Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejando Mayorkas said Tuesday that he had named Russia collusion hoaxers and Hunter Biden laptop deniers John Brennan and James Clapper to an intelligence “experts” panel.
In a statement, Mayorkas announced “the establishment of the Homeland Intelligence Experts Group (Experts Group) … comprised of private sector experts who will provide their unique perspectives on the federal government’s intelligence enterprise to DHS’s [Intelligence and Analysis] and the Office of the Counterterrorism Coordinator.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas speaks at the Democracy Summit, Thursday, March 30, 2023, at the Convention Center in Washington. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
The group will analyze “foreign nation-state adversaries” as well as “domestic violent extremists.”
Brennan, a former CIA director, and Clapper, a former Director of National Intelligence, were key players in spreading the “Russia collusion” hoax to discredit the 2016 election, with Clapper telling CNN that it was possible there was evidence linking Russia to Trump, then admitting under oath that he knew of no evidence.
Brennan claimed that Trump’s protestations of innocence were “hogwash,” though Special Counsel Robert Mueller later found that no American, including on the Trump campaign, had colluded with Russia in the 2016 election.
Later, as Breitbart News noted, Brennan and Clapper joined more than 50 national security and intelligence alumni in a letter claiming that stories during the 2020 race about Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation. In fact, the laptop was real, and the stories — published by the New York Post, Breitbart News, and others — were proven accurate. But the letter, arranged by Joe Biden’s campaign, served to deflect criticism from the candidate.
It is unclear how Brennan will advise the Department of Homeland Security, given that President Trump revoked his security clearance in 2018, in reaction to Brennan’s increasingly unhinged political attacks on the president.
“I express my deep gratitude to these distinguished individuals for dedicating their exceptional expertise, experience, and vision to our critical mission,” Mayorkas said in a statement. The statement also cited what it called the “experience, expertise, and perspective offered by Experts Group members” as an asset to DHS intelligence.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
