It was bad enough that 51 of the nation's top intelligence officials declared in Oct. 2020, at the height of the presidential campaign, that Hunter Biden's laptop "Has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation." But now the flagrant dishonesty of the whole affair has gotten exponentially worse, for any lingering doubt that these officials had access to adequate information when they published their assessment has been put to rest: it has now come to light that the FBI found the laptop to be authentic months before the intelligence officials told the world that it wasn't.
The chief signatory was James Clapper, who is listed on the letter as the former Director of National Intelligence, former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, former Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Clapper, 82, has spent practically his entire life in the intelligence field; he has been working in intelligence since he commanded a signals intelligence detachment in Thailand during the Vietnam War.
Still, he showed himself to be either clueless or craven and only confirmed that by becoming the chief signatory to the Biden laptop letter even when he must have known that it itself was disinformation.
There were, of course, 47 other signatories, including two former CIA Acting Directors, John McLaughlin and Michael Morell; Russ Travers, former acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center; and Emile Nakhleh, former director of CIA's Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program.
The author of that memo was "IRS Supervisory Criminal Investigative Agent Gary Shapley, now a whistleblower." It "Provided a chronology of how the FBI validated the laptop as having belonged to Hunter Biden as early as November 2019 and by spring 2020 was exploiting and analyzing its emails, text messages and photos." Shapley wrote in the memo that "We have no reason to believe there is anything fabricated nefariously on the computer and or hard drive. There are emails and other items that corroborate the items on the laptop and hard drive."
Clapper, Hayden, Panetta, Brennan, and the others saw the assessment that nothing on the laptop had been "Fabricated nefariously," and they wrote, "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."
No comments:
Post a Comment