U.S. Government
Deep State Election Interference: FEC Sued Over Disinfo “Letter of 51” Regarding Biden Laptop
It was a letter that changed the course of world history. Now it is the basis for a lawsuit that may again be world-changing. On October 19, 2020, just two weeks before the November 3, 2020 presidential election, 51 former high-level intelligence operatives of the CIA, National Security Agency (NSA), and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), signed a letter that they knew — or should have known — was a lie, a political psyop, a deceptive operation aimed at affecting the outcome of, perhaps, the most crucial election in our nation’s history.
It was not only a lie, it was a Big Lie, and a recycled one at that! The “Letter of 51” claimed that Putin was trying to hurt Joe Biden and help Donald Trump. It was a replay of the disinformation operation by the Deep State intel community four years earlier when they claimed that Putin was hurting Hillary Clinton to help Donald Trump. But in both cases the truth is just the opposite of what they claimed: Putin preferred Hillary in 2016, he preferred Biden in 2020, and he prefers Biden now, in 2024. Their disinfo op failed to elect Clinton in 2016, but it succeeded (with the help of many election “irregularities”) in boosting Biden into the White House in 2020.
However, the truth may finally be exposed thanks to a lawsuit brought by America First Legal (AFL). Founded by former Trump administration officials and headed by former Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller, AFL is taking a very aggressive stance and has already racked up an impressive string of legal victories that is alarming “progressive” forces across the land. On February 25, 2024, attorneys for AFL filed suit against the Federal Election Commission for refusing to act on their complaint of October 24, 2023. In that complaint, AFL had petitioned the agency to investigate and enforce action against Biden for President, the Biden Victory Fund, the Biden Action Fund, and the Democratic National Committee for “failing to disclose the campaign’s role in coordinating the infamously false ‘Letter of 51’ former intelligence officials” in violation of 52 U.S.C. §30101 of the Federal Election Campaign Act. (More on the lawsuit below.)
Hunter’s “Laptop from Hell”
The “Letter of 51” was a frantic attempt to save Joe Biden (or, rather, to save the powers-that-be behind the empty suit that poses as Joe Biden). On October 14, the New York Post had published a blockbuster exposé featuring the sensational contents of a laptop computer abandoned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter at a computer repair shop. The Post story, “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad” sent the Democrats and their media accomplices into conniptions.
More significant than the salacious videos and photos of a drugged-out, naked Hunter Biden smoking crack and engaging in sex acts with an unidentified woman are the laptop’s 120,000 emails, many between Hunter Biden and various business associates concerning deals in Communist China and Ukraine. Those emails included messages from an executive from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma thanking Hunter for introducing him to his father and conversing about how Burisma could use the Biden “influence.”
Deep State Desperation
It was panic time for the Biden campaign. For months, Biden had been fending off concerns about his drug-addicted son’s mysterious, multimillion dollar business ventures and vehemently, repeatedly denying that he had ever talked with Hunter about these dealings or had any knowledge of them. Now comes the “laptop from hell” providing beaucoup evidence strongly suggesting otherwise. Now, in addition to his months of hiding from the public and his cringe-worthy mumbling, bumbling, stumbling, and grumbling whenever he did appear in public, there was the ugly specter of foreign bribery, influence peddling, money laundering, and tax fraud. Not just bad optics, this was serious criminal stuff. Not to mention the real potential for the “t” word: treason.
This was a major crisis. What to do? Enter Biden campaign advisor Antony Blinken. On October 17, 2020, Blinken — now Biden’s secretary of state — emailed longtime CIA spook Michael Morell (formerly Obama’s acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency) for help in responding to the Post’s explosive reporting about Hunter’s laptop. Morell, who had publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and was (and remains) a vocal detractor of Donald Trump, started contacting former intelligence buddies to help write a statement discrediting the laptop’s authenticity and to solicit former intelligence “experts” as co-signers. He also got ahold of Nick Shapiro, his former deputy chief of staff and senior advisor at the CIA, to handle getting their statement into the controlled corporate media stream.
Notably, Morell suggested that Shapiro start with The Washington Post, which, together with The New York Times, has been the preferred propaganda channel used by the CIA, FBI, and other intel agencies now completely captured at the top by Deep State operatives. Want to leak a document or provide an anonymous “high-level intelligence source” that will advance the “Trump-Putin” witch hunt or otherwise undermine Trump? Go to the Post’s David Ignatius or one of the other CIA Mockingbird favorites at the Post or the Times.
