SSecretary of State Antony Blinken may have lied under oath during Senate testimony in December 2020 when he denied exchanging emails with Hunter Biden during his time as then-President Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state.
A transcript of Blinken’s Dec. 22, 2020, testimony reviewed Sunday by the Washington Examiner shows that Blinken claimed she did not communicate by email with President Joe Biden’s son even though she had, according to emails on the record Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive that was also examined and verified by the Washington Examiner.
EX-CIA OFFICIAL HOST BLINKEN ON PODCAST JUST BEFORE HUNTER BIDEN’S LAPTOP LETTER
Scott Wittmann, a senior staff member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, asked Blinken in late 2020 how often he met with Hunter Biden during his time as Obama’s deputy secretary of state. Blinken responded that “to the best of my recollection, I had a meeting with Hunter Biden, which was a lunch in my office at the State Department.” He said he did not remember any other meeting.
Wittmann asked if Blinken ever spoke on the phone with Joe Biden’s son, and the future secretary of state replied, “I don’t remember.”
“Did you have any other means of correspondence with him—emails, text messages?” Wittmann asked.
Blinken simply replied, “No.” But this answer is belied by the facts.
The interview was conducted by the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired at the time by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), and the Committee on Finance, then chaired by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), as a duo . investigated Hunter Biden and his dealings in China and Ukraine.
Johnson told Fox News on Sunday that Blinken came to the voluntary transcribed interview in late 2020 “because he wanted to be secretary of state” and “now, because of more information that has come out, we know that he lied in bold in the Congress on never emailing Hunter Biden.
Email correspondence between then-Deputy Secretary of State Blinken and Hunter Biden shows that Blinken set up meetings using his personal email address instead of his government address.
On May 22, 2015, Hunter Biden asked Blinken to meet to get his “advice on a couple of things”, in response to which Blinken set up a meeting using an AOL address instead of his state.gov. At the time, Hunter Biden had been serving on the board of Ukrainian energy giant Burisma for more than a year.
Wittmann had asked Blinken in December 2020 if he was aware at the time that Joe Biden’s son was on Burisma’s board of directors, and Blinken replied, “To the best of my recollection, I wasn’t.”
“Do you have a few minutes next week for a cup of coffee? I know you’re very busy, but I’d like your advice on a couple of things. Better, Hunter,” Hunter Biden wrote to Blinken in 2015.
Blinken replied: “Absolutely. I’m about to land in Tokyo on my way back to DC from Burma. I’ll be in charge starting Tuesday. Copying Linda into my office for fun. Hope to see’ t. Tony.”
The emails were then forwarded in two different directions, with Hunter Biden sending the exchange to Devon Archer, a Burisma board member, while Blinken forwarded the emails to Linda Landers, his then personal assistant.
Landers, using his state.gov address, later contacted Hunter Biden, telling him to “advise the best times for next week and we’ll try to accommodate.”
The lunch between Blinken and Hunter Biden finally took place on July 22, 2015. Meeting times were shared with Archer and Eric Schwerin, another business associate of Hunter Biden.
Blinken told Senate investigators in December 2020 that all he remembered from the meeting was discussing the recent death of Hunter Biden’s brother Beau, who died of brain cancer.
“All I remember was talking about Beau, talking about the impact on the family. It’s kind of etched in my … in my memory, even how raw it was,” Blinken testified.
After the July 2015 meeting, Blinken emailed Hunter Biden that day saying it was “nice to see him” and “catch up.”
“You’re going to love this,” Blinken added. pleasing to the eyes “Call yourself a woman.”
In July 2010, Hunter Biden had emailed Blinken’s wife, Evan Ryan, asking for her husband’s personal email. Ryan is now the Cabinet Secretary in the Biden White House.
“Can I get Toni’s non-government email? I wanted to send her something. Thanks,” Hunter Biden wrote. In 2010, Blinken served as national security adviser to then-Vice President Joe Biden.
Konstantinos “Gus” Dimitrelos, a cyber forensics expert and former Secret Service agent, conducted an examination of the laptop for the Washington Examiner last year, concluding that “there is 100% certainty that Robert Hunter Biden was solely responsible for the activity. on this hard drive and all its stored data” and that “the hard drive is authentic”.
Joseph Folio, the chief counsel for the Senate Homeland Security Committee, had told Blinken before questioning began in December 2020 that “we want you to answer our questions as fully and truthfully as possible,” and Blinken he said he understood. The chief adviser stressed that “you have to answer the questions before Congress truthfully,” and the future secretary of state reiterated that he understood.
“Specifically, 18 USC Section 1001 makes it a crime to make any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation in the course of a congressional investigation, so that statute applies to your statements here today Folio told Blinken. “You understand it?”
“Yes,” Blinken said, adding that there was no reason he couldn’t give truthful answers during the interview.
“He said he didn’t email Hunter Biden, and now we have those emails,” Johnson told Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures. “We also know that his wife, using her private email address when she was a State Department employee, was also basically a conduit between her husband and Hunter Biden. So, again, I think there’s a lot more to discover here.”
Former Obama acting CIA director Mike Morell, who helped orchestrate the infamous October 2020 letter from former national security officials that said reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop had “ all the classic labels of a Russian intelligence operation,” he told Congress last month that he believed Blinken wanted the unsubstantiated claims of Russian involvement to be made public.
Morell said an Oct. 17 call from Blinken is what prompted him to write the letter.
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The former CIA official also said in a recent transcribed interview that one of the reasons he helped draft the letter was to help now-President Joe Biden win the election against former President Donald Trump.
“It wasn’t my idea, I didn’t ask for it, I didn’t request it,” Blinken told Fox News on Monday about the laptop letter. But the secretary of state declined to say whether he believed Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, saying, “I’m not involved in politics.”