The subpoenas are coming and the intelligence “experts” who lied about the laptop are trying to cover their ass.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper accused Politico of having “deliberately distorted” an infamous letter signed by him and other intelligence officials about Hunter Biden’s laptop being potential Russian disinformation.
Then-Politico reporter Natasha Bertrand obtained the letter for a story headlined, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” mere weeks before the 2020 election.
“There was message distortion,” Clapper told The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler in an article published Monday. “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.”
Clapper was one of 50 intelligence officials that signed the letter, which was written in October 2020, shortly after the New York Post first reported on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Clapper, along with at least a dozen other signees on the letter, endorsed Joe Biden for president that year.
Bertrand, who was criticized by the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple for her “boosterism” of the discredited Christopher Steele dossier, now works at CNN.
Clapper of course didn’t complain about Politico’s headline at the time. Forensic computer analysts confirmed what we already knew; the laptop and the incriminating evidence contained therein, is genuine. Douglas Wise, a former Defense Intelligence Agency deputy director, knew it was real but signed the letter anyway.
The FBI/DOJ finally admitted the laptop wasn’t a “Russian disinformation campaign”. But they tried to bury it anyway.
……The signers also stipulated they had no evidence to prove their claims but were mostly going by their gut. For a media that often regurgitated Russiagate storylines from intelligence community sources throughout the Trump administration – and was wary of helping Trump by pushing out material harmful to the Biden candidacy in a manner similar to the 2016 election – that was more than enough.
But despite Politico and Biden’s framing, the signers of the letter didn’t come out of the woodworks at the time to dispute their characterization of their words. Nor did they seem to care that numerous Democrats, including future Biden officials like Jen Psaki, Susan Rice, Kate Bedingfield, Andrew Bates and others, shared the story on Twitter or touted its contents in interviews.
……New York Post columnist Miranda Devine told Fox News Digital that Clapper’s comments “show what a fraud he is, and that he’s worried now the GOP controls the House and has vowed to haul in the signatories and make them testify under oath. He’s trying to pre-shape the narrative.”
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, sent a letter earlier this month to a dozen of the signatories, including Clapper, demanding answers. Devine said she didn’t recall any of them expressing public discontent with Politico’s framing of their statements in 2020.
“They were silent. That was the message they wished to convey, and now they are scrambling because the GOP House is about to hold them accountable,” Devine said.
Clapper admitted again to Kessler that he and his fellow signers had “no evidence” to support their suspicions.
“To me, it’s a difference without a distinction. It could have been bad information, false information,” he said. “But we had no evidence, no inside baseball that it was. The intent of the letter was that this could be Russian disinformation — emphasis on could.”
The (Washington) Post reveals that the letter was the brainchild of former deputy CIA director and ubiquitous television presence Michael J. Morell, “a top candidate for CIA director in a Biden administration.” Forgive us for thinking that a seasoned Washington operator like Morell might have had some idea how the letter would be received in the press and consider it just the sort of thing that would nudge his application for CIA director to the top of the pile.
That brings us to the rest of the letter’s signatories, who have decided now’s the time to point out subtleties in their letter that two-and-a-half years of hysterical press coverage overlooked. The former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, told the Post that Politico was guilty of “message distortion.”
“All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation,” he added. “Politico deliberately distorted what we said.” Now he tells us!
The figures most guilty of distortion in this sorry ordeal are Morell, Clapper, and their colleagues, and their attempts to distort, retroactively, their October 2020 efforts add insult to injury.
The mainstream media, for its part, have been revealed as their witting pawns, starting with the Politico piece and ending with the laughable Washington Post fact check that lays the blame primarily at Politico’s feet—rather than calling these Democratic operati, er, intelligence officials—to account for their own attempts to influence a U.S. election.
The entire “Russian Collusion” hoax and the concerted effort by politicized government agencies and the media to extinguish any discussion about Hunter Biden’s Laptop From Hell.
All of the corrupt directors and cohorts in the 3-letter acronymed agencies should have already been fired and indicted.
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