On Oct. 19, 2020, 51 former intelligence officials publicly telegraphed their intent to stop Donald Trump from winning a second term as president.
The spy chiefs and intelligence "experts" all signed a letter which dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian disinformation,” giving the leftist corporate media and Big Tech mega moguls the rationale needed to bury and suppress the story.
The New York Post's Miranda Devine, who reported extensively on the "laptop from hell," called what the intel officials did "one of the dirtiest tricks in electoral history."
Even The New York Times subsequently confirmed that the Hunter Biden emails were exactly what they appeared to be, as first reported by the New York Post in October 2020.
The 51 intel officials had been caught dealing their own "disinformation." They were humiliated. Their credentials as intelligence experts were dealt a crushing blow.
So, how do you come back from that? Can you come back from that?
It appears they are certainly going to try.
One of the 51 to sign the letter, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is now claiming that it was the media who mischaracterized their words.
Specifically, Clapper is blaming Politico for “deliberately distorting” the spy chiefs' letter in an October 2020 piece titled “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”
"There was message distortion. All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation,” Clapper told Washington Post “fact checker” Glenn Kessler. “Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five."
Paragraph five of the letter states: “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.”
The Washington Examiner's Elizabeth Stauffer noted in a Feb 16 analysis that "if Clapper felt the letter had been deliberately distorted, he certainly had ample opportunity to clear things up. After leaving office at the end of the Obama administration, Clapper became a political analyst for CNN, giving him a major media platform from which to do so. Yet he remained silent — even as leftist pundits and congressional Democrats spread the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop story had been planted by Russia."
Clapper went so far as to insist he was “unaware” that Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign had used the intel chiefs' letter to dismiss concerns about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.
Stauffer asked: "Are we to believe that Clapper somehow missed the debate or at least the part where Biden used the letter to successfully shield himself from Trump’s attacks on his family’s alleged pay-to-play scheme?"
"Fact checker" Kessler reported the “letter was organized by Michael J. Morell, former deputy director of the CIA. … Morell had long been considered a top candidate for CIA director in a Biden administration, news reports said, but key Democrats objected, claiming he publicly supported the CIA’s enhanced interrogation methods after the Sept. 11 attacks.”
In other words, Stauffer wrote, "this hoax was coordinated by a man with a strong personal interest in a Biden victory."
Former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research Thomas Fingar, who also signed the letter, wrote in an email to Kessler: “No one who has spent time in Washington should be surprised that journalists and politicians willfully or unintentionally misconstrue oral or written statements. The statement we signed was carefully written to minimize the likelihood that what was said would be misconstrued, and to provide a clear written record that could be used to identify and disprove distortions.”
Stauffer noted: "Let’s rephrase that. No one who has spent time in Washington should be surprised that 51 members of the administrative state would use their clout to sway an election toward their favored candidate. Each official who signed onto that letter did so to mitigate the damage to the Biden campaign from the New York Post’s explosive story. They knew the legacy media would pick up their narrative, and they were not disappointed. Rather than trying to authenticate the emails on the laptop by contacting individuals on the other end of those communications, the legacy media either declared the story to be fraudulent or else suppressed it entirely."
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