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‘Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last October and the subsequent reporting on the Twitter Files by journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and a handful of others beginning in early December is one of the most important news stories of our time. The Twitter Files story encompasses, and to a large extent connects, every major political scandal of the Trump-Biden era. Put simply, the Twitter Files reveal an unholy alliance between Big Tech and the deep state designed to throttle free speech and maintain an official narrative through censorship and propaganda. This should not just disturb us, it should also prod us to action in defense of the First Amendment, free and fair elections, and indeed our country.
After Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter, he fired a slew of useless or insubordinate employees, instituted new content moderation policies, and tried to reform a woke corporate culture that bordered (and still borders) on parody. In the process, Musk coordinated with Taibbi and Weiss on the publication of a series of stories based on internal Twitter documents related to an array of major political events going back years: the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, Twitter’s secret policy of shadow banning, President Trump’s suspension from Twitter after the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot, the co-opting of Twitter by the FBI to suppress “election disinformation” ahead of the 2020 election, Twitter’s involvement in a Pentagon overseas psy-op campaign, its silencing of dissent from the official Covid narrative, its complicity in the Russiagate hoax, and its gradual capitulation to the direct involvement of the U.S. intelligence community—with the FBI as a go-between—in content moderation.
As Taibbi has written, the Twitter Files “show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government—from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”
The Twitter Files contain multitudes, but for the sake of brevity let us consider just three installments and their related implications: the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the suspension of Trump, and the deputization of Twitter by the FBI. Together, these stories reveal not just a social media company willing to do the bidding of an out-of-control federal bureaucracy, but a federal bureaucracy openly hostile to the First Amendment.
Hunter Biden’s Laptop
On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published its first major exposé based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which had been dropped off at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 and never picked up. It was the first of several stories detailing Biden family corruption and revealing the close involvement of Joe Biden in his son’s foreign business ventures in the years during and after Biden’s vice presidency. Hunter, although doing no real work, was making tens of millions of dollars from foreign companies in places like Ukraine and China. The Post’s bombshell reporting shined a bright light on what was happening.
According to the emails on the laptop, Hunter introduced then-Vice President Biden to a top executive at Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that was paying Hunter (who had no credentials or experience in the energy business) up to $50,000 a month to sit on its board. Soon after this meeting, Vice President Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor investigating the company. In an earlier email, a top Burisma executive asked Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” to benefit the company. The Post’s ensuing stories revealed more of the same: a shocking level of corruption and influence-peddling by Hunter Biden, whose emails suggest his father was closely connected to his overseas business ventures. Indeed, those ventures appear to consist entirely of Hunter providing access to Joe Biden.
Twitter did everything in its power to suppress the Biden story. It removed links to the Post’s reporting, appended warnings that they might be “unsafe,” and prevented users from sharing them via direct message—a restriction previously reserved for child pornography and other extreme cases. In an extraordinary step, Twitter also locked the Post’s account and the accounts of anyone who shared links to its reporting, including White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. These actions were justified under the pretext that the stories violated Twitter’s hacked-materials policy, even though there was no evidence, then or now, that anything on the laptop was hacked.
Twitter executives at the highest levels were directly involved in these decisions. Former head of Legal, Policy, and Trust Vijaya Gadde, the company’s chief censor, played a key role, as did former head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth. Oddly, all this seems to have been done without the knowledge of Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey. And it was done despite internal pushback from other departments.
“I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe,” wrote a Twitter communications executive in an email to Gadde and Roth. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” asked former VP of Global Communications Brandon Borman. His question was answered by Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker—a former top lawyer for the FBI and the most powerful member of a growing cadre of former FBI employees working at Twitter—who said that “caution is warranted” and that some facts “indicate the materials may have been hacked.”
But there were no such facts, as Baker and other top Twitter executives knew at the time. The laptop was exactly what the Post said it was, and every fact the Post reported was accurate. Other major media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post would begrudgingly admit as much 18 months later, after Joe Biden was ensconced in the White House.
If there were no hacked materials in the Post’s reporting, why did Twitter immediately react as if there were? Because long before the Post published its first laptop story, there had been an organized effort by the intelligence community to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden. The laptop, after all, had been in federal custody since the previous December, when the FBI seized it from the computer repair shop. So the FBI knew very well that it contained evidence of straightforward criminal activity (such as illicit drug use) as well as of corruption and influence-peddling.
