In 2020, Americans were targets of an influence operation carried out by current and former US intelligence officials
Andy McCarthy: The FBI and Justice Department turned Russian disinformation into a career path for advancement
Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andy McCarthy reacts to concerns over information suppression from foreign countries on 'America Reports.'
Hunter Biden’s infamous "laptop from hell" may be the most damning trove of evidence tying the sitting (if sleeping) president of the United States to the over $27 million that his family raked in by peddling his political influence to agents of corrupt and anti-American regimes – in particular, the communist regime of Xi Jinping in China.
Still, the enduring relevance of the laptop is not as a Biden story, but as a story of the political corruption of the government’s law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus – pillars of our rule of law and our national security.
Think about this: The FBI took possession of the laptop in December 2019, and quickly authenticated it – not hard to do because there was a mountain of publicly available information for purposes of corroborating the data, which was incontestably Hunter Biden’s.
What’s the significance of that? Well, Election Day wasn’t until November 3, 2020. Hence, while early voting was already underway in the weeks before the election, the FBI had already known for nearly a year that the laptop was the real deal.
Despite that, the bureau induced major social media titans, such as Twitter (now X) and Facebook, to suppress derogatory reporting about the Bidens – specifically, the New York Post’s mid-October 2020 reporting on the laptop. How? By deceptively intimating that the Post’s reporting was likely the result of an influence operation carried out by Russian intelligence.
In reality, this was an influence operation carried out by current and former U.S. intelligence officials. The FBI was not alone.
The government’s "Intelligence Community" routinely shares information. The IC, too, is prone to hype Russian "interference" in U.S. elections. Yet, such "influence operations" are longstanding: Moscow interfered in American politics throughout the Cold War; it has continued to do so since the Soviet Union’s fall up to the present day. Influence ops are also reciprocal: U.S. spy agencies routinely sought to influence Soviet politics and, now, seek to undermine Putin. If they didn’t, what good would they be?
For all the heavy-breathing by the media-Democrat complex, modern Russia is a basket-case country run by a mafia-style regime whose election-influence ops are often laughably amateurish. They are, moreover, a negligible ripple in the multi-billion-dollar ocean of American campaign messaging.
HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP RE-EMERGES AS MEDIA EMBARRASSMENT AS IT BECOMES KEY EVIDENCE AT GUN TRIAL
As our domestic security service specializing in foreign counterintelligence, the FBI is a critical IC component. The IC is led by the Office of the National Intelligence Director (ODNI), part of whose core mission is to ensure that intelligence is shared community-wide – including, of course, with the CIA, which combats foreign threats to American interests. If the FBI knew the laptop was authentic, not a product of Russian intelligence, so did the IC.
It was IC veterans, however, led by former officials who’d served in the highest ranking posts in the Obama-Biden CIA and ODNI, who generated the notorious election-eve letter in which 51 such officials endeavored to deceive voters into dismissing the Post’s laptop reporting as bearing "the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation." Indeed, we now know this letter was instigated at the suggestion of Antony Blinken – then a Biden-Harris campaign adviser, now the Biden-Harris administration's secretary of state – and that the "classic earmarks" line was suggested by James Clapper, the Obama-Biden Director of National Intelligence.
That letter was dated October 19, 2020 – again, ten months after the FBI seized the laptop. Naturally, President Biden – who also had to know the laptop was authentic – used the former officials’ letter and its politicization of their government national-security credentials in order to discredit then-President Trump’s highlighting of the laptop and its damning contents at the final presidential debate.
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It doesn’t take a quantum physicist to figure out what happened here. During the summer of 2020, as Sen. Chuck Grassley, R., Iowa, has recounted, he and Sen. Ron Johnson, R., Wisc., were scrutinizing bank records and other evidence of huge payments to Biden family members (work that became the foundation for the eventual House impeachment investigation). Alarmed, Senate Democrats suddenly asked friendly FBI supervisors in Washington, D.C., to intervene with a briefing on the bureau’s fears of Russian influence operations against the 2020 election.
There was no reason to believe readily verifiable bank records about suspicious foreign money transfers had been generated by Russian intelligence. Yet, the FBI collaborated with Democrats in framing it that way. The bureau produced an "assessment" about signs of foreign interference in the then-upcoming 2020 election, which Democrats used to portray Grassley and Johnson as dupes who were doing the Russians’ bidding. (See, e.g., this Aug. 13, 2020, AP report citing the FBI assessment and accusing Johnson of "amplifying" Russian "propaganda.)
When the laptop became public in mid-October 2020, thanks to the Post’s reporting, it was simply folded into this Russian disinformation fairy tale. The social media companies suppressed the reporting because the FBI encouraged them to do so – even though the bureau knew the laptop was real. The 51 national security officials piled on with their letter, and Biden himself trumpeted the fraud at the debate.
The American people spend over $100 billion per year on the IC. The legacy of the laptop is the IC’s capture by the party of government.
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Andrew C. McCarthy serves as a FOX News contributor and is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review. Follow him on Twitter @andrewcmccarthy
