Election interference has a long history in American politics. From distorted TV ads to foreign countries with their own agendas – and hardly just Russia – many corrupt politicians and bad actors have attempted to put their thumbs on the scale over the years to sway low-information voters. But you would be hard-pressed to find a more consequential or flagrantly dishonest episode of electoral sabotage than the 51 members of the intelligence community who all but stated outright that the Hunter Biden laptop was a product of Russian interference in the heat of the 2020 election.
Without investigating the laptop on their own and admitting, “We do not know if the emails [on the laptop] . . . are genuine or not,” they stated in a letter released to the media that it “has the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Joe Biden then used the ludicrous letter to deflect questions – while never denying it was real – and effectively immunizing himself in a debate with Trump three days after the letter was released.
Post-election polls revealed that if the majority of voters who were kept unaware by the pro-Biden media of the devastating contents of the laptop had known about it when they cast their ballots, Donald Trump would have won that election. Of course, Hunter Biden himself and even The New York Times were eventually forced to admit that the information on the laptop was genuine – but not until long after the election when Joe Biden was safely ensconced in the White House.
Four years later and just one day after beginning the second term he was denied in 2020, President Trump retaliated by stripping the infamous 51 of their top-secret security clearances. This will serve the dual purpose of punishing Trump-deranged ex-CIA Directors John Brennan and Leon Panetta and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, among others. It assures that they will no longer have access to intelligence information they have proven all too eager to access in attempting to destroy the 45th-turned-47th president. And while many other deep-state intelligence operatives will undoubtedly take up the mantle of trying to scandalize Trump, the most prominent and high-ranking anti-Trump characters in the intelligence community have now been disgraced and their credibility shot.
Sabotage by Antony Blinken and Legacy Media
Antony Blinken, far more effective in forming a smokescreen to protect his future boss than he was as Biden’s feckless secretary of state, was the one who convinced the infamous 51 to sign the letter. It is, of course, reasonable to posit that Blinken was promised the high-ranking position he was granted in return for doing Biden’s dirty work. One wonders if Blinken will eventually experience the wrath of the 47th president just as the lying spies did.
But Blinken and the 51 could not whitewash the story by themselves. Essentially the entirety of the legacy media buried coverage of the scandalous revelations on the laptop in the waning days of the 2020 campaign. News outlets headlined the letter while all but ignoring the entirely credible details of the story unearthed by Miranda Devine of the New York Post on October 19, 2020, two weeks before Election Day, and later detailed in Devine's best-selling book, Laptop From Hell. Social media was also prominent in the coverup. The Post was banned from posting on Twitter, now X, which claimed without evidence that the story was based on “hacked materials.”
One of the chief culprits in burying the story, we now know, was the left-wing platform Politico, the first site to promote the letter from the 51 with the headline, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” On a recent podcast entitled Somebody’s Gotta Win, ex-Politico staffer Marc Caputo revealed to host Tara Palmeri the lengths to which the platform went to protect Biden:
“I was covering Biden at the time, and I remember coming to my editor and saying, ‘Hey, we need to write about the Hunter Biden laptop.’ And I was told this came from on high at Politico: Don’t write about the laptop, don’t talk about the laptop, don’t tweet about the laptop. And the only thing Politico wound up writing was that piece that called it disinformation, which charitably could be called misinformation, at the least.”
Unsurprisingly, Caputo further revealed that his coverage of the tax and gun charges on which Hunter Biden was found guilty and for which he was later pardoned by his father, were also buried by the editors at Politico.
Lying Spies Sticking to Their Story
In 2023, the Post sought responses from the 51 now-defrocked officials when the authenticity of the laptop was no longer in question. 47 did not respond. The four that did refused to admit they did anything dishonest or wrong. Clapper responded with, “I stand by the statement made AT THE TIME (caps his) … I think sounding such a cautionary note AT THE TIME was appropriate.” Emile Nakhleh, former director of CIA’s Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program, stated, “I have not seen any information since [signing the letter] that would alter the decision behind signing the letter.” Russ Travers, former National Counterterrorism Center acting director, wrote, “I spent 25 years as a Soviet/Russian analyst. Given the context of what the Russians were doing at the time … I considered the cautionary warning to be prudent.”
Don Hepburn, former national security executive, did not even bother to defend his actions, instead descending into full denial even after the laptop’s authenticity had been confirmed by everyone involved: “My position has not changed any. I believe the Russians made a huge effort to alter the course of the election . . . The Russians are masters of blending truth and fiction and making something feel incredibly real when it’s not. Nothing I have seen really changes my opinion. I can’t tell you what part is real and what part is fake, but the thesis still stands for me, that it was a media influence hit job.”
Russia Cubed
Russia, Russia, Russia. That was the defensive mantra of Trump as deep state actors advanced the story that Trump colluded with Putin to steal the 2016 election. When no evidence was found after two years of “investigation,” it did not stop the perpetrators of the hoax, as they went to the well again with their letter fingering Russia - again. It always defied logic that Russians would attempt to tilt the election in favor of Trump when they undoubtedly concluded that they could roll the already enfeebled Biden, which is exactly what they did months after he took office. When Biden refused to respond to the buildup of the Russian military along the Ukrainian border, and stated publicly that he would not respond in the event of a “minor incursion,” all hell broke loose. More than a million Ukrainians and Russians have now lost their lives in a grinding ground war promising no victor.
When the history of the Trump era is written in the years ahead, it will - or should - prominently include the treachery of 51 lying spies who, instead of acting covertly as in their job descriptions, advanced a bold-faced lie in public that changed the course of history. And they did so with the aid and comfort of legacy media more than willing to serve as flacks in the grand plan to take Trump down at any cost, and for good. We can be all but certain that none of them expected what would happen four years later, on November 5, 2024.
