The Cover-Up Is Worse Than the Crime

X (formerly Twitter)

The old Washington adage that the cover-up is worse than the crime has never been truer than in the Hunter Biden case. The charges on which he was convicted today have rightly been described as rinky-dink and divert from a much bigger scandal involving foreign influence payments to Hunter and other members of the Biden Family. This is the story that intelligence officials worked successfully with the Biden campaign to conceal from the American public prior to the 2020 election.

The FBI seized Hunter Biden’s laptop from the repair shop in December 2019, almost a year before the 2020 election. What was the Bureau’s response? Did it begin an investigation into Hunter’s shady foreign dealings and potential FARA violations? As the Twitter Files exposed, the FBI began telling “Trust & Safety” executives from social networking companies to be on the lookout for a Russian “hack-and-leak” operation involving Hunter Biden, priming these executives to censor the story. The FBI would have verified the authenticity of the laptop soon after seizing it, so its warnings to social media companies were deceptive.

When the NY Post story broke, 51 former intelligence officials, including 5 former directors of the CIA, wrote their infamous letter claiming the laptop was Russian disinformation. We now know from the sworn testimony of former CIA acting director Mike Morell that the letter was coordinated by then Biden campaign operative, now Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Note that the intelligence community (IC) adopted the same “Russian disinfo” cover story that the FBI had incepted with social networks. Indeed the letter became the “expert” confirmation the social networks needed to suppress the story.

What’s the take-away? The Biden campaign knew it had a problem a year before the election. A phony narrative was invented that the Russians were behind the story. The FBI communicated this narrative to social networks; dozens of intelligence officials backed it with the weight of their credentials; Biden himself invoked it as a defense in a presidential debate with Trump; and MSM reporters like Leslie Stahl dutifully repeated it. Finally social media companies suppressed the true story, depriving the American people of information they were entitled to know before they voted. This was election interference.

As journalist @mtaibbi explained, “By any marker, this is an enormous news story. If we go by the usual measuring stick of American scandal, the Watergate story, this potentially meets or exceeds that, on almost every level. Does it reach into the current White House? Check. Was it a craven attempt to subvert the electoral process? Check again. Did a presidential candidate engineer a massive public deception? Yes, resoundingly. Did it involve intelligence agencies? Yes, and these weren’t amateurs like Nixon’s plumbers. These were 50 of the most powerful people in the intelligence world… conspiring to meddle in domestic politics on a grand scale.”

Taken together with the IC’s participation in the Russiagate hoax during the Trump presidency, the security state has shown a brazen willingness to interfere in electoral politics on behalf of their preferred candidate. This is not democracy; it is the subversion of it. There’s only one way to send the message that this is unacceptable: vote for the candidate they hate on November 5.