House Judiciary, Intel threaten to subpoena CIA over ‘spies who lie’ note

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) are threatening to subpoena CIA records related to a letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials that falsely claimed emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop were likely Russian disinformation.

“While the CIA made a minimal production of documents on May 9, 2023, the CIA admitted that it did not perform a full and complete search of all agency records prior to that production,” Jordan and Turner wrote in a letter to CIA Director William Burns.

“We fully expect the CIA to produce all responsive documents to the Committees’ March 21, 2023, request in unredacted form no later than May 30, 2023. If the CIA does not produce all responsive documents, the Committees may resort to compulsory process.”

The chairmen said the records pertain to “fundamental concerns about the role of the CIA in helping to falsely discredit allegations about the Biden family in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election.”

The intelligence officials’ letter, leaked to Politico in October 2020, sought to discredit The Post’s reporting on information from the first son’s abandoned laptop that showed Hunter involving his father in his lucrative overseas business affairs.

The officials said the leaked emails possessed “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

The Judiciary Committee previously revealed that former CIA acting director Mike Morell organized the letter after speaking with then-Biden campaign adviser Antony Blinken, now secretary of state.

David Cariens, a former CIA analyst, said in a written statement to Congress that another CIA employee solicited a signature for the letter at Morell’s behest on October 19, 2020, while Cariens was speaking with the agency’s Prepublication Classification Review Board about his forthcoming memoir.

“When the person in charge of reviewing the book called to say it was approved with no changes, I was told about the draft letter. The person asked me if I would be willing to sign,” Cariens said. 

“After hearing the letter’s contents, and the qualifiers in it such as, ‘We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement …’ I agreed to sign.”

Cariens later got his wife, also a CIA officer, to sign the letter too.

Morell told the PCRB in an email earlier the same day that the letter was a “rush job, as it needs to get out as soon as possible,” and the agency cleared it for publication just hours later.

Three days later, Joe Biden cited the letter during his second and final 2020 presidential debate with Donald Trump to dispute allegations that his family was cashing in on influence-peddling abroad.

The Republican committee leaders have informed the CIA director that agency staff must redouble their efforts to produce all documents and communications related to coordination on the letter’s signatories as well as the prepublication review of Cariens’ memoir.