How the FBI got the Hunter laptop story suppressed while attempting to preserve plausible deniability for itself
You can’t call the FBI dumb. It was clever – very very clever.
The story is somewhat complex, but Miranda Devine of the NY Post has done good reporting on this from the start. I highly recommend reading her latest in its entirety. Some excerpts:
The extraordinary revelation for the first time lays bare how the FBI was involved in pre-bunking the story of the laptop, which had been in the bureau’s possession for almost a year.
“I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter,” said Roth in a Dec. 21, 2020, declaration to the Federal Election Commission.
“I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
“Pre-bunking.” That’s a useful term.
More:
The FBI also warned Facebook to be on “high alert” for a “dump” of “Russian propaganda” before the 2020 election, in terms specific enough that it “fit the pattern” of The Post’s story, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcast host Joe Rogan in August.
Facebook also censored The Post ahead of Twitter’s throttling of the story in October, pending “fact checks” that never appear to have been done.
The FBI agent who organized those weekly meetings with Big Tech was Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan, whose postgraduate thesis claimed that Russia interfered with the 2016 election to help former President Donald Trump…
It looks very much as if the FBI pre-bunked a story it knew was coming about Hunter Biden. But how would it know The Post was going to publish the story in October 2020?
Well, the FBI was spying on Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s online cloud, under the pretext of an investigation into alleged foreign agent registration violations, a probe which conveniently was dropped this year.
The covert surveillance warrant on Giuliani gave the FBI access to emails in August 2020 from Delaware computer repair store owner John Paul Mac Isaac disclosing information damaging to Joe Biden from the laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned at his store in April 2019.
The FBI also had access to my [that is, Miranda Devine’s] messages with Giuliani in October discussing when The Post would publish the story.
The FBI knew exactly what it was doing. I bet that the owner of the computer repair store where Hunter had dropped off his computer regrets ever giving it to the FBI. Fortunately, he kept copies of its hard drive, and that’s the only reason the story ever saw the light of day.
For more on the same tale, please see this by Byron York.
What a den of partisan corruption the FBI is. The saddest thing about it is that half of the country either doesn’t know, doesn’t care, or applauds all of this.
NOTE: Oh, and then there’s James Baker’s involvement in “vetting” the Twitter email release. Another must-read.
The Post Millennial ( https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-elon-musk-confirms-data-may-have-been-hidden-and-deleted-from-the-twitter-files?utm_campaign=64483 ):
Elvis M. Chan’s master’s thesis for the Naval Postgraduate School:
https://www.hsdl.org/c/abstract/?docid=861226
Title: “Fighting Bears and Trolls: An Analysis of Social Media Companies and U.S. Government Efforts to Combat Russian Influence Campaigns During the 2020 U.S. Elections”
Submitted September 2021. Closing paragraph (minus footnotes):
“During his farewell speech after serving a second term in office, George Washington stated, “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence…the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republic government.” Those words seem prescient today, well over two hundred years later. Except for an interlude from the end of the Cold War in 1991 to 2014, Russia has waged a campaign of information warfare to tear the fabric of Western democracy through wide-ranging operations on social media platforms targeting Americans. Both the U.S. government and major social media companies were caught flatfooted in 2016 but took a series of security and transparency actions since then to counter the ongoing Russian efforts targeting U.S. elections specifically and American democracy more broadly. Hopefully, incorporating the existing and proposed measures will help repair and strengthen the framework of American democracy for the 21st century.”
Elvis must be turning in his mausoleum at the thought of someone with HIS glorious name writing such pernicious tripe….
What a devilish joker…but there you have it: the Democratic Party in a nutshell.
@Hubert
Perhaps I am too harsh a grader, but I would have seen:
Then I would have called Elvis the Direct to Video Sequel into my office and demanded to know what they thought happened in things like 2008 with the wall to wall propaganda offensive against NATO and Georgia before hitting him with a bunch of other sources – including RAND – showing them.
Then I would have spat the paper back and demand he make the appropriate adjustments.
