A former Obama intelligence official and MSNBC pundit who falsely claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop could be Russian disinformation said Monday that he “expects” leaders of the U.S. military and Intelligence Community will undermine President Trump and disobey orders if they deem them to be “unlawful” or “political.”
Jeremy Bash appeared on MSNBC with host Nicolle Wallace to discuss how the Intelligence Community will cope when Republicans hold all the levers of power.
“We’re going to be entering a period in which Donald Trump now controls the entire executive branch, his party will control the Senate, probably the House, and have a significant majority in the Supreme Court,” Bash said, adding that it would be up to the so-called “institutionalists” in the government to apply “checks and balances.”
“If there’s an unlawful order given to the United States Military, I expect and I think it will be the case, that uniformed military will not carry out unlawful orders,” he said. “If these people try to politicize the work of the Central Intelligence Agency—I know the people at the Central Intelligence Agency—they will not allow their work to be politicized.”
Bash, a former CIA chief of staff during Barack Obama’s presidency, was appointed to The President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) in August 2022 to offer Joe Biden national intelligence advice, despite being one of the 51 intelligence officials who signed a bogus letter ahead of the 2020 Election claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop had “the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
“This looks like Russian intelligence, this walks like Russian intelligence, this talks like Russian intelligence,” Bash said on MSNBC, October 19, 2020. “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.
Trump’s pick for CIA Director, John Ratcliffe, then-Trump’s National Intelligence Director, had 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.
It was not immediately clear how long Bash served on the President’s board, if at all, as a current list of PIAB members does not include his name.
He told Wallace that the members of the permanent bureaucracy in the U.S., including Intel officials, are “institutionalists” like him and “completely nonpartisan.”
“The people who wear the uniform of our country, the people who serve in out intelligence agencies, the people who are the career foreign service diplomats serving our departments and agencies are not part of any political party, they’re not part of a regime, they don’t have a loyalty oath to a person or to an agenda, they’re not even part of a loyal opposition,” Bash told Wallace. “They are completely non partisan and that’s the way we want it to be.”
Bash is a Founder and Managing Director of Beacon Global Strategies LLC, a liberal, D.C.-based strategic advisory firm that donated $48,850 to Democrat candidates and $0.00 to Republicans in 2024.
Bash expressed confidence that certain “institutionalist” Republicans, like new Majority Leader John Thune (S.D.), John Cornyn (Texas), Mitch McConnell (Ky.), and incoming Senator-Elect David McCormick (Penn.), would be able the thwart the confirmations of Trump’s appointees.
“I believe that they will want to see people leading these departments and agencies who will speak truth to power, who will be faithful to the ideal of nonpartisanship,” he told Wallace.
“I want people to know that the good people at CIA, the good people at National Intelligence, the good people at the Pentagon are not some deep state. They’re not going to pursue some political agenda,” Bash said. “They just don’t have it in their DNA. They don’t do it and they’re going to be really working for the interests of all Americans.”
Bash’s comments come as Republicans continue their investigations into the egregious weaponizations of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Justice (DOJ) in the wake of the Biden-Harris regime’s censorship enterprise, January 6 witch hunt, lawfare against Trump and conservatives, and the manufactured COVID pandemic.
Well, I see we have our first volunteer for a treason trial. The unabashed gall of this individual is utterly amazing.