by JOY PULLMANN
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.”
Why would Panetta, Brennan or any other Democrat regret lying? It’s the only thing that works for Democrats. Lying and fraud is their mainstay, they won’t survive without it.
He belongs in Prison doing 50 years
Whether the laptop was Hunter Biden’s wasn’t the only question. The main question was whether the data on it was altered. Panetta and other intelligence officials had abundant reason to suspect it might have been.
No Speaker of the House as America faces deepening peril, but they still have time to conduct Hunter Biden investigations…