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Revisiting Hunter’s Laptop
You hear? The emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop are real. No less than the New York Times, the official MSM newspaper of the MSM, agrees. Actually, the FBI agreed first, as they’re in the middle of an ongoing criminal investigation into Hunter’s business and tax activities based on the contents of the laptop. Despite massive coverage of the emails in the non-MSM, it was only the FBI’s use of the laptop which finally forced the Times to admit to this year what it said was bull last year. Politico, based on a book by one of its own writers, now, too, admits the emails are real, not Russian disinformation.
Now that we all agree the emails are real, and we can talk about them in polite company, what’s the big deal? Is this just another case of “buh buh her emails!!!”
Well, yes, sort of. As the media went full-spectrum to hide, diminish, downplay, and muddle the story about Hillary Clinton’s emails, so did they do the same with Hunter’s. In Clinton’s case, knowledgeable people, experts in government classification, were forced to endure months of “news” speculating on whether the Secretary of State’s official correspondence might contain something classified, or about whether running one’s own unsecured email server for official business was some sort of legal violation, and then questions about whether deleting 30,000 pieces of potential evidence was “okay.” Despite failing to kill the story (Hillary’s shifting excuses gave it new life at each turn) the media softened its edges enough that when then-FBI Director James Comey disingenuously proclaimed Hillary innocent the public was ready to move on.
In Hunter’s case the emails were buried, not merely diminished, as the MSM came to better understand its super powers. The hallmark was the interplay among the American intelligence services and the MSM, working for the Democratic Party. That interplay, awkward in 2016 with Comey at center stage, matured in 2020. As the NY Post and others broke the story that a laptop full of Hunter Biden’s files indicated a potential pay-for-play scenario involving then-candidate Joe Biden just ahead of the presidential election, almost in real time more than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed a letter claiming the emails “have all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” With absolutely no evidence, the signers said their national security experience made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” “If we are right,” they added, “this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”
The letter was evil brilliance in that it played off earlier prejudices, from 2016, that the Russians sought to manipulate American elections. In fact, most of the key signatories — James Clapper and John Brennan among them — had played key roles in misdirecting public opinion around the DNC server hack and later the whole of Russiagate. In the hands of the MSM the meme quickly morphed into “the laptop is fake,” a parallel to “but her emails!!!”
Something new was introduced, however, the active blocking of information from a large number of Americans. With the letter as “proof” the laptop was disinformation, social media took the handoff. Twitter locked The New York Post‘s account after the Post refused to obey Twitter’s orders to delete its own reporting. Twitter also blocked all references to the laptop story by all users, even banning links to the story in DMs. Facebook announced no discussion of the issue would be allowed pending a “fact check” which never came. MSM labeled the laptop fake, social media blocked the news, and pretty much the public fell in line and voted for Joe Biden without knowing squat about what he and his son Hunter had been up to.
TAC readers were not included in this seething heap of ignorance. TAC, alongside the NY Post and many other non-MSM outlets, understood the emails were worthy of the public’s attention. In the case of TAC, we published a deep dive into the laptop’s contents online in December 2020, and a deeper dive in our print edition. NY Post readers got much of the same information even before the election. As the contents of the laptop become more widely known, it appears the intelligence community-media-Democratic Party was right to hide them before the presidential election: almost half of Americans believe Trump would have won a second term if the media had fully reported on the laptop’s revelations. Another poll showed enough people in battleground states would have changed their minds had they known about the emails to give Trump the electoral votes needed for reelection. If you’re keeping score, hiding the emails marks the second election controlled by the intelligence community-media-Democratic Party.
Given that for better or worse Joe Biden was elected, and is very unlikely to run for a second term, do Hunter’s emails still matter in 2022? Yes. The laptop still has a lot to tell us.
— The emails matter because their handling exposed (again) the way the intelligence community-media-Democratic Party manipulated your vote. You need to understand their techniques ahead of 2024.
— The emails matter because they are just the tip of the iceberg. We already know Hunter did not report much of the income revealed by the emails, and recently paid one million dollars in back taxes with Federal fraud charges pending. There is more to come which may affect who you vote for in 2024.
— The emails matter because they show Hunter did or was planning to kick in money to his father (“10 percent for the big guy,” read one email.) There was co-mingling of their finances, shared bank accounts, and covering each other’s bills, which need to be investigated. In one message, Hunter revealed he was locked out of a bank account because his father was using it. In a text, Hunter complained that he was required to give his father half of his money for some unspecified task.
