Was the FBI acting as an active oppositional force to Donald Trump during the 2020 election? That’s the story former DNI John Ratcliffe told Friday evening on Tucker Carlson’s show.

Recent revelations about how the bureau tried to suppress the damaging Hunter Biden story, including going to Facebook to falsely suggest it was Russian disinformation, have painted a picture of subterfuge to help elect Joe Biden. Ratcliffe told Carlson during his interview that while all that was going on, FBI Dir. Christopher Wray was telling the White House a very different story.

Former DNI John Ratcliffe says Mark Zuckerberg’s recollection of the FBI warning before the 2020 election, leading Facebook to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, was the opposite of what Director Christopher Wray told him at the time pic.twitter.com/0CcHZul79N

— Daniel Chaitin (@danielchaitin7) August 27, 2022

This confirms what was already suspected given that the FBI took possession of the laptop back in 2019. By the time field agents went to Facebook to “warn” them that it was Russian disinformation, there is no question they knew that was a lie. They themselves had the laptop and knew that what was on it was authentic.

As Ratcliffe notes, Democrats, including Rep. Adam Schiff, were still allowed to go out and claim falsely that the laptop wasn’t real. Dozens of former intel directors and agents also signed a letter pushing the Russian disinformation claim at the time. All the while, Wray was telling the White House that they knew the truth, yet the FBI did nothing to rectify the situation while actively trying to exacerbate it on the other end by lying to Facebook – and presumably, every other major social media platform.

Instead, it was left up to Ratcliffe to put out a statement that was quickly dismissed as partisan given his role as an appointee of Trump. By that point, the conventional wisdom had taken hold, and for months after the election, any mention of Hunter Biden’s laptop resulted in charges of spreading Russian propaganda. It’s astonishing when you break it all down, take a step back, and witness how corrupt our government is.

As Carlson notes at the end of the clip, what happened was blatant election interference as well, with the FBI putting its thumb on the scale in one of the most direct ways possible. The bureau quite literally seeded disinformation to those who control the flow of information while at the same time refusing to directly denounce it.

My only complaint with Ratcliffe’s commentary is that he still dances around the elephant in the room, which is Christopher Wray’s behavior, never quite getting to the obvious conclusion: The FBI director had to have known about all this. Random agents don’t just go to the world’s largest social media company without the upper echelons of leadership knowing.

Wray should be called out for what he is, which is a hack who believes he should influence how Americans think and even vote. This isn’t about being a Republican or Democrat, as James Comey’s egregious actions before and after the 2016 election illustrated. It’s about Washington apparatchiks believing they aren’t just above the law, but that they are the law.