Joe Biden named MSNBC pundit Jeremy Bash to the Intelligence Advisory Board, despite the fact he pushed two conspiracy theories that have either been debunked or remain unverified.
Bash was one of 50 former intelligence officials who signed the infamous letter that declared the Hunter Biden laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” He also said during the Russian collusion investigation that “people in Trump’s organization were colluding with the Russians.”
The FBI was forced to admit later that the laptop was genuine, and the Justice Department is now building a case against the president’s son based at least in part on information found on the laptop. As for the Russian collusion story, special counsel Robert Mueller spent 674 days investigating the claim and concluded in the end that there was no collusion with Moscow by Trump or his campaign.
The authenticity of Biden’s laptop has since been verified by numerous news organizations, but Bash was among more than 50 former intelligence officials who previously signed a letter dismissing it as Russian disinformation ahead of the 2020 presidential election. The letter was widely spread in the media despite there being no evidence to substantiate their claims.
Bash, who is a former Central Intelligence Agency chief of staff in addition to his role as an MSNBC pundit, signed the October 2020 letter that attempted to downplay the scandal before Election Day.
“Perhaps most important, each of us believes deeply that American citizens should determine the outcome of elections, not foreign governments,” Bash and the other officials wrote in the letter. “All of us agree with the founding fathers’ concern about the damage that foreign interference in our politics can do to our democracy.”
That’s very nice and all patriotic and everything, but the 50 former intel officials who signed the letter admitted in the same breadth that they had absolutely no evidence to base their wild conspiracy of Russia trying to pass along disinformation showing that the president and his son looked to profit off his office.
Bash and the other former officials conceded that they did “not know if the emails… are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement” but still said that they were “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”
The letter caught on like wildfire online, with several members of the Biden administration amplifying it, including Biden’s eventual first press secretary, Jen Psaki. Joe Biden himself even worked to discredit reports swirling about his son’s laptop.
Now we know that the FBI had explicitly instructed agents not to investigate Hunter Biden’s laptop just a couple of weeks before the 2020 election. The agent behind the suppression of the story has since been kicked out of the FBI building and forced to resign. Despite all the assurances we’ve been hearing since the 2016 election about the “professionalism” of the FBI not allowing their personal political bias to interfere in their professional judgment, it did, at least in this one case.
How many other agents’ reports are tainted by anti-Trump bias?
We’re nearly two years removed from this, and even now we’re forced to ask: if the Hunter Biden emails had come out before the election, would it have made a difference? Recall that it was a matter of fewer than 100,000 votes in five states that spelled the difference between victory and defeat for either candidate.
But that’s an exercise in sophistry. The truth is, it’s impossible to say what effect, if any, Hunter Biden’s revelations would have had on the election in 2020. More to the point, does anyone outside of a few fuddy-duddy right-wingers care that the FBI is putting its thumb on the scales of American elections?
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