[NYPOST] The State Department stonewalled Friday when confronted with the revelation that Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s outreach inspired the October 2020 letter by 51 former intelligence officials that cast doubt on The Post’s reporting on first son Hunter Biden’s laptop."That is not a State Department issue," front man Vedant Patel said when asked about ex-CIA acting director Michael Morell’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee — first reported late Thursday by The Post — that Blinken had "triggered" the now-notorious missive. "So I don’t have a comment for you on that."
When a news hound told Patel that "it’s not clear who else outside of the department we could ask" about Morell’s statement, the front man again said: "It is not a State Department issue, and I don’t really have a comment on this from the State Department."
Later in the briefing, a second journalist noted that Blinken "is the person that is currently serving as the secretary of state" before asking: "What do these claims from this former CIA official, as well as the letter from the House Judiciary Committee, mean in terms of the public trust in his position as secretary of state?"
"Again, this is not an issue that is an issue of the State Department," Patel repeated. "It has naught to do with US foreign policy or the work of this department so I don’t have a comment for you on this.
The exchange occurred shortly before CNN
...formerly the
Cable News Network, now who know what it might stand for...
and Fox News reported that Hunter Biden;s lawyers are preparing to meet last week with US attorney for Delaware David Weiss. On Wednesday, the IRS
...the Internal Revenue Service; that office of the United States government that collects taxes and persecutes the regime's political enemies...
agent supervising a long-running investigation of the first son for tax evasion and related crimes alleged a coverup in the case.
Biden cited the spooks’ letter at the second and final presidential debate against then-President Donald Trump
...The tack in the backside of the Democratic Party...
, alleging falsely that the information disclosed by The Post — and later broadly corroborated — was the result of a "Russian plant."
"There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant," Biden said at the time. "Five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except [Trump’s] good friend Rudy Giuliani."
The House Judiciary Committee Republicans’ official account tweeted out a clip of Biden’s comments from the debate Friday, with the message: "It was always a lie."
Republicans on Capitol Hill were enraged by Morell’s disclosure, led by Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who called the letter "a political operation" that "became the basis for suppressing the story and keeping it from the American people just days before the most important election that we have, the election for president of the United States."