Trump pulls security clearances over Hunter Biden laptop letter

Gregory Korte, Bloomberg News on Jan 20, 2025

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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump revoked the security clearances of 50 former U.S. intelligence officials who had cast doubt on conservative attacks on former President Joe Biden’s son, delivering on a campaign promise to exact retribution against what he sees as a “deep state” conspiracy against him.

The former intelligence officials signed on to a letter in the final days of the 2020 presidential election saying the distribution of emails obtained from an abandoned laptop belonging to Hunter Biden “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

The emails, which purported to show a corruption scheme by members of Biden’s family involving ties to Ukrainian and Chinese businesses, were published by a conservative tabloid and helped to spur a criminal investigation into the former president’s son. Biden granted him a blanket pardon in December.

The intelligence officials didn’t directly defend the younger Biden, but said Americans needed to be aware of possible Russian influence in the election.

“We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case,” the letter said.

The letter’s signatories — including former Central Intelligence Agency directors Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, John Brennan, John McLaughlin and Michael Morell — have been targets of Republican attacks ever since.

“Federal policymakers must be able to rely on analysis conducted by the Intelligence Community and be confident that it is accurate, crafted with professionalism, and free from politically motivated engineering to affect political outcomes in the United States,” Trump said in the executive order. “The signatories willfully weaponized the gravitas of the Intelligence Community to manipulate the political process and undermine our democratic institutions.”

Those calls have been echoed by Trump allies on Capitol Hill, including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona.

Access to classified information is controlled by the president in his role as commander-in-chief, giving Trump nearly absolute power to keep national secrets and determine who has access to them. Officials can appeal a revocation of their security clearance to a high-level panel, but that process is dictated by an executive order that Trump can revoke, change or ignore.

All of the letter-signers were former officials, so Trump can’t fire them. But security clearances are invaluable for onetime intelligence officials, who can leverage them for jobs at defense contractors, security firms and national security think tanks.

Others who signed the letter include former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former National Counterterrorism Center Director Nicholas Rasmussen, and former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Mike Vickers. The intelligence officials included many who served under both Democratic and Republican administrations, in career and presidentially appointed positions.

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