The new story about former acting CIA director Michael Morell looks like a similar game of disinformation telephone. Again, the House Weaponization of Government Committee led by Jim Jordan recently questioned Morell. His answers suggest he may have been “triggered” by a call from then-Biden campaign official Anthony Blinken to organize a group letter signed by 50 former intel officials, opining the Hunter Biden laptop story looked like a “Russian information operation.”

A little-noticed detail about the letter is in its next-to-last paragraph, where officials worked the word “disinformation” into the text …

This is the same circular firing squad trick Cheney employed. Nameless official is source for news outlet, news outlet becomes source for different official, and in the end, no one has to take credit for making the wrong claim. This is the template for information delivery in a world run by spooks, where we won’t get news but what the Russians call versii, or versions — takes on takes on reality, with the origin source too far away to see. We’ll know what we’re supposed to think, but less and less effort is being put into the problem of giving us reasons to believe what we’re told.

We saw the same circle-trick in 2016 when a “well-placed Western intelligence source” told Michael Isikoff of Yahoo! that former Trump aide Carter Page met with Rosneft chief Igor Sechin. The article claimed Page was a “possible back channel” to the Russians.

[Maybe it’s just time to stop paying attention to the spies. They haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory the last couple of decades on the job, let alone in the press. — Ed]