CNN
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President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday revoking the security clearances of 51 former intelligence officials who signed a 2020 letter saying emails from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden bore “all the classic hallmarks of a Russian information operation” and that of his former national. security advisor John Bolton.
Many of the former officials are long retired and no longer hold active clearances – meaning the move could have limited practical impact on their careers – but the order nevertheless suggests that Trump intends to act on the threats he has made to penalize national security and intelligence professionals who he considers to be his enemies.
“They should be prosecuted for what they did,” Trump said of the 51 former officials who signed the letter, at a campaign rally in June.
The executive order also directs the director of national intelligence to submit a report to the White House documenting “any additional inappropriate activity that occurs within the intelligence community, by any person engaged by the intelligence community, or by any person holding a security clearance » linked to the letter, as well as any recommended disciplinary action, within 90 days.
The letter was signed by a number of former officials from the Obama and Bush administrations, including former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former Acting CIA Directors John McLaughlin and Michael Morell.
In the four years since the letter was written, its authors have become a key target for Republican lawmakers and Trump allies. Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill have made the letter’s origins a focal point, calling on a number of signatories to testify behind closed doors and releasing several reports on the subject.
Bolton, meanwhile, drew Trump’s ire for a memoir about his time on the National Security Council that was deeply critical of the president and which the first Trump administration investigated for the potential inclusion of classified documents . Bolton said the book was authorized for publication after extensive pre-publication review by the U.S. government, and that the Justice Department, under President Joe Biden, ended the criminal investigation into the book. Trump era on this matter.
CNN has contacted Bolton for comment.
The executive order, titled “Holding Former Government Officials Accountable for Election Interference and Improper Disclosure of Sensitive Government Information,” accused the letter’s signatories of “falsely suggesting” that an initial article on the laptop was a Russian disinformation campaign and “deliberately (weaponizing) the serious intelligence community to manipulate the political process and undermine our democratic institutions.”
It accuses Bolton of publishing memoirs “riddled with sensitive information from his tenure in government” that “created a serious risk that classified documents would be exposed publicly” and “compromised the ability of future presidents to request and obtain frank advice on matters of national interest.” safety of their staff.
The letter regarding the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop almost immediately became a flashpoint in the partisan feud over the laptop itself, which contained sexually explicit videos of the former president’s son with women, as well as photos of him doing drugs in hotel rooms, many of which have since been published by right-wing media.
When the existence of the laptop and its contents first became public through reporting by the New York Post, many mainstream media outlets questioned its authenticity and social media companies moved to restrict the ability of users to share coverage of the Post, following questions about its ability to do so. were part of a foreign influence campaign – a skeptical approach that was partly reinforced by the concerns raised in the letter, which were ultimately not confirmed.
“We would like to emphasize that we do not know whether the emails… are authentic or not and that we have no evidence of Russian involvement – simply that our experience makes us deeply suspect that the Russian government played a role important in this matter. “” former officials wrote in 2020. “If we are correct, it is Russia that is trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we are confident that Americans need to be aware of that.” »
Since then, the laptop and its contents have been found to be legitimate. He played a role in the younger Biden’s drug prosecution, with special counsel David Weiss calling questions about the laptop’s authenticity a “conspiracy theory.”
Republicans argued the letter was evidence of deep state collusion between the CIA and the Biden campaign to conceal other documents on the laptop that they say show improper foreign business dealings by the Biden family. There was coordination between the former officials who wrote and signed the letter and the Biden campaign, a Republican congressional investigation documented, and Joe Biden, then a presidential candidate, cited the letter during a presidential debate at the time.
But claims that material in the laptop proved foreign corruption have not held up to scrutiny, even though the authenticity of the device and some embarrassing material documenting drug use and sexual activity of young Biden have been confirmed by several news outlets.
And the 51 signatories were all private citizens at the time they wrote the letter, although a handful of them held CIA contracts at the time, the Republican congressional investigation later found. At least one of these contracts was an unpaid position.
Some did not hold an authorization at the time of writing the letter or no longer held one; Clapper, for example, currently does not have active permissions.
“It would be contrary to decades of national security standards to suspend the security clearances of individuals who have simply exercised, as private citizens, their First Amendment rights,” said Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents a certain number of signatories. “Such action would be unprecedented and undeserved, especially since many of the signatories have spent their entire careers serving apolitically to protect the American people. »
Hunter Biden’s lawyers said the files were manipulated and even sued the owner of a computer repair shop who made the material public.
Biden dropped off the laptop at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019. His lawyers said in a court filing that the store owner admitted in his memoir that he “immediately began accessing sensitive material and deprived of the data” and that he had potentially continued to do so. falsifying data in the five months before the device was seized by the FBI.
This story has been updated with additional details.
