Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Really? 'Solid evidence'? Appears not. If Tucker can say 'just asking the question' then 51 private citizens can say that 'they were merely stating an opinion'.

Like most hyper-partisan blind RW ideologues you believe what you NEED to believe.

Trump lost fair and square, bigly, and he's going to be indicted for inciting his boneheaded followers to insurrection.

Democrats argue that the Republicans are wasting time and resources investigating the 51 former intelligence officials, who were private citizens at the time of the letter and wanted Mr. Biden to be victorious in the campaign. The former intelligence officials stress that their letter stated that they had no evidence of a Russian disinformation campaign, and that they were merely stating an opinion.

Several said they did not regret their actions.

“The Congress is wasting its time and our money by investigating the First Amendment rights of private citizens,” Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents seven signers of the letter, said in an interview.

Democrats also argue that the letter must be understood in its proper context. Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani — whose credibility had become shaky — had been shopping around the contents of the laptop to different news media outlets, not long after a top Trump intelligence official warned that Russia was seeking to “primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden” and that “some Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump’s candidacy.”

The Democrats also note that Facebook and Twitter decided to censor or limit the sharing of a New York Post article about the laptop’s contents five days before the letter’s publication in Politico.

In a statement submitted to Congress on behalf of Michael J. Morell, the former deputy director of the C.I.A., Mr. Morell said he “organized and helped draft” the statement “because of his honest and well-founded belief that Russia was involved in some way in the emergence of the Hunter Biden emails for the purpose of interfering in the 2020 presidential election.”

“The public statement was careful not to claim that the New York Post story was disinformation or that the information it reported was untrue, and Mr. Morell was careful to confirm his suspicions with public source information and the views of multiple experts in the field,” the statement said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/us/politics/republicans-hunter-biden-laptop.html