Morell helped draft the statement and recruit signers to the statement.
According to testimony given by Morell to joint committees last month on April 20 and as compiled in a May 10 interim joint committees staff report, new information was revealed that neither Morell nor any of the other signers of the statement initiated the idea of producing a public statement.
Before Morell could generate a statement in the public domain about Russian disinformation in a news story, he needed to clear it with the CIA. Former CIA employees such as Morell are required to submit any intelligence-related material that they intend to make public to the CIA's Prepublication Classification Review Board to ensure that classified information is not being exposed.
In order for the statement to be made public prior to the Biden-Trump debate, Morell would need the PCRB to review and approve his drafted statement within a couple of days of his receipt of Blinken's email, which initiated the idea for a public statement.
As shown in the joint committees report, a written statement was provided by former CIA official David Cariens, informing that a CIA employee may have helped in the effort to solicit signatures for the public statement: "Cariens explained that he spoke with the PCRB in October 2020 regarding the review of his memoir," but that the CIA employee he spoke with also told him about the proposed statement.
Morell testified to the joint committees that "Such an action by a CIA employee would be 'inappropriate'" and that he "Did not coordinate with the CIA." Nonetheless, any CIA employee engaging in partisan activities while on CIA duty to assist the campaign of a presidential candidate should be grounds for termination, especially considering that the subject CIA employee should have known that the claims in the statement were dubious and being made for purely political reasons.
An important note in the report about the public statement that was organized by Morell and signed by 50 of his former intelligence colleagues: Morell had approached 36 former intelligence officials to sign the statement, but 26 declined.
https://spectator.org/the-deep-states-deeper-involvement-in-bidens-2020-election-campaign/
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