Media “Mockingbirds” Jump to Save Biden
Apparently, the Post did not jump on the story quickly enough, nor, apparently, did The Associated Press, Morell’s second choice. Thus, it fell to Politico, Morell’s third choice, to run with Team Biden’s propaganda response disguised as an independent effort by “intelligence professionals.” Politico’s Natasha Bertrand jumped on the bait, coming out with a story on October 19 titled “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” (Bertrand was rewarded with a gig at CNN, and on February 13, 2024, CNN announced her promotion “to cover national security and politics across CNN’s platforms.” See how the Deep State symbiosis between Big Intel and Big Media works?)
Bertrand’s Politico subtitle told readers: “More than 50 former intelligence officials signed a letter casting doubt on the provenance of a New York Post story on the former vice president’s son.” According to these supposedly concerned, nonpartisan, patriotic, civic-minded intel experts, the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop reporting “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Moreover, they said, it clearly would be in Putin’s interest to help Trump and undermine Biden. “For the Russians at this point,” the letter stated, “with Trump down in the polls, there is incentive for Moscow to pull out all the stops to do anything possible to help Trump win and/or weaken Biden should he win. A ‘laptop op’ fits the bill, as the publication of the emails are [sic] clearly designed to discredit Biden.”
We know what happened. Politico had fired the shot that started the media avalanche. Immediately, and for days, weeks, months afterward, the establishment media were dismissing the laptop as Russian “disinformation” (when they weren’t ignoring its inconvenient contents altogether).
Incredible! This was the Steele dossier and the Trump-Putin “Russia, Russia, Russia” smear campaign all over again. And it was all the same intel and media operatives who had dragged our nation through four years of multiple investigations costing tens of millions of dollars and intentionally hamstringing President Trump to prevent him from implementing the agenda he had been lawfully elected to pursue. We know how those “investigations” ended. With zero evidence of the “Trump-Russia collusion” that Adam Schiff, Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough, Joy Reid, CNN, NPR, CBS, MSNBC, and the rest of the media herd and their intel comrades had promised would be forthcoming.
The “Letter of 51”: Serial Liars, Perjurers, Deceivers
To the uninitiated, the 51 “former intelligence officials” who signed on to the Blinken-inspired Morell letter undoubtedly appeared to provide an impressive endorsement. But the savvier observers quickly recognized among the co-signers many who are notorious for lying (even under oath) and equally notorious for publicly slamming Donald Trump. How impartial and trustworthy are these signatories? Well, the first one to sign on was James Clapper, Obama’s former director of national intelligence. That should have sealed its doom right then and there, since even much of the pro-Biden prostitute press had called for Clapper’s scalp a few short years before when he was caught blatantly lying under oath about massive and illegal NSA surveillance of the American people. Commentators at liberal-left organs such as Slate, Salon, The Washington Post, HuffPost, AlterNet, Consortium News, Truthout, Chicago Tribune, and many more called on Obama to fire him and have the Department of Justice prosecute him for perjury. In a column for USA Today, law professor Jonathan Turley explained why Clapper should have been prosecuted for “commission of open perjury before the Senate Intelligence Committee.” Instead, the Obama DOJ rebuffed bipartisan calls for action against the disgraced spy chief and allowed the statute of limitations to run out. Instead of a jail cell, Clapper was rewarded with a lucrative gig as national security analyst at CNN, as well as regular appearances on all the other globalist platforms. But his Senate perjury performance wasn’t a one-off event; he was caught lying multiple times on matters of grave importance and was the Obama administration’s hatchet man in its war on the brave whistleblowers who exposed his lies. Particularly germane to the “Letter of 51” and the supposed veracity of its signatories are Clapper’s apparent lies (or conveniently faulty memory) about leaking Steele dossier information to the media. After flatly denying (in sworn testimony before the House Intelligence Committee) that he had shared the Steele information with any journalist and publicly feigning dismay at the leaks (which he professed to be mystified about as to origin), he admitted that he had indeed shared the information with CNN’s Jake Tapper and “might have spoken with other journalists about the same topic.”
