Secretary of State Antony Blinken may have lied under oath during Senate testimony in December 2020 when he denied exchanging emails with Hunter Biden during his time as then-President Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state.
A transcript of Blinken’s Dec. 22, 2020, testimony reviewed by the Washington Examiner on Sunday shows that Blinken claimed that he did not communicate via email with President Joe Biden’s son even though he had, according to emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive that were also looked at and verified by the Washington Examiner.
EX-CIA OFFICIAL HOSTED BLINKEN ON PODCAST SHORTLY BEFORE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP LETTER
Scott Wittmann, a senior professional staff member on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, asked Blinken in late 2020 how often he met with Hunter Biden during his time as Obama’s deputy secretary of state. Blinken replied that “to the best of my recollection, I had one meeting with Hunter Biden, which was a lunch in my office at the State Department.” He said he couldn’t remember any other meetings.
Wittmann asked if Blinken ever talked with Joe Biden’s son on the phone, and the future secretary of state replied, “Not that I recall.”
“Did you have any other means of correspondence with him — emails, texts?” Wittmann asked.
Blinken replied simply, “No.” But that answer is belied by the facts.
The interview was conducted by the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired at the time by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), and the Finance Committee, then chaired by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), as the duo investigated Hunter Biden and his business dealings in China and Ukraine.
Johnson said on Fox News on Sunday that Blinken came in for the voluntary transcribed interview in late 2020 “because he wanted to be secretary of state” and “now, because of more information that’s come out, we know that he lied boldface to Congress about never emailing Hunter Biden.”
Email correspondence between then-Deputy Secretary of State Blinken and Hunter Biden shows that meetings were set up by Blinken using his personal email address instead of his government address.
On May 22, 2015, Hunter Biden asked Blinken to get together to get his “advice on a couple of things,” in response to which Blinken set up a meeting using an AOL address instead of his state.gov address. At the time, Hunter Biden had been working for over a year on the board of the Ukrainian energy giant Burisma.
Wittmann had asked Blinken in December 2020 if he was aware at the time that Joe Biden’s son was serving on Burisma’s board, and Blinken replied, “To the best of my recollection, I was not.”
“Have a few minutes next week to grab a cup of coffee? I know you are impossibly busy, but would like to get your advice on a couple of things. Best, Hunter,” Hunter Biden wrote to Blinken in 2015.
Blinken responded, “Absolutely. I’m just about to land in Tokyo en route back D.C. from Burma. I’ll be in office from Tuesday on. Copying Linda in my office to find a good time. Look forward to seeing you. Tony.”
The emails were then forwarded in two different directions, with Hunter Biden sending the exchange to Devon Archer, a fellow member of the Burisma board, while Blinken forwarded the emails to Linda Landers, his then-personal assistant.
Landers, using her state.gov address, later reached out to Hunter Biden, telling him to “advise on best times for you next week and we’ll try to accommodate.”
The lunch between Blinken and Hunter Biden eventually took place on July 22, 2015. The meeting times were shared with Archer and Eric Schwerin, another Hunter Biden business partner.
Blinken told Senate investigators in December 2020 that all he remembered from the meeting was talking about the then-recent death of Hunter Biden’s brother, Beau, who died of brain cancer.
“The only thing I remember was talking about Beau, talking about the impact on the family. It’s kind of seared into my — into my memory even how raw that was,” Blinken testified.
After the July 2015 meeting, Blinken sent Hunter Biden an email that day saying it was “great to see” him and to “catch up.”
“You will love this,” Blinken added, “After you left, Marjorie, the wonderful african american woman who sits in my outer office (and used to be Colin Powell’s assistant) said to me: ‘He sure is pleasant on the eyes.’ Tell you wife.”
In July 2010, Hunter Biden had emailed Blinken’s wife, Evan Ryan, to ask for her husband’s personal email. Ryan is now the Cabinet secretary in the Biden White House.
“Can I get Toni’s non-govt email? I wanted to send him something. Thanks,” Hunter Biden wrote. In 2010, Blinken was serving as then-Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser.
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.”
Joseph Folio, the chief counsel for the Senate Homeland Security Committee, had told Blinken before the questioning began in December 2020 that “we want you to answer our questions in the most complete and truthful manner possible,” and Blinken said he understood. The chief counsel stressed that “you’re required to answer questions before Congress truthfully,” and the future secretary of state again said he understood.
“Specifically, 18 U.S.C. Section 1001 makes it a crime to make any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation in the course of a congressional investigation, so this statute applies to your statements here today,” Folio told Blinken. “Do you understand that?”
“I do,” Blinken said, adding that there was not any reason he would be unable to provide truthful answers during the interview.
“He said he did not email Hunter Biden, and now we have those emails,” Johnson told Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures. “We also know that his wife, using her private email address when she was an employee of the State Department, was basically a conduit between her husband and Hunter Biden as well. So, again, I think there’s so much more to uncover here.”
Former Obama acting CIA Director Mike Morell, who helped organize the infamous October 2020 letter from former national security officials saying the reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” testified to Congress last month that he thought Blinken wanted the baseless claims of Russian involvement made public.
Morell said an Oct. 17 call from Blinken is what led him to write the letter.
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The former CIA official also said in a recent transcribed interview that one of the reasons he helped put the letter together was to help now-President Joe Biden win the election against former President Donald Trump.
“It wasn’t my idea, didn’t ask for it, didn’t solicit it,” Blinken told Fox News of the laptop letter on Monday. But the secretary of state refused to say whether he believed the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, saying, “I’m not engaging in politics.”
