by Daniel Greenfield
“All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation."
Hunter Biden’s laptop is so mainstream now that even the 50 former intel officials who falsely suggested that it was Russian disinformation are now backing away from that claim and blaming the media.
The Washington Post fact check by Glenn Kessler seems belated, but I suppose better late than never, and the fact check grudgingly exonerates the ex-intel officials, while laying the blame on Biden, as if the latter wasn’t just taking the bait that had been laid out by the “experts”.
And it features our old pal Jimmy Clapper trying to disavow the infamous letter.
“There was message distortion,” former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. told The Fact Checker in a telephone interview. “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.”
Paragraph 5 does state, “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”
That paragraph is undermined by virtually every other which leads the reader by the nose to the idea that it’s Russian disinformation and other paragraphs that outright assert it.
Like this one.
“Our view that the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue is consistent with two other significant data points as well.”
The letter claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop not only “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” and, in italics, emphasizes that, “If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”
This is well beyond raising a yellow flag. And Politico wasn’t distorting anything. Furthermore, if Clapper thought so, he had ample time to correct the record when the story first came out.
But Clapper disagreed. “To me, it’s a difference without a distinction. It could have been bad information, false information,” he said. “But we had no evidence, no inside baseball that it was. The intent of the letter was that this could be Russian disinformation — emphasis on could. It’s a very important nuance … a distinction that people are always ignoring.”
Clapper could be a pedophile. It’s a very important nuance. Could! Wasn’t this the routine that lefties used to run with Glenn Beck? And now they’re betting a lot on it.
But where’s the ‘could’ in “our view that the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue”?
Daniel Greenfield
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/james-clapper-claims-he-didnt-really-mean-hunter-bidens-laptop-was-a-russian-plot/
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