Wednesday, Fox News anchor Bret Baier took former CIA official David Priess, who styles himself as “Publisher of Lawfare and Chief Operating Officer of the Lawfare Institute,” to the metaphorical woodshed.
Bret Baier was ostensibly interviewing Priess about a bizarre “armageddon” remark Biden made over the weekend (Biden Makes Chilling Statement About Present Threat of Nuclear Armageddon and Biden’s Response to Question if Armageddon Is Coming Is Something Else) and in classic “ambush interview” style changed the subject to the Hunter Biden laptop letter. The results were illustrative of the endemic corruption within the Intelligence Community.
Lawfare produces progressive legal porn; perhaps the most famous member of the blog is Benjamin Wittes, who punctuated every low-IQ accusation against President Trump with “BOOM!” This, presumably, indicated that the bullsh** posted was somehow significant. Solidifying their status as a gift, they also employ retired lieutenant colonel Alexander “Stay Puft Marshmallow Man” Vindman as their “Pritzker Military Fellow” — whatever the hell that is.
Preiss was one of the “51 former intelligence officials” who signed a letter during the final days of the 2020 campaign declaring that Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop had all the hallmarks of a Russian dezinformatsiya.
Statement on Hunter Biden Emails by streiff on Scribd
Hunter Biden’s laptop clearly showed that Hunter Biden, James Biden, and Joey SoftServe himself were up to their eyebrows in fraud, corruption, and influence peddling. The story, should such a thing as journalistic integrity exist as a commodity within our major media, should have resulted in all three individuals in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit.
Instead, fueled by this letter, the New York Times and Washington Post, who, by the way, had shared a Pulitzer Prize for their fraudulent coverage of the fraudulent investigations of President Trump, refused to cover the story.
See all of our coverage here:
Response From Intel Letter Signers Tells You Everything You Need to Know
Let Us Not Forget That Intel Letter That Influenced the Election
NPR Attempts to Fluff Hunter Biden, and the Beclowning Commences
Justice May Be Coming for the 51 Who Signed the Intel Letter Against Hunter Biden Laptop
Kevin McCarthy Drops the Hammer on 51 Former Intel Officials Who Signed Hunter Biden Letter
TRANSCRIPT
BAIER: I want to turn to another aspect of Russia, and this deals with Russian interference. October, days before the 2020 election, you signed onto this open letter that was published by Politico. It said, “we write to say that the arrival on the US 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.”
Why did you sign onto that?
PREISS: Yeah. Because of what it says. It has all the classic earmarks of one of these operations. You’ll note elsewhere in the letter, if you read it, it also says “we don’t know if this is a Russian operation at all. That has been dramatically changed in the retelling of the story.
The letter is merely pointing out that this is the kind of thing that time after time after time people who study Russian disinformation, intelligence officers who look at Russian tactics, over the long period of time. This is the kind of thing they like to amplify to sow discord within target countries. Now…
BAIER: But they…
PREISS: Now sometimes that target country is the United States, most often in the Cold War it was Europe, but the fact is the tactic is an old one, a tried and true one and its been successful in the past for them.
BAIER: But in this case it was not true. It was not true. In fact, the New York Times found these authenticated. The Washington Post writes, “Thousands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures from Google and other technology companies, say two security experts who examined the data at the request of the Washington Post.” The New York Post who did the story first says, “Holy cow, here are these other verifications.”
In the debate, right before the election, now-President Biden used it. Take a listen.(VIDEO start; Pompeo on Fox and Friends)
POMPEO: Reckless. Absolutely reckless. Putin heard this. Our allies and friends heard this.
(VIDEO cut to October 23 debate)
TRUMP: It’s the laptop from hell. The laptop from hell.
[Moderator Kristen] WELKER: President Trump, we’re talking about race right now and I do want to speak on the issue of race. President Trump—
BIDEN: Nobody– Kristen, I have to respond to that.
WELKER: Please, very quickly.
