James Clapper’s Disinformation
Whether or not GOP House oversight yields answers about 2020 election meddling, it is at least producing some fantastical squirming and finger pointing. See this week’s incredulous Clapper defense.
That would be James Clapper, the Obama director of national intelligence, one of 51 former intelligence officials who in October 2020 issued a highly consequential letter. The New York Post had revealed contents of a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden. The information raised ugly questions about his use of the Biden family name in his foreign business dealings and the extent to which his father knew about them. With weeks to go in a close presidential campaign, the laptop bomb might have derailed Joe Biden’s White House bid.
Instead, the intel cabal neutralized the threat almost overnight. “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” blared a Politico headline on Oct. 19, 2020. The Clapper & Co. letter explained that the supposed Hunter emails had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” making the signers “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” They had no evidence, but the letter served its purpose by providing the news media, Democrats and social-media censors the excuse to suppress the story.
But the laptop was real, and Republicans suddenly have subpoena power. Hence the remarkable sight this week of Mr. Clapper and fellow signatories resurfacing to blame their 2020 tradecraft on the press. The catalyst for this convenient claim is a batch of letters sent last week by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan to 12 of the letter’s signers, demanding documents and interviews about their decision to issue a public statement that “falsely implied” the Hunter story was bogus.
As blame-shifting goes, the press is usually a solid dumping spot. Yet in this case, the signers’ claims are laughable. Start with the partisan motivations. Mr. Clapper and John Brennan, President Obama’s director of the Central Intelligence Agency, were the most politicized officials to ever hold their posts, and were hip-deep in the 2016 Russia-collusion hoax. Most of the rest of the signers were Biden supporters or Never Trumpers. The press made hay of the “bipartisan” quality of the letter, but the conservative side featured folks like Mike Hayden, George W. Bush’s CIA director, who prior to signing the letter had cut an ad beseeching the country not to vote for Donald Trump.
Also consider the hand-picked messenger. Former Brennan aide Nick Shapiro didn’t approach any old Politico reporter with the letter: He chose Natasha Bertrand, who served as one of the key outlets for the outlandish Russia-collusion claims that opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and former Obama officials shopped four years earlier. The letter writers knew exactly what they were getting by going to this reporter—and more likely than not the headline reflected their intent. This was no press sandbagging; it was press cooperation.
And then there’s the silence. No signers complained about the Politico letter after its publication. None corrected the record as dozens of outlets repeated the supposed distortion. No one said a word when Joe Biden, in a presidential debate and a CBS interview, used the letter to declare definitively that the laptop story was “disinformation from the Russians,” “a bunch of garbage,” a “Russian plan” and a “smear campaign.”
As to the muteness, Mr. Clapper claimed to be “unaware” of how Mr. Biden described the letter. Did he and his 50 co-signers make a pact to skip the presidential debate, to tune out all subsequent coverage, and never to communicate again? Surely one would have noticed the “distorted” claim and felt compelled to alert the others. And surely a group capable of collaborating on the letter was capable of correcting the record.
They didn’t, because they didn’t want to. The letter served its purpose. It was written by an intel community that knows well how to manipulate a narrative. It was written by a group of officials who abused their titles—and the public’s belief that their backgrounds gave them unique insights—to peddle a claim for which they had no evidence. It was written to benefit Mr. Biden’s election bid.
Any claims to the opposite are what you might call disinformation.