The White House announced on Friday that Joe Biden has appointed to his Intelligence Advisory Board an Obama-era intelligence official and MSNBC contributor who falsely claimed in October 2020 that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.
“This looks like Russian intelligence, this walks like Russian intelligence, this talks like Russian intelligence,” said Jeremy Bash, the former Obama official, on MSNBC, October 19, 2020.
Bash was one of 51 former intelligence officials who signed the now infamous letter suggesting the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was part of Russia’s interference in the 2020 election—not a shocking and disturbing glimpse into Hunter Biden’s gross and salacious illegal activities and the Biden family’s corrupt foreign influence-peddling operations.
With the 2020 election just weeks away, the corporate media worked hand-in-glove with the nation’s corrupt intel community to shoot down the growing scandal before it could torpedo their candidate’s campaign.
Natasha Bertrand, writing for Politico, put out an article on October 19 titled: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”
Here's a letter signed by over 50 top IC officials claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
Includes Clapper, Brennan, Morrell, etc. Joe Biden & Psaki said it too.
Imagine taking any of these people remotely seriously today. https://t.co/rbHZEvBOyW
— Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.today (@JordanSchachtel) March 17, 2022
That same day, multiple media outlets ran anonymously sourced stories claiming that the FBI was investigating the emails as part of a Russian effort to spread disinformation ahead of the 2020 election.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan last week that his platform suppressed stories about the laptop based on an FBI warning that it could be Russian disinformation. Twitter famously suspended the New York Post over its accurate reporting on the “Laptop from Hell.”
On Oct. 19, 2020, then-Director Of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe immediately debunked the “Russian disinfo” conspiracy theory, saying there was no intelligence to support the idea that Hunter Biden’s emails were linked to the Russians.
But not the so-called national security expert Jeremy Bash. On MSNBC that same night, he doubled down on the conspiracy theory. “This looks like Russian intelligence, this walks like Russian intelligence, this talks like Russian intelligence,” he told host Nicole Wallace.
Bash boiled it down to a partisan “effort to cook up supposed dirt” on the irreproachable Biden, whom Wallace called “one of the most vetted politicians in this country.” .
“This effort by Rudy Giuliani and the New York Post and Steve Bannon to cook up supposed dirt on Joe Biden looks like a classic Russian playbook disinformation campaign,” he said earnestly. Bash went on to link the laptop scandal to Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which Trump urged Ukraine to investigate the Bidens’ corrupt business dealings. Democrats would go on to impeach Trump over what the president always insisted was a “perfect” phone call.
“And then Rudy Giuliani suddenly comes forward with these mysteriously created emails—probably hacked through a Russian intelligence operation—we have to acknowledge the fact that the president of the United States is supporting, is condoning, is welcoming a Russian Intelligence operation in 2020,” Bash insisted, adding with a straight face, “this is collusion in plain sight!”
More than a year after it mattered, the New York Times and the Washington Post finally caught up with the truth, and reported that the contents in the laptop were legitimate and confirmed that Hunter Biden was under federal investigation for tax fraud.
FBI Whistleblowers have since reached out to Republicans in Congress and shed light on the partisan corruption at the Bureau.
In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Chris Wray in July, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) alleged that the whistleblowers had informed him that the FBI had “developed information about Hunter Biden’s criminal financial and related activity” in the lead-up to the 2020 election, but partisan actors in the FBI falsely labeled the laptop as “disinformation.”
According to the whistleblowers, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten prepared an assessment in August 2020 that was used by others at the FBI “to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation.”
Additionally, according to the whistleblowers, the assistant special agent in charge of the Washington Field Office, Timothy Thibault, tried to quash any further investigation of Hunter Biden by ordering the matter closed “without providing a valid reason as required by FBI guidelines.”
The whistleblowers claim that in October of 2020, one month before the election, Thibault “attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future,” Grassley said.
The whistleblowers also told Grassley that Thibault routinely “opened or approved, investigations based on unsubstantiated or unverified statements sourced to biased media publications.” But in other instances, he “declined to open or approve investigations based on partisan objectives, notwithstanding the existence of proper predication.”
Thibault was forced to resign and was escorted out of the FBI’s headquarters on Friday after coming under congressional scrutiny for alleged political bias in his handling of the laptop, and other politically sensitive investigations.
Despite the fallout from this ongoing scandal, Biden has chosen Bash, one of the 51 “Russian disinfo” conspiracy theorists, to sit on the 16-seat President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.
Bash was a CIA chief of staff during the Obama presidency. During the Trump years, he peddled damaging RussiaGate conspiracy theories on MSNBC that were concocted to hobble Trump’s presidency.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the top Republican on the House Oversight committee, on Monday accused Joe Biden of using the government to protect himself and his son from further fallout from the laptop scandal.
Comer told DailyMail.com that “it comes as no surprise that President Biden is appointing to his Intelligence Advisory Board a partisan who colluded with the Swamp to hide the truth and influence the 2020 election by dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The congressman noted that “the Biden Administration has a pattern of using the power of the federal government to protect the Biden family and reward those who do their bidding.”
Comer also told the Daily Mail that the regime has refused to sanction any Russian oligarchs with ties to Hunter, and has participated in “hiding” the allegedly corrupt activity of his family members from Congress.
In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Sen. Ron Johnson said that Joe Biden would never have been elected if not for the FBI’s suppression of laptop story.
“We’ve seen polls that show that had the American public known the corruption of the Biden family and Hunter Biden, Joe Biden would not be president,” Johnson told Maria Bartiromo on Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures. “We wouldn’t have open borders. We wouldn’t have 40-year high inflation, record gas prices, rising crime.”
He added: “All these disasters and results from the Biden administration and the Democratic government wouldn’t have happened but for the FBI’s politicization, their partisanship, and their suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop. Again, they had it in December 2019 and did nothing with it.”
Grassley on Sunday promised to continue investigating Hunter Biden and to try to root out the “political bias” within the FBI if Republicans take the lower chamber’s majority.
“I want you to know that I’m not going to give up on the Hunter Biden investigation,” Grassley told a gathering with Iowa Republicans. “Every one of you in this room and everybody that isn’t in this room, ought to have extraordinary confidence in the FBI. But today, we can’t have it.”