MAGA: “Nihilistic, Dangerous, Contemptible”
It doesn’t get any better as you go down the “Letter of 51” liar list. The second co-signer on the list is General Michael Hayden, former director of both the CIA and NSA. Like Clapper, he endorsed Biden and has been a steady fixture on the television networks, podcasts, and editorial pages of the prostitute press. He uses these opportunities to viciously lambaste Donald Trump, Republicans, and conservatives. In 2022, he retweeted an incredible tweet by Edward Luce, in which the British left-wing globalist at the Financial Times stated: “I’ve covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world over my career. Have never come across a political force more nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible than today’s Republicans. Nothing close.” Hayden said in his retweet: “I agree. And I was the CIA Director.” So, was Hayden saying that half of America is “more nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible” than al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Chinese Communist Party, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Antifa, and the Russian KGB-FSB? It would appear so.
But who is the real extremist? Following the Biden FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and reports that nuclear documents were found, “progressive” historian Michael Beschloss suggested that execution might be an appropriate penalty for Trump, to which Hayden agreed. “Rosenbergs were convicted for giving U.S. nuclear secrets to Moscow, and were executed June 1953,” Beschloss tweeted. To which Hayden replied: “Sounds about right.”
Last year a post on X (formerly Twitter) asked if Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) should be removed from the Senate Armed Services Committee due to placing holds on military promotion. Hayden tweeted: “how about the human race”? Tuberville interpreted the tweet about removing him from the human race as promoting “politically motivated assassination” and reported Hayden to the Capitol Police. Considering Hayden’s past, the senator’s response may not have been out of line.
When it comes to lying, Gen. Hayden may top Gen. Clapper. As noted by the liberal Columbia Journalism Review, Hayden has a long history of making misleading and outright false statements — to Congress, the president, and the media. This was made manifest with the dozens of his dissimulations, misrepresentations, intentional inaccuracies, and lies that are recorded in a 712-page report released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2014.
So, the CIA/NSA lie master decided to write a book defending his truth-challenged career. Hayden, apparently, decided to follow the advice of French Revolutionist George Jacques Danton, who famously urged: “Audacity, more audacity and always audacity.” The audacious title for Hayden’s 2018 book? The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies. As ratings go, perhaps only a book by Jeffrey Epstein titled Saving Our Children and Young Women From Sexual Predators would register higher on the audacity meter.
Brennan and 2017 Big Lie Replay
The third co-signer on the “Letter of 51” was former CIA Director John Brennan, who you may recall began his CIA career by lying about his involvement with the Communist Party and hiding the fact that he voted for the Moscow-directed U.S. Communist Party leader Gus Hall for president of the United States in 1972. Yes, at the height of the Cold War, while Soviet Russia was brutally subjugating much of the planet, Brennan sided with our Soviet enemy — and lied about it. Yet, that did not impede his rise to the top of the intelligence organization that ostensibly is tasked with protecting us from that enemy. He continued a pattern of lying throughout his career. One of his biggest lies was perpetrated just before Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. You may recall that on January 6, 2017, two weeks before taking office, President-elect Trump was hit with the release of an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) titled Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.
Immediately the media herd let loose a tsunami of articles and broadcasts with claims that “17 intelligence agencies” say Russia interfered in the elections to hurt Hillary Clinton and favor Trump. “Russia’s goals,” the ICA claimed, “were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
For starters, the “17 intelligence agencies” claim was a lie. Five months later, when Clapper testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 8, 2017, he admitted that it was only four, not all 17 agencies of the Intelligence Community (IC) that participated in the ICA. Moreover, he confirmed that only a couple dozen “hand-picked” analysts from the CIA, NSA, FBI, and his own Office of the Director National Intelligence (ODNI) participated in the ICA. And who hand-picked the participants? Well, Clapper, Brennan, and former FBI Director James Comey, another paragon of prevarication. And, as it turns out, that “hand-picked” selection process was just one of several key protocols violated by the Clapper-Brennan-Comey triumvirate in their rush to produce a fake Intelligence Community Assessment that would whitewash Biden and tarbrush Trump. Additionally, in contravention of standard ICA procedures, it was not reviewed by the other intelligence agencies, did not include dissenting opinions, and relied on the salacious, discredited “Steele dossier” that had been funded by Trump’s opponent (Hillary Clinton) using Russian operatives Igor Danchenko and Olga Galkina.
CIA/NSA/FBI Revenge: “Six Ways From Sunday”
Moreover, at least two of the hand-picked specialists for the ICA panel said they were pressured to get in line with the anti-Trump/pro-Clinton ICA “consensus.” They had argued contrariwise that the preponderance of evidence showed Putin viewed Trump unfavorably as a “wild card” and was more comfortable with Clinton. Of course, there is no question about the anti-Trump/pro-Clinton bias of one prominent author of the ICA: FBI’s Peter Strzok. Yes, the same Peter Strzok who along with his FBI paramour Lisa Page infamously exposed their virulent animus toward Donald Trump in numerous text messages.