BIDEN: Look, there are 50 former National Intelligence folks who said that what this, he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan…
TRUMP: You mean, the laptop is now another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax? You gotta be–
BIDEN: That’s exactly what– That’s exactly what–
(VIDEO end)
BAIER: I understand how you characterize it, but he characterized it differently and used it in a debate days before an election.
PRIESS: I’ll let President Biden speak for himself, he’s capable of doing that. What I’ll do is say that it has all the classic earmarks of a Russian campaign, in the way it was disseminated and propagated through media.
BAIER: Do you regret signing onto the letter.
PRIESS: Oh, absolutely not. Because those words are still true. It has all the classic earmarks.
BAIER: Do you think it changed the outcome of the election?
PRIESS: Oh, absolutely not.
BAIER: But it wasn’t true. It had the classic earmarks but it wasn’t true.
PRIESS: What is not true?
BAIER: It was Russian disinformation.
PRIESS: That is not what we said. Read the actual letter and we said we do not know if this is Russian disinformation.
BAIER: “It has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
PRIESS: Exactly. The difference between and information campaign and a disinformation campaign…
BAIER: C’mon, you’re talking nuance and yet to candidate Joe Biden…
PRIESS: It’s not my problem if people don’t look up definitions.
BAIER: I know. But the purpose of the letter is to have an effect. And the nuance you’re talking about here never made it to candidate Biden because he said it plainly on a debate stage. That obviously affected the dynamic.
PRIESS: I would absolutely love for all news media to show nuance on all these issues instead of raising the soundbites. In this case, some news media raised the soundbites. That’s not helpful for the American people. And I really wish…
BAIER: You think your letter was helpful for the American people?
PREISS: Instead of quoting one sentence from it, if people maybe read an entire paragraph it shows that we don’t know if it’s Russian…
BAIER: You don’t think it effected anything?
PRIESS: I don’t know. We don’t analyze American political environments.
BAIER: …but you were trying to.
PRIESS: What we were trying to do was point out that this has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information campaign. Not to say it’s Russian disinformation, but to say that the propagation through American media and international media has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information campaign because we’ve seen it over and over and over again. They love to sow these kinds of divisions and exacerbate them. That’s not American, that’s Russian.
BAIER: I gotcha. But it ended up being a Biden information campaign because he used it in the campaign and that debate.
PRIESS: I encourage you to ask him about that.
BAIER: And I will. Thank you very much.
Though Priess never gave ground, Baier exposed the letter for exactly what it was. It was blatant interference in a US election by a claque of former intelligence officials who had decided to do their damnedest to do what they’d failed to do with the Russia Hoax: keep Donald Trump out of the White House. The letter calls the laptop a Russian “information operation” and tries to shield the authors and signatories by saying, “we don’t know.” One of the more interesting parts is that the letter uses the Mueller investigation to claim the Russians are always at the gate, and it uses leaks by intelligence officials to smear Rudy Giuliani:
Our view that the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue is consistent with two other significant data points as well. According to the Washington Post, citing four sources, “U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence.”
In addition, media reports say that the FBI has now opened an investigation into Russian involvement in this case. According to USA Today, “…federal authori<es are investigating whether the material supplied to the New York Post by Rudy Giuliani…is part of a smoke bomb of disinformation pushed by Russia.”
One of the signers of that letter was almost certainly the source for the Post and USA Today stories mentioned in the letter.
Priess and his co-conspirators knew exactly what they were doing. They were injecting themselves, like a political COVID virus (hahaha), into the 2020 campaign to discredit physical evidence of criminality on the part of one of the candidates and smear the other as the beneficiary of an operation by a hostile power just as they had in 2016.
If we are ever fortunate enough to get a ruthless warrior in the White House, one of the first orders of business must be to get rid of everyone involved in these operations that meddle in US domestic politics and to remove the security clearances of clowns like Priess, so they no longer have access to the information they need to move their political agenda forward.