— The emails matter because they are primary evidence of possibly criminal actions by Hunter that bump into Joe’s official work first as Obama’s VP and now as president. Hunter Biden had extensive deals working in Ukraine and China that conflict-of-interest laws demand to be investigated. Hunter took large sums of money from businesses in Ukraine that were part of his father’s official portfolio as vice president, and took large sums of money from Chinese shell companies with ties to the Chinese oligarchy. Hunter performed no work in return for the money. In the case of China, he appeared to launder money, taking in six figures, skimming off a percentage, then handing the remainder over to a U.S. corporate entity of the Chinese organization. That got around Chinese government currency export regulations. Only an FBI investigation will show if Joe was involved in any of the same.
— The emails matter because they were blackmail fodder, and the FBI must find out if Hunter was tapped by any foreign intelligence service when his father was VP. On the laptop was evidence of Hunter’s filthy life, actions simply screaming to a foreign intelligence service “Blackmail me!” Hunter’s laptop was chocked with video showing him smoking crack. Hunter spent money on escorts, some $21,000 on cam sites, big plays on all sorts of depravities. There was correspondence referencing Hunter’s affair with his dead brother Beau’s widow.
— The emails matter because if Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife’s politics may rise to the level of his impeachment, then Joe Biden’s son’s action may do so also.
— The emails matter, if you keep score this way, because they show Hunter was doing what so many can only imagine they’ll one day have proof Jared, Don, Jr., Ivanka, and Eric did.
— The emails matter because the President of the United States says they do not matter. Joe Biden’s defense is a sweeping: “My son did nothing wrong.” That makes Joe either too ignorant to hold high office, or an accomplice in a cover-up, both 25th Amendment territory. This is especially important because Joe ran on an anti-corruption platform following the Trump family escapades.
— The emails matter because they are not a smoking gun, but a multi-pronged series of leads and pointers which deserve investigation to see if there is a smoking gun. To dismiss them because they are “incomplete” is to fail to understand the difference between evidence and conclusion. And that makes you look sorta dumb shouting about it on Late Night.
Editor’s Note: Though the full text of the emails are not yet available in full online, you can read TAC’s summary, with specific examples, here.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Tradecraft: Why Spies Knew the Hunter Biden Emails Were Not Russia Disinfo
Hunter Biden just paid over a million dollars in back taxes for income he never claimed, but which was found in his emails, the ones from his laptop that had been dismissed by the MSM as Russian disinformation.
The FBI is conducting an ongoing criminal investigation into Hunter’s business activities based on the contents of the laptop. It was only the FBI’s use of the laptop as evidence which finally forced the New York Times this month to admit what it said was bull last year.
See, as the NY Post broke the story that a laptop full of Hunter Biden’s files indicated a potential pay-for-play scenario involving then-candidate Joe Biden just ahead of the 2020 presidential election, almost in real time more than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed a letter claiming the emails “have all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The signers said their national security experience made them “deeply suspicious the Russian government played a significant role in this case. If we are right this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”
The letter played off prejudices from 2016 that the Russians manipulated an American election. In fact, most of the letter’s signatories — James Clapper and John Brennan among them — had played key roles in misdirecting public opinion around the DNC server hack and later the whole of Russiagate. In the hands of the MSM the meme quickly morphed into “the laptop is fake, ignore it.” Twitter and Facebook quickly banned all mentions of the laptop, and the story disappeared in the MSM. Until now.
In my 24-year State Department career I was exposed to foreign disinformation and as a journalist today I read the Hunter Biden emails. There is no way experienced intelligence officers could have mistaken the contents of the Biden laptop for fake, produced, material.
The most glaring reason is most of the important emails could be verified by simply contacting the recipient and asking him if the message was real. Disinfo at this level of sophistication would never be so simple to disprove.
In addition, the laptop contents were about 80 percent garbage and maybe 20 percent useful (dirty) information, a huge waste of time if you are trying to move your adversary to act in a certain way. Such an overbearing amount of non-actionable material also risks burying the good stuff, and if this is disinfo you want your adversary to find the good stuff. It is also expensive to produce information that has no take attached to it, and fake info of any kind is at risk of discovery, blowing the whole operation. Lastly, nothing on the laptop was a smoking gun. You need the disinfo to lead fairly directly to some sort of actionable conclusion, a smoking gun, or your cleverness will be wasted.