Did Brennan perjure himself when he testified under oath before the House Intelligence Committee in May 2017 that the Hillary-funded Steele dossier “was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community Assessment”? It certainly looks like perjury. The problem with Brennan’s claim is that two of his ICA colleagues, James Clapper and then-NSA Director Admiral Michael Rogers, have contradicted him, testifying that the Steele dossier did indeed play a substantive role in the ICA. And Adm. Rogers further revealed that a summary of the unverified Steele dossier had been appended to the classified version of the ICA, another violation of standard ICA procedure. In short, the anti-Trump/pro-Clinton ICA was a textbook example of the use of the Big Lie as political propaganda and dirty tricks.
Only three days before the ICA’s release, in an interview on MSNBC with Rachel Maddow, N.Y. Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer had called Trump “really dumb” for “taking on” the intelligence community. Showing apparent delight at the probable backlash Trump would face, Schumer famously said: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” Schumer’s comment portended the Clapper-Brennan-Comey ICA that would be released 72 hours later. Of course, Donald Trump was not attacking the entire “intelligence community” any more than he was attacking all news media with his forensic blasts against the “Fake News” empire. He was attacking the leftist, anti-America First, globalist, Deep State cabal at the top of the intelligence community and the corporate media.
Election Interference, Election Coup
The election interference by anti-Trump intelligence operatives during the 2016 election cycle turned into a nonstop campaign of obstruction, sabotage, and vilification during President Trump’s entire term of office and then back into election interference in the 2020 election cycle. Although the “Letter of 51” was only one of many disinformation operations aimed at Trump and his supporters by Deep Staters in the intelligence community (both active and “retired”) and their political and media allies, it was arguably the most impactful.
In his press statement announcing America First Legal’s lawsuit against the FEC, AFL Vice President Daniel Epstein said: “The facts speak for themselves: 79 percent of Americans believe that had there been accurate coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop, Trump would have won the election.” “Foreseeing this electoral benefit,” he continued, “the Biden for President campaign organized 51 former intelligence officials to claim that the Hunter Biden laptop story was ‘Russian disinformation.’ The law requires this type of coordination and electoral benefit to be reported to the Federal Election Commission for the public to see. Otherwise, it’s not simply a form of dark money, it’s not simply corruption, it’s election interference.”
Mr. Epstein’s “79 percent of Americans” claim is a reference to a 2022 survey by TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics, a New Jersey-based polling outfit run by statistician Raghavan Mayur who has run up an impressive record of calling the shots in the past four presidential elections, beating out the big pollsters and political pundits. (See here and here.)
Another similar survey of Biden voters in seven swing states taken by The Polling Company in November 2020 immediately following the election found that many Democrats were completely unaware of the many Biden scandals, including those involving Hunter Biden’s laptop. No surprise there, since these low-information voters rely heavily on the Fake News industrial complex which has systematically censored these stories. No surprise also that there were more than enough Democrats who, had they known, would have switched their votes and changed the election results.
“In 6 of the 7 states surveyed,” the poll found, “enough voters would have not voted for Joe Biden that those states would have gone to President Trump, giving Trump 311 electoral votes and re-electing him.”
Politicized Intelligence
Whether or not one accepts Mr. Mayur’s poll results that 8 in 10 voters believe suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story changed the election’s results, it’s clear that the 51 anti-Trump spooks who signed the now-infamous Blinken-Morell-Clapper-Hayden-Brennan letter clearly believed that their effort could swing the election in Biden’s favor. In fact, Morell, the organizer of the operation, admitted as much in sworn testimony before House committees last year. Team Biden knew the laptop was certain to be a hot-button issue in the upcoming, nationally televised Trump-Biden debate on October 22, 2020 — and it was, as President Trump hit him during the debate with “laptop from hell” taunts.
Asked by House committee members why he had organized the letter campaign, Morell said it “was to help Vice President Biden in the debate” and “because I wanted him to win the election.” In soliciting co-signers, Morell had sent an email to fellow operatives saying their help was urgently needed “because we think Trump will attack Biden on the issue at this week’s debate and we want to give the VP a talking point to use in response.” Again, in a similar email to ex-CIA chief John Brennan, Morell wrote: “Trying to give the [Biden] campaign, particularly during the debate on Thursday, a talking point to push back on Trump on this issue.”
