Hunter Biden investigation: Trump team says Morell revelations make FEC complaint ‘very easy’

A lawyer for former President Donald Trump said testimony from an ex-CIA official makes it “very easy for us” to prove their recent Federal Election Commission allegations about President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign’s “involvement” in “soliciting” the Hunter Biden laptop letter.

Trump lawyer Timothy Parlatore filed an FEC complaint in March against the Biden campaign and against the roughly 50 former intelligence officials who signed the now-infamous October 2020 letter baselessly alleging Russian involvement.

LAPTOP LETTER ORGANIZER SAID BLINKEN WANTED RUSSIAN INVOLVEMENT CLAIMS MADE PUBLIC

The Trump lawyer argued in the FEC complaint that the Biden campaign’s goal was to make sure the laptop and stories stemming from it were “thoroughly discredited in the eyes” of U.S. voters, and “the best way to achieve that goal, and the path chosen by the Biden Campaign, was to recruit experts from the Intelligence Community to take advantage of the window of opportunity created by Facebook and Twitter and to further suppress and discredit the discovery of the laptop emails.”

Parlatore told the Washington Examiner on Monday that he believed former acting CIA Director Michael Morell’s recent bombshell testimony had quashed any potential defense by the Biden campaign that they hadn’t been involved with the laptop letter’s creation.

In 2021, the FEC shot down a complaint filed by the Republican National Committee against Twitter, finding there was “no reason to believe” that Twitter violated the law “by making corporate in-kind contributions” to the Biden campaign.

Parlatore said the RNC complaint failed in part because of the difficulty with proving “a connection between that contribution and the campaign itself” at the time but said that wasn’t a problem with the new Trump complaint.

“And so, really to us, that was always the link that we believed was there, we believed that through investigation we’d be able to find proof it was there, but our concern always was that the defense to that is that ‘the campaign knew nothing about it, they had no communication with these people, and they just did it on their own,’ and then we would’ve had to go through phone records and emails and everything to prove that that was a falsehood,” Parlatore said. “But largely, Morell’s testimony makes that very easy for us to just kind of skip those steps because now it’s admitted.”

Morell, who testified to Congress earlier this month about the laptop letter, said he thought now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken wanted the baseless claims of Russian involvement in the saga made public.

The former Obama acting CIA director told House investigators that, before his Oct. 17 phone call with Blinken, he had no intention to write the Oct. 19 Hunter Biden laptop letter and testified “yes” and “absolutely” when asked if the call with Blinken, who was then a top adviser for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, was what “triggered that intent in you.”

Morell also said in a recent transcribed interview with congressional investigators that it was his “guess” that Blinken called him to talk about the Hunter Biden laptop because the future secretary of state wanted it “out” in public that “the Russians were somehow involved” in the saga.

He also testified that one of the two reasons he helped put the letter together was to help now-President Joe Biden “because I wanted him to win the election” against former President Donald Trump.

Parlatore alleged to the FEC, which was reported by Just the News, that there was “surreptitious involvement of the Biden Campaign in soliciting or organizing the drafters of the letter in a clear violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act.”

Parlatore told the Washington Examiner that “in this case, they provided a product, an intelligence analysis report, that would’ve been something that, given the signatories on it, would’ve been a very expensive product.”

Roy Luckett, an acting assistant general counsel at the FEC, sent Parlatore a letter last month that “acknowledges receipt” of the Trump allegations, telling him that “you will be notified as soon as the FEC takes final action” on the complaint.

“Everything that was in our complaint is accurate and now being even more borne out through this testimony. … This is more just supporting proof for the allegations that we already outlined,” Parlatore told the Washington Examiner of Morell’s testimony, arguing that the ex-CIA director’s revelations are now “just filling the gaps” on what was already known.

The October 2020 laptop letter contributed to the narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop stories were nothing but a product of Russian disinformation — a storyline happily seized upon by Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and spread by some of the laptop letter signers. Hunter Biden himself later tried to claim falsely that the intelligence community concluded his laptop was some sort of Kremlin smear campaign.

Morell’s bombshell revelations came in a letter sent to Blinken on Thursday by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Jordan and Turner wrote that the same day of the Blinken-Morell call, Blinken “also emailed Morell an article” published in USA Today the same day that alleged the FBI was examining whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a “disinformation campaign.”

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Although the October 2020 letter hedged a bit at various times, it did repeatedly contend there was Russian involvement with the laptop stories, arguing that “if we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election” and expressing “our view that the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue.”

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 a 100% certainty that Robert Hunter Biden was the only person responsible for the activity on this hard drive and all of its stored data” and that “the hard drive is authentic.”