Spy-Media Collusion

It turns out the “51 intel experts” letter implying Hunter Biden’s 100% authentic laptop was a Russian fake, and the ensuing efforts to kill Post reporting on it, were the actual disinfo operation. The dishonor of our intelligence community, and most of the media, is now complete.

Veteran spook and former acting CIA Director Mike Morrell masterminded it, as he swore under oath, to “help Vice President Biden . . . because I wanted him to win the election.” And Morell plainly also did it in hopes a victorious Biden would hand him the top CIA job.

Not only was there no intricate Russian plot, there was never any evidence suggesting one. Only a Biden campaign conspiracy to bury the truth behind a tissue of lies.

But a compliant media really made this possible. The “experts” handed the letter to Politico’s Natasha Bertrand (now at CNN), an eager propagator of such disinformation.

Politico promptly packaged the letter’s “bears the hallmarks of Russian disinformation” language into a headline claiming the experts deemed it to be disinfo, triggering an avalanche of similar reporting and a media-wide refusal to touch the story (except to attack The Post for reporting it).

Where’s Bertrand’s mea culpa? Her editor’s? Politico hasn’t even changed its bogus headline implying the laptop was fake. But there’s blame to go around. Social-media companies (primed by false warnings from secret government censors) blocked and downgraded posts sharing The Post’s reporting. Our competitors at The New York Times and Washington Post did bogus exposés of how we were “deceived.”

When powerful security-state actors pitch reporters a story, the correct response is deep skepticism. But on Hunter, the “democracy dies in darkness” crew displayed only willful credulity — at least until they “authenticated” the documents more than a year later, after the suppression ploy had worked.

All this, after the media fell for a Hillary Clinton campaign op, RussiaGate. Then again, that adventure in hysteria won the Times and WaPo a joint 2018 Pulitzer Prize.

This is repeated collusion among spooks, politicos and journos to blast falsehoods and suppress truth. Rather than serving the nation, they’ve collaborated in deceiving it.

Absent a full accounting, you can only expect the betrayals to keep coming.