The Left’s disinformation industrial complex

May 18, 2023

Vice President Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The Left’s disinformation industrial complex

Washington Examiner May 18, 04:59 AM May 18, 12:01 AM Video Embed

By itself, the conclusions of special counsel John Durham’s report on the FBI’s involvement in the 2016 election are damning enough. The FBI allowed itself to become a conduit for disinformation instigated by a partisan political campaign and possibly influenced by the very foreign actor it was allegedly investigating.

But when you take a step back and put the Durham report into the broader context of the CIA’s involvement in suppressing Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s involvement in suppressing the investigation into the origins of COVID, a disturbing pattern emerges: The Democratic Party, the liberal media, and highest levels of the federal government are routinely conspiring to spread disinformation for plainly partisan ends.

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As the Durham report establishes, much of the information that formed the basis of the FBI’s investigation into former President Donald Trump’s campaign originated as paid opposition research from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. So ham-handed was the Clinton campaign’s efforts to dig up dirt on Trump that Russian intelligence was aware of the effort, as was the CIA.

Not only did Russian intelligence know that the Clinton campaign was looking for dirt on Trump, but it already had the perfect asset in place to deliver disinformation to that effect: Brookings Institution analyst Igor Danchenko, a Russian national, was in contact with both the Russian Embassy and known Russian intelligence officers. Danchenko, in fact, did become Clinton campaign client Christopher Steele’s primary source for the Steele dossier.

But according to the Durham report, “The FBI never gave appropriate consideration to the possibility that the intelligence Danchenko was providing … was in whole or in part, Russian disinformation.” The FBI never investigated this possibility because FBI leadership purposefully hid the CIA’s knowledge of the Clinton campaign’s involvement in the Steele dossier from FBI investigators. The Steele disinformation was then used by the FBI to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, and the contents of the dossier were then leaked to a compliant press eager to disseminate them.

Just as the Steele dossier disinformation had its origin in a Democratic Party presidential campaign, so did the letter signed by former CIA officers falsely claiming that the information on Hunter Biden’s laptop was disinformation. In this case, it was the Biden campaign that reached out to former CIA Director Michael Morell, who then marshaled other former CIA officials to sign the letter before a presidential debate for the express partisan purpose of providing political cover for a Democratic presidential candidate. We know now that current CIA employees even helped Democrats recruit former CIA officials to sign the letter. This collaboration between the Democratic Party and the intelligence community to spread disinformation was also eagerly helped by a compliant liberal media eager to dismiss the very real and true contents of Hunter’s laptop.

Likewise, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, may not have been running for president, but he definitely had a personal and political interest in covering up any possible role the Wuhan Institute of Virology played in the spread of the virus since he personally approved so much funding there. While pretending to play a disinterested scientist on TV, emails now show that Fauci was furiously orchestrating a disinformation campaign to suppress any investigation into the role the Wuhan lab played in the origin of the virus.

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And again, the liberal media eagerly complied. When Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) raised the possibility of the Wuhan lab’s role, the Washington Post labeled it a “debunked” “conspiracy theory.” The paper that supposedly stops democracy from dying in darkness has since been forced to correct its story now that multiple government agencies have since confirmed that a Wuhan lab leak is the most likely origin of the virus.

This pattern of Democratic operatives collaborating with law enforcement and intelligence officials and a compliant media to spread disinformation to the public is extremely alarming. There is no silver bullet solution. All we can do is remember the past and not trust a single thing any of these institutions ever say, ever again.