The string “Biden” (or “biden”) occurs eight times in Chan’s thesis. Here’s the first occurrence, on page 7 (again, minus footnotes):
“In March 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) issued
an unclassified version of the intelligence community assessment summarizing foreign state-sponsored threats to the 2020 U.S. elections. In particular, the ODNI’s report provided a succinct but comprehensive overview of the Russian influence campaign, which focused on damaging the Biden presidential campaign and favoring the Trump campaign. In April 2021, the ODNI issued an unclassified version of the Intelligence Community’s annual worldwide threat assessment, highlighting Russian influence operations as a persistent threat to the United States. Reporting from the ODNI represents the collective efforts of all 18 organizations which comprise the U.S. Intelligence Community.”
And so forth. No references to the Hunter Biden laptop story or the author’s role in getting it suppressed. By the way: Avril Haines was already DNI in March 2021.
Chan’s thesis appears to draw heavily on the work of Graphika, a NYC-based social media analytics company. From Graphika’s “Our Values” page:
“Human & Digital Rights: A lot of our work is motivated by our belief that the Internet should be free and open, and by our desire to protect citizens from censorship and oppression.” (Source: https://graphika.com/our-story)
Well, the FBI was spying on Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s online cloud, under the pretext of an investigation into alleged foreign agent registration violations, a probe which conveniently was dropped this year.
Tucker reported recently that the DOJ prosecutions of the J6 people utilized the complete smartphone GPS location data for those people on that day. The tech companies coughed up the data without complaint or resistance. Some J6 people had used airplane mode or switched off location monitoring, not realizing that their location was still being recorded.
Some were aware that the data was still going to storage and tried to delete the files. This fact was used against them in the DOJ’s prosecution.
All of this is so so unacceptable.
FBI delenda est.
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The media playbook seems to be to say “There’s no proof” until more evidence comes in and they can say “That’s all old news.”
“What a den of partisan corruption the FBI is.” neo
“FBI delenda est.” David
“The saddest thing about it is that half of the country either doesn’t know, doesn’t care, or applauds all of this.” neo
‘Sad’ doesn’t cover the half of it.
By now, those that don’t know, down deep don’t want to know.
Those that don’t care, are beneath contempt and deserve the future they are enabling.
Those who applaud, serve evil. Because corruption of the rule of law, results in the spread of evil. “By their fruits shall ye know them”
@ abraxas > “The media playbook seems to be to say “There’s no proof” until more evidence comes in and they can say “That’s all old news.” –
Which is why the leftist judges have such a great time claiming about a case (say, for instance, election fraud): You have no standing or you lack the evidence to bring a case; then when evidence is incontrovertible, refuse to allow a trial because of the doctrine of laches.
“A legal doctrine that bars a claimant from receiving relief where the claimant’s delay in pursuing the claim has operated to the prejudice of the opposing party.”
That’s a pretty flexible MO.
I’m sure that this will be an unpopular opinion here, but the way to address FBI corruption is to study what Bill Barr did to Mueller’s team. Trump’s style against Mueller had him on a path to a BS indictment for obstruction, on which a DC jury would have almost certainly returned a conviction. Barr put his head down, focused on the law, and won.
We need an AG and FBI director who are willing and able to outmaneuver the deep state crowd just as Barr did. We also need determined but sober leadership in the White House and Congress to put together a reasonable reorg bill that will empower the AG and FBI director to get the job done.
I think we also need to accept that we will never have the emotional catharsis of seeing Comey, Wray, Baker, or anyone else frog-marched off to trial. These people are way too smart and sophisticated to allow that to happen. The best case scenario is to deprive them of their power and wring the ideological corruption out of the FBI and DOJ.
Encore! Elvis unplugged…
“FBI agent’s testimony implicates headquarters brass in social media censorship
Elvis Chan estimated social media companies took censorship action 50% of the time when FBI asked.”—
https://justthenews.com/accountability/cancel-culture/fbi-agents-testimony-implicates-headquarters-brass-social-media
Opening grafs:
‘ An FBI agent’s testimony in a freedom of speech case confirms that the bureau ran an operation during the 2020 election that requested social media companies remove content as disinformation, suggesting the government’s requests succeeded about half of the time and were conducted with a “headquarter stamp of approval.
