President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for undersecretary of defense for policy, Colin Kahl, has a long history of perpetuating Russian disinformation.
On Wednesday, Biden made the announcement that Kahl would be joining the administration after serving as a deputy assistant to President Barack Obama and national security adviser to Vice President Biden from 2014 to 2017. Kahl is currently co-director at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation and a strategic adviser at the Penn Biden Center.
“I know how hard the professionals in Policy work every day to keep America safe,” Kahl wrote on Twitter in response to the appointment. “I would be honored to lead this great organization.”
My first government job was as an action officer in OSD Policy and I was later a DASD. I know how hard the professionals in Policy work every day to keep America safe. I would be honored to lead this great organization and work with @kath_hicks and @LloydAustin to strengthen DoD! https://t.co/THHuaq8aVq
— Colin Kahl (@ColinKahl) December 30, 2020
As Justice Department reporter Jerry Dunleavy outlined in the Washington Examiner, however, Kahl has developed quite a track record of amplifying foreign disinformation since leaving the Obama White House.
Kahl became an early defender of the since-debunked DNC-funded Steele dossier that served as the basis for claiming President Donald Trump was a Russian agent. An inspector general report on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuse from the Justice Department earlier this year revealed the FBI had been aware the Steele dossier contained Russian disinformation but pushed onward with its deep-state investigations anyway.
Intriguing thread on the Trump-Russia-Rosneft connection mentioned in the Steele dossier. Seems worth closer look. https://t.co/w9sg9kDuSc
— Colin Kahl (@ColinKahl) March 26, 2017
Last night, Trump's twitter account channeled anxiety over #RussiaGate. Perhaps it's b/c the dossier is panning out. https://t.co/Ou4nrHxiWr
— Colin Kahl (@ColinKahl) March 28, 2017
Former member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service: Steele's Trump-Russia Dossier holds up pretty well https://t.co/HkdQns68J6
— Colin Kahl (@ColinKahl) September 6, 2017
Kahl also took specific aim at the House Intelligence Committee Republican’s memo on FISA abuses in 2018, competing directly with the committee Democrats, led by California Rep. Adam Schiff. In December 2019, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released an earth-shattering report damning FBI conduct over the course of its Crossfire Hurricane investigation and vindicating entirely the Republican memo that the legacy media had dismissed.
Kahl, however, declared the House Intelligence Committee Democrats’ memo to be “a devastating rebuttal to Nunes & his crackpot staff” and condemned the Republican Rep. Devin Nunes memo as “biased and dishonest.”
The HPSCI Minority memo is a devastating rebuttal to Nunes & his crackpot staff, & it is VERY damaging for Page. Watch for Hannity, Tucker, & the InfoWars conspiracy trolls to pivot to the claim that Page was a crisis actor paid by HRC to set up Trump. https://t.co/MR2zlGvPR5
— Colin Kahl (@ColinKahl) February 25, 2018
The infamous Nunes memo seemed biased and dishonest at the time and more so after the Democrats released a rebuttal memo. Now, with the release of the FISA applications requesting surveillance of Carter Page, “the Nunes memo looks even worse.” https://t.co/AwJXSGhLvE
— Colin Kahl (@ColinKahl) July 22, 2018
As Dunleavy pointed out, there is no shortage of tweets from Kahl making hysterical claims of Trump-Russia collusion, a conspiracy theory entirely discredited in the conclusion of the more than two-year special counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller. Yet theories of Trump operating as a covert Russian agent have become the go-to narrative of the Democratic Party and their allies in the media to dismiss reporting they don’t like.
As news broke in October implicating the former vice president in his family’s potentially criminal overseas business ventures, the Biden campaign, along with their allies ruling corporate media, charged, without evidence, that blockbuster reporting related to Biden’s son was Russian disinformation. The theory had been debunked, however, with on-the-record statements from the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Department of National Intelligence, and the Department of State, all prior to the election. News also surfaced in the days running up to Nov. 3 that Hunter Biden was the target of an FBI probe examining his finances, about which the campaign faced virtually no questions.
CBS’s Lesley Stahl rejected to nearly 17 million viewers that Biden was under any sort of scandal, and CNN’s chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour decried reporting on Hunter Biden as Russian disinformation. Furthermore, a “perspective” piece in the Washington Post read, “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.”
Several months later, even more evidence has emerged illustrating that the Hunter Biden stories that broke in October stemmed in no part from a foreign interference campaign, which should embarrass Biden and all others who dismissed the blockbuster revelations in the midst of an election.
