It was bad enough that 51 of the nation’s top intelligence officials declared in Oct. 2020, at the height of the presidential campaign, that Hunter Biden’s laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” But now the flagrant dishonesty of the whole affair has gotten exponentially worse, for any lingering doubt that these officials had access to adequate information when they published their assessment has been put to rest: it has now come to light that the FBI found the laptop to be authentic months before the intelligence officials told the world that it wasn’t. The last doubt that the 51 officials were brazenly lying to the American people has been removed.
It’s important to remember exactly who it was who lied to us. The chief signatory was James Clapper, who is listed on the letter as the former Director of National Intelligence, former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, former Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
You can’t get more of a U.S. intelligence insider than James Clapper. Clapper, 82, has spent practically his entire life in the intelligence field; he has been working in intelligence since he commanded a signals intelligence detachment in Thailand during the Vietnam War. To be sure, he has previously shown his willingness to sacrifice the truth to political expediency. Back in 2011, he notoriously labeled the Muslim Brotherhood, which has repeatedly stated its goal of imposing Sharia (Islamic law) over the entire world, as “largely secular.”
That was right around the time that the Obama administration was selling Muslim Brotherhood uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa as a secular “Arab Spring” flowering of democracy, so Clapper was doubtless reflecting his boss’ agenda. Still, he showed himself to be either clueless or craven and only confirmed that by becoming the chief signatory to the Biden laptop letter even when he must have known that it itself was disinformation.
Also signing the letter were three more of the heaviest hitters in Washington’s intelligence establishment: Michael Hayden, former Director of the CIA, as well as of the NSA; another former CIA director, Leon Panetta, who also served as Secretary of Defense during the Obama administration; and a third former CIA director, John Brennan, who also served as White House Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor and Director of the Terrorism Threat Integration Center.
There were, of course, 47 other signatories, including two former CIA Acting Directors, John McLaughlin and Michael Morell; Russ Travers, former acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center; and Emile Nakhleh, former director of CIA’s Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program.
All 51 of these people, who were entrusted with the nation’s most sensitive secrets and the responsibility to protect it from its enemies, lied outright to the American people and to the world. Just the News reported Sunday that long before the letter they signed was written, “the FBI had authenticated the device as belonging to the first son and prosecutors had expressed confidence its contents had not been manipulated, according to a contemporaneous IRS investigative memo.”
The author of that memo was “IRS Supervisory Criminal Investigative Agent Gary Shapley, now a whistleblower.” It “provided a chronology of how the FBI validated the laptop as having belonged to Hunter Biden as early as November 2019 and by spring 2020 was exploiting and analyzing its emails, text messages and photos.” Shapley wrote in the memo that “we have no reason to believe there is anything fabricated nefariously on the computer and or hard drive. There are emails and other items that corroborate the items on the laptop and hard drive.”
Clapper, Hayden, Panetta, Brennan, and the others saw the assessment that nothing on the laptop had been “fabricated nefariously,” and they wrote, “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”
Related: Hey, What Happened to the 51 Intel Agents Who Assured Us Hunter’s Laptop was Russian Disinformation?
This was not the weaselly escape clause they intended it to be, as when they wrote this, they had easy access to the FBI memo saying that nothing was fabricated nefariously and that other items corroborated what was on the laptop.
This is the apex of political corruption. These people should be formally barred from holding any position in the American government ever again. But their friends and cronies are still in power, so expect them to be given awards instead.
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