‘ Elvis Chan, the FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Cyber Branch in San Francisco, told lawyers for the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general in a lawsuit over social media censorship that he supervised a “command post” in his home city that helped the nationwide disinformation censorship operation function in fall 2020….’
File under: Cockroach hotel.
People forget that Mark Felt, “Deep Throat” in the Watergate mess, was the FBI #2 and got his revenge on Nixon for not naming him as Director when Hoover died. That was a successful FBI coup that preceded the 2020 coup.
Best of the Web:
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2022/12/06/breaking-matt-taibbi-drops-more-information-on-the-twitter-files-and-exposes-an-attempted-cover-up-n669840#comment-6059167547
RiverRev • 2 days ago
Taibbi and Weiss. The new Woodward and Bernstein, complete with H R Haldeman trying to control the cover-up.
These people are way too smart and sophisticated to allow that to happen.
I don’t believe it’s that they’re overly smart and sophisticated so much as there’s a lot of them and they’re all of one mind. Throughout the Federal government there were and are a very large number of people in key positions who are all on the same page. So individually they don’t have to be particularly smart necessarily, just smart enough and all in agreement. In this case they all completely agreed that pretty much anything is OK in service of removing the great Orange Hitler. Other than that, they’re obviously clever enough to maintain a level plausible deniability, which in my opinion doesn’t require that much in the way of raw intelligence.
Turtler: I’ve still got a day job, so don’t have time to go through Mr. Chan’s thesis and identify other examples of bland po-faced misrepresentation, selective or tendentious sourcing, lack of historical context, and question-begging. I am pretty sure, however, that this additional academic “credential” from the NPS got him a nice little FBI pay raise and a bump up on the GS scale. And a reputation as an “expert”. It reminded me of that scene in “The Lives of Others” where Wiesler’s department chief in the Stasi—played with cynical flair by Ulrich Tukur—leafs through and quotes from Stasi-approved academic theses that support and legitimize the Stasi’s work. Same thing here.
The Soviet Union and Russia have conducted campaigns of disinformation and subversion aimed at sowing discord and undermining public trust in this country since the 1920s (see e.g. David Dallinn’s 1955 book “Soviet Espionage”). Nothing new there. What is new is that the U.S. intelligence community seems to be leveraging this longstanding activity to achieve the same ends and consolidate its own power.
Barry: “pernicious tripe” indeed. But very cleverly crafted and effective pernicious tripe.
AesopFan: good summary of the establishment MO. Here are some additional elements:
• Concoct an officially approved narrative of consequential Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
• Commission reports, white papers, and pronouncements from the IC to give it a patina of official legitimacy.
• Use the narrative to imply that Trump’s election was illegitimate and quite possibly the fruit of a Russian intelligence op.
• Use it further as an all-purpose Leatherman tool to censor, suppress, or discredit contradictory evidence or unwelcome revelations, pre-empt political opposition, and destroy political opponents.
Which brings me to Bauxite and this statement: “Barr put his head down, focused on the law, and won.” Barr won nothing. Take a look at Chan’s thesis. He cites the 2019 Mueller Report extensively and approvingly in support of the narrative outlined above (no mention of Bill Barr, by the way). Remember: this is an approved work of purported “scholarship”, submitted two years after the Mueller Report, by a high-ranking FBI cybersecurity and CI agent who played a central role in the government’s ongoing effort to suppress, censor, adulterate, and discredit unwelcome information on Twitter and other social media platforms and pressure those platforms to fall into line with the official narrative. The word for that is “Gleichschaltung” (look it up), and Barr did nothing to short-circuit it. Indeed, he may have (deliberately?) enabled it. See this article by Lee Smith in The Epoch Times:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-anti-democracy-operation-continues_4899182.html
Further: “The best case scenario is to deprive them of their power and wring the ideological corruption out of the FBI and DOJ.” No, the best-case scenario is to defund and dismantle the FBI and the DHS, rescind the Patriot Act, and reduce the intelligence community’s power, influence, and capacity to interfere in domestic politics, corrupt the political process, and violate the constitutional rights of American citizens. There should be no place in this country for a secret political police agency, certainly not a partisan one. By the way, that’s not my characterization of the FBI, although I agree with it. It’s from a 1956 book by Walter Millis, a mainstream mid-century military historian and public intellectual (he edited James Forrestal’s diaries). Reference:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Arms_and_Men/PcGpkzmjFbgC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22secret%20political%22
Nonapod – The DC jury pool helps a lot too!
furthermore, felt’s fingerprints on ‘breakings ‘ black bag jobs, helped acquit william ayers, ironically he helped topple hoover’s temple leading to the fisa
Hubert – Epoch Times wants me to give them my e-mail address to read your article, which I’m not going to do so I didn’t look at it. Perhaps you could summarize?
