By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, December 15, 2020
If there’s one thing that the Hunter Biden laptop episode
has proven, it is that former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency
aren’t as adept at evaluating evidence as advertised.
Five former directors or acting directors of the CIA
signed a letter asserting that the laptop, first reported by the New York
Post in the weeks before the election, “has all the classic hallmarks of a
Russian information operation.”
More than 50 former senior intelligence officials,
including former director of national intelligence James Clapper, endorsed the
letter, which was used by the Biden campaign and the press to discredit the
damning emails about Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
The signatories should have thought better of their
missive when they felt compelled to include the line, “We want to emphasize
that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by
President Trump’s personal attorney, are genuine or not and that we do not have
evidence of Russian involvement.”
That also should have tipped reporters off to the fact
that the letter was rank speculation masquerading as informed analysis. But
true to form, they happily ran with it instead.
In a complete reversal from the Cold War era, journalists
in the Trump years have not only reflexively believed representations from
national-security professionals about nefarious Russian plots, they have
actively sought them out and promoted them.
In this case, it was former U.S. intelligence officials
who were spreading disinformation in an attempt to mislead the American public
about a consequential matter touching on the front-runner in an American
presidential campaign. The call came from inside the house.
Anyone believing the officials, who used their past
titles and long experience to lend credibility to their letter, would have been
shocked to learn last week that Hunter Biden is under federal investigation for
tax crimes.
According to news reports, the laptop hasn’t advanced the
investigation, but the feds have looked at it, and there’s no indication that
it’s so-called foreign disinfo.
The provenance of the laptop wasn’t, to paraphrase
Winston Churchill’s famous line about Soviet foreign policy, a puzzle inside a
riddle wrapped in an enigma, but as simple as Hunter Biden — not the most
careful person — forgetting that he’d left it at a Wilmington, Del., repair
shop.
The idea that the Russians drove the laptop story was
always far-fetched. Certainly, no one would ever accuse Rudy Giuliani, who
brought the device to light, of being a credible source of information. But if
the Russians were behind it, they would have had to fabricate the laptop, drop
it off at the repair shop hoping that the owner would eventually look at it and
then be alarmed enough to tell someone about its contents, or compromise the
repair-shop owner and make him a tool in their operation.
This might have been plausible if we, indeed, have been
living in a Russian spy novel for the past five years. We haven’t.
Still, Democrats and the media relentlessly hewed to the
Russian-disinformation line. Of course, House Intelligence Committee chairman
Adam Schiff spouted it, “We know that this whole smear on Joe Biden comes from
the Kremlin.” Biden used it to deflect during a debate with Trump, “There are
50 former national-intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is
a Russian plan[t].” And the press, such as Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes,
who did in an interview with Trump, insisted that there was absolutely nothing
to see here.
We don’t know where the Hunter Biden story will end up.
But if he gets indicted, it’s at least going to be a significant distraction
for President Joe Biden and raise questions about how much he knew about his
son’s sketchy dealings.
This is the kind of story voters should be aware of when
choosing a president. And they would have been if there hadn’t, in effect, been
an American conspiracy to misinform people, led by former U.S. intelligence
officials who shamefully abused the public trust.
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