Hunter’s laptop admission reveals intel community bias

FPI / April 7, 2021

Hunter Biden’s admission that a laptop filled with details of Biden family shady foreign business deals “certainly” could be genuine not only buries the Left's Russia disinformation narrative, but underscores what conservatives say is the U.S. intelligence community’s "overall bias in favor" of Democrats and Joe Biden, a report said.

That bias has become evident this year in the coverage of the corporate media and the unprecedented censorship policies of the social media corporations.

In an April 5 report for The Washington Times, Rowan Scarborough cited three recent events:

⦁ After The New York Post in October first published Hunter Biden’s laptop emails showing that he did political favors for his Ukrainian employer, high-powered intelligence community alumni published a letter blaming the disclosures on Kremlin disinformation. The letter injected influential former leaders directly into the presidential campaign and gave news media an excuse not to cover the contents of the Apple MacBook. Candidate Biden also said his son was the victim of a Russian scheme. No evidence backing the claim has materialized.

⦁ Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines released an Intelligence Community Assessment on foreign influence in the presidential election. It depicted Biden and his “family” as victims of Kremlin disinformation from its Ukrainian actors but failed to mention Hunter Biden’s financial windfall in the country. Fred Fleitz, who was a National Security Council senior staffer under President Trump, wrote in The Federalist: “There are good reasons to believe the new report was rigged to hurt Trump.”

⦁ The DNI’s March 1 report, “Domestic Violent Extremism Poses Heightened Threat in 2021,” dovetailed with the Biden administration’s talking points about the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol, about hard-line right-wing groups and about a new Pentagon “stand down” to educate troops about extremism.

“Top layers of the IC (intelligence community) are still thoroughly politicized,” Scarborough cited a Republican congressional staffer as saying. “They still see it as their duty to defeat Trump and vanquish his supporters. That’s why the new extremism report reads like it was written by Adam Schiff.”

Fleitz, president of the Center for Security Policy, noted: “Our intelligence agencies have been captured by the politically correct Left, which does not tolerate dissenting views that help Republican presidents or hurt Democratic ones.”

Following the New York Post’s exclusive on Hunter Biden's laptop, a group of former intelligence officials from the Obama administration published a letter all but blaming Russia.

"The story for liberal news outlets became the accusation, not the disclosure that Hunter Biden had arranged a meeting between a Burisma Holdings executive, his employer, and Vice President Biden, according to the executive’s email," Scarborough noted.

The Obama-era officials’ letter said: “The arrival on the U.S. political scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter, much of it related to his time serving on the Board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.

“For the Russians at this point, with Trump down in the polls, there is incentive for Moscow to pull out the stops to do anything possible to help Trump win and/or to weaken Biden should he win. A ‘laptop op’ fits the bill, as the publication of the emails are clearly designed to discredit Biden,” the letter said.

The 51 signers included former DNI James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former acting CIA Director Michael Morell.

Clapper and Brennan "were among Trump’s harshest critics on cable TV networks CNN and MSNBC. Both implied strongly that Trump was a Russian spy and/or operator," Scarborough noted.

None of the Trump-Russia federal investigations came to that conclusion. Neither Clapper nor Brennan provided direct evidence.

While promoting his book, “Beautiful Things,” Hunter Biden said the laptop could be his. Fighting cocaine addiction at the time, he said he did not remember dropping it off at a repair shop.

“There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me. It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was the — that it was Russian intelligence,” he said.

The New York Post responded in an editorial: “Oh, Hunter, you’re so full of it. The troubled son knows that he left the laptop at a Delaware repair shop and then forgot about it. How could he forget about something like that? Well, he admits that he’s relapsed on drugs as recently as last year’s presidential campaign.”

No person in the copious threads of laptop emails and texts, including Biden family members, has disputed their authenticity.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s first DNI report of significance was a four-page outline on extremist groups in America.

"Here, too, Republicans see bias," Scarborough noted.

The DNI almost exclusively confines a predicted increase in attacks to the political right.

“The IC assesses that several factors could increase the likelihood or lethality of [domestic violent extremists] attacks in 2021 and beyond, including escalating support from persons in the United States or abroad, growing perceptions of government overreach,” the report said in a description often applied to militias.

The report added: “The IC assesses that racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) and militia violent extremists (MVEs) present the most lethal DVE threats, with RMVEs most likely to conduct mass-casualty attacks against civilians and MVEs typically targeting law enforcement and government personnel and facilities.”

All Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence sent a letter to Haines questioning the need for such a report. They suggested the findings were hasty because they did not go through the more elaborate National Intelligence Community Assessment process.

“We are concerned that IC elements and personnel acted beyond their legal authority in its production,” said the letter, spearheaded by Rep. Devin Nunes, California Republican.

Since the report was issued, there have been three notable attacks in the U.S.: a disgruntled Muslim is accused of killing 10 people at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado; a Hispanic man is accused of killing four people at a business park in Orange County, California; and a Black follower of the Nation of Islam rammed his car into a U.S. Capitol barricade, killing a police officer and wounding another before he was fatally shot.

Michael Johns, a speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush and a tea party co-founder, said intelligence analysts are “close-minded.”

“President Trump was right to run on a ‘drain the swamp’ agenda, but draining the swamp starts with personnel and operational processes, and U.S. intel agencies have become very entrenched, very set in their ways and often their views, and generally close-minded as it relates to constructive change,” Johns told The Washington Times.

“China’s Communist Party will prove the biggest security threat of the 21st century. It also has a vast and still underestimated intelligence operation in just about every segment of U.S. society that needs to be rooted out, including in the private sector and academia. A lot of this starts with having a DNI who has the authority, fortitude and insight necessary to really execute reform,” he said.

Free Press International