Re Barr: Trump wasn’t indicted. There was no impeachment over Russiagate. And Mueller wrapped up his investigation within two months of Barr taking office. That’s a win.
Comey, Mueller, Weissman and that whole cabal knew that “Russian collusion” was a complete fabrication from the start. I think its pretty clear that their goal was to string the investigation along as long as they could to bleed Trump and then either indict him on a bogus obstruction charge for a DC jury, or refer the obstruction charge to the Democratic partisans in the House, who wouldn’t much care about legal niceties such as . . . whether the statute actually applied.
Barr shut that down and minimized the fallout from the report. Those are the kinds of wins that we’re likely to get (and we should take them).
If I get the gist of your Epoch Times article from the first few sentences, I’m not sure it’s fair to expect Barr to have reformed the whole FBI and DOJ in under two years in office. Especially when you consider that he took office in the middle of a 5-alarm fire with Mueller and Russiagate ongoing and handled that better than I think anyone could have expected in early 2019.
(Another unpopular point – major reform during a presidential administration requires presidential leadership. Trump’s MO is pretty inconsistent the kind of leadership that is necessary to overhaul an entire federal agency, let alone two. I know we’re all suppossed to wink and nod at “mean tweets,” but look at how often Trump undermined Barr with stupid tweets about ongoing cases and investigations or demands that Barr do things that are unethical for a lawyer/prosecutor. You can’t expect miracles from your cabinent secretaries when you make them deal with those kinds of headwinds.)
there was nothing to this case, it was a fraudulent investigation, like the witchhunt against general flynn for nearly four years he labored under those lies, which they kept under lock and key, but strzok mccabe, et al, spread these lies, meanwhile an all but declared russian agent in the special forces was allowed to wander around with a security clearance, the same team laufman, baker, et al, has been unaccountable same with lisa monaco, who is the master of garlands chain, a dozen gop senators voted for her, compare that with what happened to matt whitaker,
concerned conservative™ declares that Barr did a smash up, wonderful job reining in Meuller, shutting down Antifa and BLM terrorism and insurrection (mostly peacefully trying to burn down Federal courthouses, the CHAZ etc.) and any suboptimal results of Barr are the fault of the Great Orange Whale.
Barr is super, double pluss good!
And of course the concerned conservative™ is truly sad that the FBI, DOJ, CIA criminals are just too darned smart to be prosecuted, let alone convicted. Nothing to see, move along!
Bauxite: weak sauce. If Barr had really focused and followed through on the law, the people who abused their trust and were responsible for the rolling coup attempt against a legitimately elected president would be in prison or on their way there.
I actually defended Barr at the time (late 2020-early 2021) on this forum. My view was similar to yours. My view has changed as new information has surfaced. Yours hasn’t.
Here are some money grafs from Lee Smith’s piece in The Epoch Times:
“There was a time when Republican voters hoped that Barr would restore the credibility of federal law enforcement. [I was one of them.] But the numbers show that the GOP base has less faith in the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after Barr’s two-year tenure than before it. And now with his latest anti-Trump salvo, it seems that Barr has joined the effort he was hired to stop—the U.S. intelligence services’ anti-democracy campaign.”
“Named attorney general in December 2018, Barr hit the ground running. He soon brought an end to Mueller’s weaponized probe [your point] and then tapped John Durham to investigate the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia campaign. GOP congressional investigators, as well as the Republican base, were confident that Barr and Durham would hold the Deep State conspirators accountable for their crimes and abuses.”
Alas, no.