During the debate, Biden did use the ammunition provided by the Deep State operatives. When Trump brought up Hunter’s laptop, Biden responded: “Look, there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what this, he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan. They have said that this has all the characteristics — four– five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him….”
Of course, it was not just “Sleepy Joe” saying this. This same message was echoed over and over again by ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, Reuters, Bloomberg, etc., etc. What’s more, the Fake News industrial complex was aided and abetted in this effort to debunk the Hunter Biden laptop via a coordinated censorship campaign with Facebook, Google, and Twitter — orchestrated by the CIA and FBI.
All of this and much more was fleshed out in detail in a May 10, 2023 joint report issued by the House Committee on the Judiciary, the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence titled How Senior Intelligence Community Officials and the Biden Campaign Worked to Mislead American Voters.
Censorship Industrial Complex
Did the same media echo chamber that endlessly heaped ridicule on the laptop as “disinformation” and bowed in reverence to the “Letter of 51” rush to give the blockbuster report of the joint House committees wall-to-wall coverage? You know the answer: Most Americans have never heard of it. Again, no surprise. After all, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the rest of the media herd waited until more than a year after the laptop surfaced, until Joe Biden — their man — was firmly ensconced in the White House, to admit that, “Oh, gee, looks like it really is Hunter’s laptop and not Russian disinfo.” (See here and here.)
Merrick Garland’s Department of Injustice was even more dilatory. More than four years after the Hunter Biden laptop surfaced, in January 2024, the Biden/Garland DOJ quietly confirmed (albeit hidden in a court filing) that they had authenticated Hunter’s laptop. More than four years! Did NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN rush to report this momentous DOJ admission? Yeah, right. It was crickets again. “So how much time have the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks spent on this official acknowledgment?” the Media Research Center (MRC) asked. The answer: “ZERO seconds.” (Emphasis in MRC statement.) Again, no surprise. As shown by a detailed analysis by MRC staff of every minute and second of coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story by the major networks (ABC, NBC, CBS), when the Big Three aren’t censoring the laptop story completely they are protecting Biden by dismissing its authenticity and/or its significance. In other words, despite all the media’s alleged concern about Putin and Russia, they have proven they are as adept at censorship and disinformation as Pravda, Novosti, and RT (Russia Today).
Still At It: “Russia, Russia, Russia”
In a March 2017 address to an intelligence conference sponsored by The Cipher Brief, an intelligence website, Obama’s ex-CIA chief Mike Morell admitted that the Trump-Russia collusion charges were all smoke and mirrors and no fire. “On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all,” Morell said. “There’s no little campfire, there’s no little candle, there’s no spark. And there’s a lot of people looking for it.” That was an astounding admission that received very little media coverage — and no mea culpas from Morell or the media for having perpetrated the false narrative.
Around the same time, on March 5, in an interview with Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press, James Clapper acknowledged that he had “no evidence” of collusion between Donald Trump or his campaign with Russia. Since that time, what evidence have the Mueller special counsel investigation, the bipartisan investigations by the House and Senate, and the nonstop sleuthing by the anti-Trump media turned up? Zero. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. But that didn’t stop Morell, Clapper, and their “Letter of 51” co-conspirators from resurrecting the “Russia, Russia, Russia” propaganda line for the 2020 election.
And, yes, the Trump-Putin reboot is in full swing for 2024. Washington Post: “Russia looms over yet another Trump presidential campaign.” CNN: “Putin looms over a third successive US election.” TIME: “How Putin Co-Opted the Republican Party.” Politico: “The prospect of a second Trump presidency has the intelligence community on edge.” And much, much more. We’re seeing nothing less than a shameless repeat of the same disinformation operation, featuring quotes from the same discredited Deep State operatives and the usual nameless “intelligence officials.”
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and the House Intelligence, Oversight, and Weaponization committees continue to produce copious evidence of the Biden regime working hand in hand with the globalist cabal inside the intelligence community and their media and social media accomplices. No one should have any doubt that we are witnessing genuine election interference on megadose steroids.
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William F. Jasper
Senior editor William F. Jasper is an author/journalist/commentator/documentary producer with a well-earned reputation as one of America’s top investigative reporters, most renowned for his in-depth, years-long investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing and its aftermath. For more than three decades he served as an accredited correspondent at the United Nations in New York and UN summits around the world.
Published with permission of thenewamerican.com