Compare the alleged Russian disinfo of the Biden laptop to the real disinfo of the Christopher Steele “Russiagate” Dossier. To begin, Steele pastes fake classified markings on his document. That signals amateur work to the pros but causes the media to salivate, Steele’s goal (always remember who your target is, who you are trying to fool.) Steele never names his sources to prevent verification by the media (a major tell.) Steele also finds a way to push the important info up front, in his case a Summary. If Biden’s laptop was disinfo, the makers could have included an Index, or Note to Self where “Hunter” called out the good stuff. Or maybe even a fake email doing the same. Steele’s dossier is also concise, 35 typed pages. Hunter’s laptop is a pack rat’s nightmare of jumbled stuff, thousands of pages, receipts, info on cam girls, and the like.
But the real give away is who was out there peddling the info/disinfo. Ideally you want the stuff to come from the most reliable source you can find to give it credibility. Steele, as a professional intelligence officer, used multiple, overlapping sources, including himself. The list included leaks to a selected patsy journalists, the State Department, John McCain, and even the Department of Justice (FBI and DOJ officials.) Steele not only planted the disinfo, he figured out a way to create “buzz” around it. Textbook work.
For the Biden laptop, it is understood the whole messy thing was shopped all across the MSM by Rudy Giuliani, about the most mistrusted man available for the purpose. The source must be reputable for the gag to work and there is no way a full-spectrum Russian disinformation operation would use Rudy. That alone should have ended the discussion among those 50 letter signing intelligence officials.
Lastly, everything on the laptop was verifiable in an hour or two by an organization like the NSA. They could have had an intern verify the emails, bank statements, wire transfers, etc. using about half of the capabilities Edward Snowden revealed they have. James Clapper and John Brennan knew this, and knew equally well the media, if they picked up the story at all, would not ask any such questions, and the NSA, et al, would never weigh in. It would be our little secret.
So we’ll call that letter claiming the Biden emails were potential Russian disinfo a lie, a fabrication, made-up, fake stuff designed to influence an election. That’s disinformation by any definition, and evidence the only disinformation op run in 2020 was run against the American voters by their own intelligence community working with the media and on behalf of the Democrats. Almost half of Americans now believe Trump would have won a second term if the media had fully reported on the laptop’s revelations, so it worked. You know some of its hallmarks now, so keep a sharp eye out in 2024.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Harsh Lessons of History: Faux Reports of Progress Against IS
(This article, written by me, originally appeared on Middle East Eye)
Allegations that American military analysts may have “cooked the books” to skew intelligence assessments about the campaign against Islamic State (IS), providing a more optimistic account of progress, are a sign of bad things to come.
Bad intel leads to bad decisions. Bad intel created purposefully suggests a war that is being lost, with the people in charge that loathe to admit it even as they continue to stumble forward, ever-more blind. And if that sounds like America’s previous war in Iraq, or its earlier one in Vietnam, you are not wrong.
A Pentagon Inspector General’s investigation into allegations of overly optimistic intelligence reporting, first reported in the New York Times, began after at least one Defence Intelligence Agency analyst claimed officials overseeing the war against Islamic State were improperly reworking the assessments prepared for senior policy makers. The focus is on whether military officials changed the conclusions of draft intelligence assessments during a review process and then passed them on.
Intelligence typically involves working with incomplete data (one analyst likens the process to turning over a small subset of rocks in a large field) to assess the present situation and then to predict the future.
Anyone who claims to be certain about the future is more likely to be a fortune teller than a professional analyst, and so it is quite reasonable and common for a group of honest, well-meaning people to assess a data set and come to different conclusions. To be of value, however, legitimate differences of opinion must be played off one another in a non-politicised, intellectually vigorous check-and-balance fashion, as enshrined in Intelligence Community Directive 203.
There is a wide gap between that, and what it appears the inspector general is now looking into.
We can assume, arguendo, the inspector general knows a legitimate difference of opinion when he sees one, can easily rule out a sloppy supervisor, or spot a mid-level official rewriting things to pump up his own credentials. Investigations of the level leaked to the New York Times are not needed to deal with such situations. What appears to be under the microscope is whether or not the intelligence assessments headed to senior policy makers are purposely inaccurate.