“[E]ven after Barr had closed Mueller’s shop, the spy services’ anti-democracy operation moved into a new phase, with Russiagate blending seamlessly into Ukrainegate. The former was premised on a dossier authored by a retired British foreign spy falsely alleging that Trump had been compromised by Moscow. The latter started when a CIA officer, believed to be Eric Ciaramella, filed a whistleblower complaint concerning a phone conversation between Trump and the president of Ukraine.”
Trump is impeached for the first time.
“[W]hile Trump was being impeached, the agencies under Barr’s control had evidence of the Bidens’ financial dealings in Ukraine. The information found in the laptop supports Trump’s contention that he had not abused his power, but rather as president had fulfilled his duty to protect U.S. national security by asking for information regarding the extent of the Bidens’ alleged corruption abroad. Trump was impeached for what Barr’s Justice Department knew to be false.”
Trump is acquitted and immediately has to deal with Covid. Then the 2020 election takes place.
“Barr resigned in December 2020 ostensibly outraged by Trump’s demands that DOJ investigate election fraud. There was no evidence anything was wrong with the vote, Barr claimed. But the very institutions that Barr directed had interfered in the 2020 election as they had in the 2016 and 2018 vote. Federal law enforcement authorities had again defrauded the U.S. electorate, this time under the nose of the man who was hired to restore their credibility.
“Because Barr didn’t bring the FBI to heel—and because Durham has failed to convict anyone for Russiagate—federal law enforcement’s anti-democracy campaign continues unabated.”
Indeed. Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago is raided in August 2022. Trump declares his intention to run in 2024 right after the 2022 midterms. Garland immediately appoints a special counsel to investigate Trump with a clear mandate to indict the ex-president.
And so “[i]t’s in this context that Barr’s article demanding Trump step down, published shortly after the special counsel was named, requires an assessment not only of Barr’s tenure as Trump’s attorney general but also of his character.”
“Barr makes his home and his living in the nation’s capital. It’s hardly surprising he seeks to re-ingratiate himself with the Beltway officials, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and contractors on whom Trump made war and who continue to make war on the former president. But adding his voice to the Justice Department’s serial campaign to interfere in elections suggests that his inability to hold anyone accountable for the ongoing assault on democracy may be owing to something worse than incompetence or even cowardice.”
I don’t think Barr is incompetent. I think he’s extremely competent. What does that leave?
Not to harp on a prior post, but what have the Republicans actually done, or what are they promising to do, to address the culture at the FBI? We had Mike Pence actually defending these people. And other than a few exceptions, most GOP politicians are silent about the FBI’s issues.
The above is another example of why there are conservatives who no longer trust the GOP.
I Callahan:
Realistically, what do you think they actually have the power at this point to do? They don’t hold the Senate or the presidency. They hold the House by a few seats. They can hold hearings and subpoena people, which I think they plan to do.
Neo: they can state a case against the FBI and the IC and get it on record. They’re scared to do that. Why are they scared? Ask Chuck Schumer. He nailed it in January 2017.
Hubert:
I have no idea what you mean by “state a case.” They’ve already done quite a bit of that – see this – and they’re planning to do more. That’s the House. Grassley and company have done much work in the Senate with whistleblowers. This has been going on for months.
Neo: opening paragraph in the article you linked to:
“House Judiciary Committee Republicans will release a 1,000-page report on Friday that will serve as a “road map” for future investigations into the FBI and Justice Department if Republicans can take control of the House after the midterm elections.”
I meant tie it all together in a way that the public will pay attention to and in less (fewer?) than 1,000 pages. Think of Ike’s farewell address in 1961 as a model. Or Zola’s “J’accuse…!” open letter in the Dreyfus case. Publicly throw down the gauntlet in an unmistakable way. “Take the chance of anger” (“King Lear”). That’s what I meant.
Hubert – I think that we differ on what Barr could or should have been able to do. I don’t think it was at all realistic to expect an AG to step in in the middle of a presidential term and overhaul a DOJ and FBI that are/were completely off the rails. Barr was only AG for a little over 20 months and was only involved in one year’s budget (with the 2020 budget being controlled by a Democrat Speaker of the House).
Writing him off or ignoring the significant things he did accomplish because he didn’t do more strikes me a self-defeating.