President Obama’s CIA Director Leon Panetta said, “No, I don’t have any regrets,” when Fox News’ Bret Baier asked him Friday about signing an October 2020 letter that pushed misinformation that affected the presidential election. The letter signed by 51 former top U.S. intelligence officials falsely claimed a Hunter Biden laptop containing evidence of Biden family corruption instead looked like foreign “disinformation.”
Polling indicates if Joe Biden voters had learned of the laptop’s contents before they cast their votes in 2020, 17 percent would have changed their votes. That’s enough to have reversed the presidential results.
Panetta excused using his intelligence credentials to influence a presidential election by telling Baier, “Well, Bret, look, I was extremely concerned about, uh, Russian, uh, interference and misinformation. And we all know intelligence agencies discovered that Russia had continued to push disinformation across the board. And my concern was to kind of alert the public to be aware that these disinformation efforts went on. And frankly, I haven’t seen any evidence from any intelligence agency that that was not the case.”
Earlier this year, Special Counsel John Durham published a 316-page report showing the Russian disinformation hype that consumed the Donald Trump presidency was a Democrat Party information operation fed to willing U.S. intelligence agencies based on manufactured falsehoods. Earlier reporting and investigations had already demonstrated this reality for years.
Durham documented that President Obama, Joe Biden, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch knew on Aug. 3, 2016, about the Clinton campaign’s plans to run the Russian disinformation operation. They all knew it was a hoax before intelligence officials they oversaw started seeding the hoax in complicit media through carefully selected leaks. That makes the Russian collusion narrative U.S. government disinformation. And Panetta is still running it.
Brennan also signed the Hunter Biden disinformation letter Panetta signed and now refuses to disavow. The Federalist exclusively reported earlier this year that CIA officials recruited letter signatories and the CIA approved it before its publication. While a senior adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign, former Obama national security official and current U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also reached out to sitting CIA officials to recruit letter signatories and support.
Yet when Baier pushed him on the letter one last time, Panetta responded by trying to cover up one discredited, government-laundered disinformation operation with another one: “No, I don’t have any regrets about not trusting the Russians.”
Of course he’s not sorry. Lying to Americans and the press works, baby. Not one Democrat or intelligence official has had to pay a serious price for weaponizing U.S. intelligence agencies into partisan actors, a harbinger of totalitarianism. Why would they regret what works so well? Worst-case scenario, they maybe have to endure hearings in Congress that never result in firings, loss of funds, or restrictions on their powers.
Panetta surely knows that intelligence actors like him have massive control over what Americans know about public affairs, and thus election results. They can lie until the cows come home, and nobody whose voice is allowed to be heard will call them on it. It’s this dynamic that so conveniently boosts their power.
A vast array of often government-funded “nonprofit” intelligence agency cutouts flag narratives that damage Democrats and pressure internet monopolies to turn down their volume. That’s the subject of a massive First Amendment case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Just scratch the surface of any of these third-party information filters to see that they work to censor true and fairly debatable ideas. This includes censoring facts that show Panetta and those like him are far bigger purveyors of misinformation and disinformation than right-wing media, onto whom they project their own wickedness. For example, just this week the narrative-sifting tech organization VineSight flagged these themes as “misinformation or toxic narratives”:
- “MAGA movement was able to make election fraud a top voters issue”
- “The 2020 election was stolen and now Democrats are trying to interfere with 2024”
- “Republicans should focus on Democrats not stealing the 2024 election”
- and “Democrats are trying to interfere with the election.”
So-called fact-checkers use VineSight’s AI-combed information to choke the spread of ideas online, which surely will happen to this very article. Notably, VineSight’s “report” on “misinformation” flagged a tweet from Rep. Jim Jordan, who days later won the Republican conference vote for House speaker: “What’s happening in New York to President Trump with Alvin Bragg and Letitia James is election interference. Pure and simple.”
This web of entities ultimately helps U.S. intelligence agencies manipulate the elected officials who are supposed to oversee them, and the voters who are supposed to oversee those elected officials. If our nation’s affairs aren’t actually run by elected officials, but intelligence agencies who selectively inform them into everything from wars to overthrowing governments, we’re not a democracy, folks.
We’re more than a decade into publicly available evidence of this situation now, and Congress is still “investigating.” Not just the Spygate saga but also the Hunter Biden laptop saga involves multiple uses of federal spy agency power to rig elections for Democrats. Remember, Obama was able to spy on his party’s top political opponent and that opponent’s personal attorney due to the false pretexts the FBI fed a secret court.
Besides the former intel officials’ letter, the FBI also lied to internet monopolies about the laptop’s authenticity, according to lawsuit disclosures and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. This caused internet monopolies to censor non-leftist news sources when they reported on the laptop before the 2020 election.
Nearly a year-and-a-half later, after the damage was done, The New York Times finally reported, likely without government censure, that it had verified the laptop was authentic. That once again confirmed multiple former and current U.S. intelligence personnel had lied in a transparent attempt to influence election results.
The timeline of the FBI’s knowledge of the laptop indicates the FBI used its “investigation” as a coverup on behalf of the Bidens, not an investigation, for years. That laptop is now a key trove of evidence in congressional investigations into Biden family members accepting massive bribes for access to first the vice president and now the president of the United States.
Yes, we’re getting an impeachment inquiry out of this, but while the inquiry shakes out, Democrats have the president’s power, and boy are they using it. It might even be convenient for Democrats to ditch a Biden with horrifically low approval ratings who can’t speak coherently for a fresh tyrant like California Gov. Gavin Newsom that the media can go on to lacquer with lies half of the populace will believe because Democrats say so.
While U.S. intelligence is bringing its foreign election-rigging operations stateside, it’s failing to identify conflicts that could launch World War III. There is no justification for any elected official to allow this — except if they’re part of the election protection racket.
