In an on-air moment that echoed Donald Trump’s televised call for Russia to help “find [Hillary Clinton’s] 30,000 emails that are missing,” the president appeared on Fox News to demand that his Justice Department use hacked computer files to investigate his opponent. On Tuesday morning, after a Fox & Friends host inquired about Trump appointing a special prosecutor to probe Joe and Hunter Biden just two weeks before November 3, he replied by essentially dictating marching orders for Attorney General William Barr. “We’ve got to get the attorney general to act. He’s got to act, and he’s got to act fast. He’s got to appoint somebody,” the president said, before accusing the Biden family of being wrapped up in a “major corruption” scandal that the American people must know “about before the election.”
The parallels between Tuesday’s comments and Trump’s public request for Russia to conduct opposition research against the Clinton campaign in 2016 do not stop there: The FBI is also currently looking into whether the New York Post’s release of emails allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden is tied to a disinformation operation being carried out by a nefarious foreign entity, according to a congressional source who spoke to the Daily Beast. In December the FBI reportedly seized control of the Biden son’s laptop at the heart of the controversy—but not before a computer repair shop owner purportedly obtained the computer, made a copy of its hard drive, and passed said hard drive off to Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, which is how the contents ended up in the Post’s newsroom.
This news comes after FBI director Christopher Wray warned Congress last month about the “very active efforts by the Russians to influence our election” by way of sowing “divisiveness and discord,” with the primary goal of denigrating “Vice President Biden in what the Russians see as kind of an anti-Russian establishment.” Wray said Russia is using social and state media and online journals in its disinformation campaign.
John Ratcliffe, the president’s director of national intelligence, attempted to shoot down all concerns regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop and foreign election meddling during a Monday appearance on Fox, telling the network, “The intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports that.” An FBI spokesperson has declined to weigh in on the matter, maintaining the agency’s “standard practice of neither confirming nor denying the existence of our investigations.”
Immediately after demanding that his attorney general unleash the DOJ’s prosecutorial powers on his surging opponent just two weeks away from an already-fraught election, the president—who, of course, was impeached for trying to get Ukraine to dig up dirt on the Bidens—appeared to realize the implication of his on-air request and pivoted to signaling that his campaign is supremely confident and not at all desperate. “We’re going to win the election. We’re doing very well,” he told Fox News. “If you look at all of what’s happening and all of the people that come in and don’t come in, you take a look all around the country, and with Texas early voting, those are our votes too, and we’re doing well in Texas.” But after chiming in with a couple more claims about his campaign not just “doing great” but doing so “all over” America, he could not help himself. “But forget that,” Trump said, opting to instead close by calling on Barr to give him one final Hail Mary heave before the clock expires. “This has to be done early, so the attorney general has to act.”
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