Intelligence officials believe the Republican-led congressional investigation into the business activities of Hunter Biden is being spurred by Russian disinformation, according to one journalist.
Julian Barnes, a national security reporter for the New York Times, said on Tuesday that the Kremlin could be working to “deflect” from its information efforts this election cycle as they did in 2016.
“A lot of intelligence officials believe the Burisma accusations that are being revived are once again trying to obscure what Russia is up to,” he told MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace.
He was referring to Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company that employed Hunter Biden on its board at the same time his father, Joe Biden, was serving as vice president and leading the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy. Republicans, led by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, say they are investigating whether there was any corruption. Democrats claim the investigation is a partisan scheme reliant on Russia information to damage the elder Biden’s election prospects as he is running for president.
“A lot of intelligence officials believe the Burisma accusations that are being revived are once again trying to obscure what Russia is up to… The only remedy that really works is resilience of a population that knows what’s going on” – @julianbarnes w/ @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/gU1Uo7gFNz
— Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) July 21, 2020
Democratic leaders demanded this week an all-members FBI briefing over their concern that Congress is being targeted as part of a foreign interference campaign to disrupt the presidential election. The bureau warned lawmakers in March that a source of information for the Burisma investigation, former Ukrainian official Andrii Telizhenko, could be spreading Russian disinformation, as Barnes and his colleagues have reported.
The publicly released letter from the Democrats, which asks FBI Director Christopher Wray for a defensive briefing prior to the August recess, does not mention Burisma or any other specifics, but Barnes speculated it was meant, in part, to alert the public without the partisan filter that accompanies secret information.
“It’s important for voters not to be affected by the disinformation campaign, and that requires talking about it, putting some of this stuff out in the open, realizing when it is being done to the American public,” he said.
