As the saying goes, sunshine is the best disinfectant. And now that the sun has begun to fully shine on the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” story and how the government and Big Tech colluded to hide it ahead of the 2020 elections, the rats are beginning to abandon ship. The latest figure in this parade is former DNI James Clapper. He was one of 51 former intelligence officials who signed the now-infamous letter that year, claiming that the laptop story had all of the signs of being a “Russian information operation,” despite the fact that the FBI had the laptop in their possession at the time. But now, more than two years later, Clapper is claiming that his words were “distorted.” And he’s blaming Politico for improperly interpreting him. It would appear that the participants in this scam are beginning to eat their own. (NY Post)
A key signer of the open letter that wrongly suggested The Post’s bombshell reporting on Hunter Biden’s emails was part of a “Russian information operation” has accused Politico of distorting “what we said” — more than two years after the fact.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper tried Monday to tamp down the growing controversy over the letter that he and 50 other ex-spooks signed after The Post first revealed the existence of the first son’s infamous laptop in October 2020.
Their public statement, now the subject of investigations by the Republican-led House Judiciary and Intelligence committees, was first reported by Politico and later seized on by then-candidate Joe Biden.
This week, Clapper told the WaPo that there was “message distortion” in Politico’s piece about the laptop. He insists that he and his fifty fellow intelligence officials were just “raising a yellow flag” and claiming that the story might be a Russian disinformation campaign. Note the careful use of the phrase “yellow flag” instead of “red flag.” See? It wasn’t a danger signal. It was more like a minor penalty in a soccer match.
An interesting part of his claim is that he’s not just insinuating that Politico made a mistake or got the story wrong. He used the phrase “deliberately distorted.” But is that really true? You can read the original Politico article here. You’ll note that it includes the following portion of the letter:
“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,” the letter reads. But, it continues, “there are a number of factors that make us suspicious of Russian involvement.”
In that sense, Clapper’s claims kind of make sense, even though all of the focus was on the bona fides of the letter’s signatories and their “suspicions” of Russian involvement. It was Nick Shapiro, a former aide to John Brennan, who told Politico that the intelligence specialists who signed the letter “want the American people to know that once again the Russians are interfering.”
That’s not a statement of “suspicions” or “implications.” That’s a flat-out claim that the Russians were “interfering” in the election and it was given specifically in the context of the Hunter Biden laptop story and all that was contained in the device. So why did it take two years for James Clapper to “clarify” this for us? He clearly knew about the coverage the letter received, including by Politico.
Keep in mind that all of this was happening only weeks before the election. If Politico’s article really “distorted” what Clapper and the rest of the crew were claiming in that letter, why didn’t he raise his hand that week and say, “no, that’s not what we said?” We don’t need a detective to answer that question. He stayed silent because the letter and the coverage it received in the mainstream media were doing precisely what the authors wanted to see happen. They were in a panic and wanted to discredit the laptop story so Joe Biden would have a defense against it when he debated Donald Trump. And that’s just what Biden did.
James Clapper’s protest should ring hollow in our ears at this point. He and his friends deliberately interfered in the 2020 election to help Joe Biden win. And now they need to be held accountable for that, even though the admissions are many days late and many dollars short.
