Trump deprives security permits from former officials to Hunter Biden

Trump deprives security permits from former officials to Hunter Biden

President Donald Trump has a Setting arrangement signed, which revoked the security approval of 51 former secret service employees who signed a letter in 2020. This letter argued that the emails from a laptop that belongs to Hunter biden showed "all classic features of a Russian information operation".

effects of the arrangement on the former employees

Many of the 51 former officials have been retired for a long time and no longer have active security releases. This means that the measure may only have limited practical effects on your careers. Nevertheless, the order indicates that Trump plans to put the threats he spoke against national security and intelligence officers, whom he sees as his enemy.

The background of the dispute around the laptop

"You should be persecuted because of what you did," said Trump about the 51 former officials who signed the letter during an election campaign event in June.

Among the signatories of the letter are numerous high-ranking former employees from the governments of Obama and Bush, including the former director of national secret services, Jim Clapper, the former CIA director, John Brennan, as well as the former commissioner CIA directors John McLaughlin and Michael Morell.

political implications and reactions

In the four years since the letter was written, his authors have become a central goal for Republican legislators and Trumps allies. Republican MPs in the Congress targeted the origins of the letter and invited several signatories to confidential statements and published several reports on this topic.

The controversy around the laptop

The laptop itself quickly became a point of dispute in the party conflicts. He contained sexually explicit videos of the son of the former president with women and photos that show him in drug use in hotel rooms, many of which have now been published by right -wing extremist media.

When the laptop's existence and its content became public through reports of the New York Post, many mainstream media questioned its authenticity. Some social media have limited users to share the postage of the post office, as there were concerns that it could possibly be foreign influence. This skeptical attitude was partially supported by the concerns in the letter, which ultimately did not confirm.

results of the investigation

"We want to emphasize that we do not know whether the emails ... are real or not and that we have no evidence of Russian participation-only that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government has played an important role in this case", the former civil servants 2020. "If we are right, Russia tries to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we are firmly convoked that the Americans are whose must be aware. ”

Since then, the laptop and its content have been recognized as legitimate. He played a role in the criminal prosecution of Hunter bidges for drug offenses, whereby special investigators David Weiss described questions about the authenticity of the laptop as "conspiracy theory".

interpretation of the Republicans and defense of the former officials

Republicans argue that the letter is evidence of a conspiracy of the deep state between the CIA and the bideau election campaign to cover up other materials on the laptop that they consider to be evidence of inappropriate business of the bid family. A Republican congress examination has documented that there was a coordination between the former officials who wrote and signed the letter and signed the bida election campaign. Joe Biden, then presidential candidate, quoted the letter during a presidential debate.

But the claim that materials on the laptop prove foreign corruption have not withstood the review, although the authenticity of the device and some of the compromising materials that document the drug and sexual behavior of the younger bidges have been confirmed by several press organizations.

All 51 signatories were private individuals at the time of the letter, although some had contracts with the CIA at that time. According to the later republican investigation, most of these people no longer had these contracts or no longer held any safety approval, such as Clapper, who currently has no active safety approval.

lawyer expresses concerns

"It would be against decades of national security standards to suspend the security releases of people who have done nothing more than to exercise their protected rights of the first change as private individuals," said Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents several signatories. "Such a measure would be unprecedented and not justified, especially in view of the fact that many of the signatories have politically neutrally devoted their entire career to the protection of the American people."

controversy about the data of the laptop

The lawyers of Hunter Biden claimed that the files are submitted a lawsuit against a computer repair owner that has made the materials public.

biden handed over the laptop in April 2019 in a repair workshop in Delaware. His lawyers stated in a court document that the workshop owner admitted in his memoirs that he "started to access sensitive, private materials in the data" and during the five months before the FBI confiscated the device, possibly still manipulated with the data.