Cooking the intel has a sordid history in the annals of American warfare.
Former CIA analyst Paul Pillar described the process in a postmortem on the 2003 Iraq intelligence failures, noting “Intelligence analysts and their managers knew that the United States was heading for war with Iraq. It was clear that the Bush administration would frown on or ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysis that supported such a decision.”
Those factors led directly to the flawed if not outright fraudulent 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) supporting the narrative of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The NIE was used by the White House to press Congress into supporting war, and by Colin Powell to do the same at the United Nations. The so-called Downing Street Memo bluntly stated “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”.
Analysis during the Vietnam War also pushed forward a steady but false narrative of victory. Former CIA and US Army analyst Patrick Eddington notes analysts’ conclusions that the US would be unlikely to ever defeat North Vietnamese forces were repeatedly overruled by commanders certain the United States was winning. He cites a complex inter-agency process of manipulating data to match the needs of General William Westmoreland’s narrative that enemy morale and military structure were deteriorating.
The CIA’s Paul Pillar again, stresses the difficulties of dissent, and speaking of truth to power: “You’re part of a large structure that does have a vested interest in portraying the overall mission as going well.” Compare that to what any journalist, graduate student or successful businessperson should be able to tell you, that information must drive conclusions, not the inverse. The more complex the problem, the higher the quality of information needed to successfully solve it.
The situation with Islamic State is more complex than that faced by the United States in Iraq over a decade ago, or in Vietnam before that. IS is a trans-state, loosely-organised fighting force, whose defeat requires the United States to stitch together a collection of strange bedfellows, each with their own agendas, in hopes the sum will add up to victory.
The Iranians support Iraq’s Shiite militias against IS, but not Iraq’s Sunni forces. Turkey is prepared to wage war only in equal dollops against America’s opponents IS, and America’s allies the Kurds. The Kurds themselves fight well in their own territories but are loathe to strike elsewhere in Iraq. Creating a unified strategy out of all that demands hard, objective reporting and courageous analysis.
There are three positions on why the military might not be providing that courageous analysis, and instead substituting a more positive spin on events.The first is basic bureaucratic cover – saying things are going well is a neat way of telling the boss that the military is doing the job they were sent to do, a self-administered pat on the back. Such thinking should never be easily discarded. However, higher-ups in the military chain of command will eventually look askance at such tactics, fearful of blow-back if events on the battlefield turn sour.
The second is of more concern. Imagine a scenario where the president is rejecting advice from his generals to continue the war against IS, and wants to tamp down the level of American involvement (as some say Kennedy wished to do in Vietnam before his assassination). The president pushes back, saying nothing has worked, that ongoing failure comes at great cost. A military that wishes to stay engaged, again, as in Vietnam, might want to create the appearance that current levels of involvement are good, and thus increased involvement will be even better.
But it is the third position, reporting only the good news senior policy makers signal they want to hear, that history suggests is the dominant reason.
If American military intelligence insists on pushing false narratives of progress up the chain of command, that strongly suggests someone higher up, afraid of the ground truth, is happy to receive only the palliative of good news. And that is bad news. The lessons of modern history make clear that misleading policy makers who themselves seek to be misled can only yield disastrous consequences.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Cooking the Books: The Danger of Bad Intel on Islamic State
Are American analysts skewing intelligence reporting and assessments to provide a rosier outlook of U.S. progress against Islamic State?
At least one civilian Defense Intelligence Agency analyst says so, and has convinced the Pentagon’s Inspector General to look into it. The analyst says he had evidence officials at United States Central Command, overseeing the American campaign against Islamic State, were improperly rewriting conclusions of intelligence assessments prepared for policy makers, including President Obama.While legitimate differences of opinion are common in intel reporting, to be of value those differences must be presented to policy makers, and played off one another in an intellectually vigorous check-and-balance fashion. There is a wide gap between that, and what it appears the Inspector General is now looking at.
Cooking the intel to match policy makers’ expectations has a sordid history in the annals of American warfare. Analysis during the Vietnam War pushed forward a steady but false narrative of victory. In the run-up to Iraq War 2.0, State Department analysis claiming Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction was buried in favor of obvious falsehoods.
Jokes about the oxymoron of “military intelligence” aside, bad intel leads to bad decisions. Bad intel created purposefully suggests a war that is being lost, with the people in charge loathe to admit it.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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