Ex-Spy Who Discredited Hunter Biden’s Emails Used WaPo Column to Boost Joe Biden
24th April 2023
As a contributing columnist for the Post, former CIA deputy director Michael Morell published numerous articles before the election attacking former president Donald Trump and pushing various claims about Russian disinformation. Morell called on Trump’s intelligence chief, John Ratcliffe, to resign in his final Post column on Oct. 12, 2020, a week before he concocted the Hunter letter. In an Oct. 11 piece, Morell said Trump’s financial debt raises national security concerns. In August 2020, Morell made the disputed claim that “the Russians infiltrated Trump’s 2016 campaign.”
Morell was carrying water for the Biden campaign behind the scenes, too. The former intel official admitted in a recent congressional interview that he was behind an Oct. 19, 2020, letter that cast the release of Hunter Biden’s laptop days earlier as a probable Russian disinformation campaign. Morell said he organized the letter, which was signed by 50 other former intelligence officials, after a conversation with Biden adviser Tony Blinken, now the secretary of state. Morell told lawmakers he undertook the initiative to help Biden “win the election.”
The Post has penalized columnists for campaign connections more tenuous than Morell’s. In 2011, conservative columnist George Will came under scrutiny after his wife began advising Rick Perry’s presidential campaign. The Post’s ombudsman found that Will did not use his column to improperly boost his wife’s client, but said the columnist should have disclosed his wife’s work. The ombudsman wrote that “readers need to be able to judge for themselves if any conflict of interest could bias a journalist, even an opinion columnist.”
“A cynic would say none of this is surprising,” Tim Graham, the Media Research Center’s director of media analysis, said of Morell and the Post. He noted that the Post describes Morell’s CIA service in the George W. Bush administration to make Morell look bipartisan. “It’s that ‘career official’ spin that helps them present people like Morell as less partisan.”