by Robert McGreevy
Both of CNN’s moderators for Thursday’s presidential debate have deep ties to intelligence officials who peddled now-debunked conspiracy theories about former President Donald Trump.
Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are both intimately connected to former deep-state officials who pushed the now-discredited Steele Dossier and the hoax that reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was a product of Russian election meddling. The duo will preside over the first presidential debate Thursday between Trump and President Joe Biden.
Tapper published a story based on a leak from James Clapper, former President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, indicating that Russia had hacked DNC emails on behalf of Trump and that the Trump campaign had coordinated with Russian officials, according to RealClearInvestigations. Neither Tapper nor Clapper initially disclosed that this false reporting relied heavily on the now-discredited Steele Dossier.
Bash was married to Jeremy Bash, a former CIA chief of staff in the Obama administration, from 1998-2007. Both Jeremy Bash and Clapper were signatories to a 2020 letter from dozens of former intelligence officials falsely attesting that the Hunter Biden laptop story broken by the New York Post had “all the classic earmarks” of a Russian disinformation operation.
The laptop contents were later verified as authentic by various news outlets, including the Daily Caller News Foundation. The contents were deemed so reliable, in fact, that federal prosecutors working for Biden’s Department of Justice used them to prosecute Hunter Biden on gun charges for which he was found guilty this summer.
For his part, Tapper won a Merriam Smith Award for broadcast journalism for his reporting on Clapper’s leaks. He never disclosed his source, nor did he correct the record when Clapper lied to the American public, stating that the leaks had not come from the intelligence community, according to RCI. Clapper apparently repeated the same lie to then-incoming President Donald Trump.
However, Clapper owned up to the leak during a deposition with the House Intelligence Committee. Clapper was later hired by CNN to be a national security analyst (and Tapper’s co-worker).
CNN later hired Clapper as a national security analyst, making him Tapper’s co-worker.
