Laptop

July 26, 2022

How a country’s political corruption, institutional decay, and moral decline can be summed up in one sad family saga

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-national-tragedy-of-hunter-bidens-laptop

The recent release of more gigabytes of images and information from Hunter Biden’s laptop adds to the evidence that the all-out elite effort to bury the scandal before the 2020 election wasn’t just to protect Joe Biden, the preferred candidate of the American oligarchy. Sure, the 50-plus senior U.S. intelligence professionals who signed a letter claiming the laptop’s contents were “Russian disinformation” wanted to stop Donald Trump from sending angry tweets at them, but the laptop suggests there was much more at stake.

The U.S. spy chiefs who signed that infamously misleading letter—including John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and James Clapper—had directed America’s foreign intelligence services while Biden was vice president and before that chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They knew what his son Hunter was doing abroad, because it was their job to know what foreign services know about leading U.S. officials and their families, and how it might affect U.S. national security.

But none of these powerful and experienced men, presumably dedicated to defending the national interest, lifted a finger to stop Hunter Biden—and really, how could they? He was Joe Biden’s son, after all. And by doing nothing about him, the pillars of America’s intelligence community became the curators of the Biden family’s scandal.

Outside of the New York Post, Fox News, and the Daily Mail, the press has ignored the latest release, as it did with previous tranches of Hunter’s emails. Still, it seems the Biden administration isn’t taking any chances. The Treasury Department has rebuffed requests from Republican lawmakers to release suspicious activity reports (SARs) related to Hunter Biden that might shed more light on the foreign entanglements outlined in the laptop’s information and his father’s possible involvement.

But there’s something even more obvious going on here: Calling every report on the Biden family’s corruption “Russian disinformation” is the preemptive countermeasure U.S. intelligence services have deployed on the off chance Moscow really does release whatever it has on the president and his son—including more hard drives, tapes, or records of financial transactions. At this point, after all the claims American spies have made about “Russian disinformation” looking to undermine the Bidens, who’s to say what’s true or not?

And what choice did American security agencies have? They couldn’t stop Hunter, who had his father’s blessing. So they spied on both of them. CIA officer Eric Ciaramella was detailed to Biden’s vice presidential staff, where he was in charge of the Ukraine file—that is, he observed what the Bidens were doing in Kyiv and reported it back to Langley. When Trump started raising questions in July 2019, Ciaramella filed a phony whistleblower’s complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general and, using the media and Democratic Party operatives, set in motion impeachment proceedings against the president."