A new Republican president after the 2024 election should scrub security clearances from the 51 former intelligence officers who signed off on a letter in October 2020 claiming that emails from Hunter Biden's laptop were Russian disinformation, former National Security Council chief of staff Fred Fleitz said on Newsmax Saturday.
"In this letter, intelligence officers were misusing their professional credentials to fool the American people about a national security threat when they were really meddling in politics," Fleitz, the vice chairman of the America First Policy Institute Center for American Security, commented to Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "There has to be a professional price for betraying your country by misusing your intelligence credentials."
Former acting CIA director Mike Morell testified last month that he organized 50 of his colleagues in the intelligence community to sign the letter, and said that campaign official Antony Blinken, now the Secretary of State, was the person who reached out to him.
Blinken has denied the claims.
Fleitz pointed out that the Biden campaign organized the letter to try to make it look as if the intelligence officers who signed it were people who investigate Russia and got "upset and got together to do this letter."
But instead, he said, it was Morell, who was designated by the Biden campaign to write the letter and then round up Russia analysts.
"Most of them refused because they saw the letter as too political," said Fleitz.
He added that the matter is "very serious" and said there must be professional standards where former intelligence officers are concerned.
"I am really irritated that the 51 signers of this letter, none of them have apologized," said Fleitz. "None of them have expressed remorse and most of them still hold high-level security clearances, which is allowing them to earn a great deal of money from defense firms, [including] firms that work with the CIA."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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