The evening before the Post ran its first story on the laptop, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sent ten documents to Roth at Twitter through a special one-way communications channel the FBI had established with the company. For months, the FBI and other federal intelligence agencies had been priming Roth to dismiss news reports about Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election as “hack-and-leak” operations by state actors. They had done the same thing with Facebook, whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted as much to Joe Rogan in an August 2022 podcast. As Michael Shellenberger reported in the seventh installment of the Twitter Files, the FBI repeatedly asked Roth and others at Twitter about foreign influence operations on the platform and were repeatedly told there were none of any significance. The FBI also routinely pressured Twitter to hand over data outside the normal search warrant process, which Twitter at first resisted.
In July 2020, Chan arranged for Twitter executives to get top secret security clearances so the FBI could share intelligence about possible threats to the upcoming presidential election. The next month, Chan sent Roth information about a Russian hacking group called APT28. Roth later said that when the Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop broke, “It set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leak campaign alarm bells.” Even though there was never any evidence that anything on the laptop was hacked, Roth reacted to it just as the FBI had conditioned him to do, using the company’s hacked-materials policy to suppress the story as soon as it appeared, just as the agency suggested it would, less than a month before the election.
Suspending the President
The erosion of Twitter’s content moderation standards would continue after the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, reaching its apogee on January 8, 2021, two days after the Capitol riot. That is when Twitter made the extraordinary decision to suspend President Trump, even though he had not violated any Twitter policies. As the Twitter Files show, the suspension came amid ongoing interactions with federal agencies—interactions that were increasing in frequency in the months leading up to the 2020 election, during which Roth was meeting weekly with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. As the election neared, Twitter’s unevenly applied, rules-based content moderation policies would steadily deteriorate.
Content moderation on Twitter had always been an unstable mix of automatic enforcement of rules and subjective interventions by top executives, most of whom used Twitter’s censorship tools to diminish the reach of Trump and others on the right through shadow banning and other means. But that was changing. As Taibbi wrote in the third installment of the Twitter Files: “As the election approached, senior executives—perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they met more as time progressed—increasingly struggled with rules, and began to speak of ‘vios’ [violations] as pretexts to do what they’d likely have done anyway.”
After January 6, Twitter jettisoned even the appearance of a rules-based moderation policy, suspending Trump for a pair of tweets that top executives falsely claimed were violations of Twitter’s terms of service. The first, sent early in the morning on January 8, stated: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” The second, sent about an hour later, simply stated that Trump would not be attending Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20.
That same day, key Twitter staffers correctly determined that Trump’s tweets did not constitute incitement of violence or violate any other Twitter policies. But pressure kept building from people like Gadde, who wanted to know whether the tweets amounted to “coded incitement to further violence.” Some suggested that Trump’s first tweet might have violated the company’s policy on the glorification of violence. Internal discussions then took an even more bizarre turn. Members of Twitter’s “scaled enforcement team” reportedly viewed Trump “as the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler and on that basis and on the totality of his Tweets, he should be de-platformed.”
Later on the afternoon of January 8, Twitter announced Trump’s permanent suspension “due to the risk of further incitement of violence”—a nonsense phrase that corresponded to no written Twitter policy. The suspension of a sitting head of state was unprecedented. Twitter had never taken such a step, even with heads of state in Nigeria and Ethiopia who actually had incited violence. Internal deliberations unveiled by the Twitter Files show that Trump’s suspension was partly justified based on the “overall context and narrative” of Trump’s words and actions—as one executive put it—“over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.”
That is, it was not anything Trump said or did; it was that Twitter’s censors wanted to blame the President for everything that happened on January 6 and remove him from the platform. To do that, they were willing to shift the entire intellectual framework of content moderation from the enforcement of objective rules to the consideration of “context and narrative,” thereby allowing executives to engage in what amounts to viewpoint discrimination.
Private companies, of course, for the most part have the right to engage in viewpoint discrimination—something the government is prohibited from doing by the First Amendment. The problem is that when Twitter suspended Trump, it was operating less like a private company than like an extension of the federal government.
***
Among the most shocking revelations of the Twitter Files is the extent to which federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies came to view Twitter as a tool for censorship and narrative control. In part six of the Twitter Files, Taibbi chronicles the “constant and pervasive” contact between the FBI and Twitter after January 2020, “as if [Twitter] were a subsidiary.” In particular, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security wanted Twitter to censor tweets and lock accounts it believed were engaged in “election misinformation,” and would regularly send the company content it had pre-flagged for moderation, essentially dragooning Twitter into what would otherwise be illegal government censorship. Taibbi calls it a “master-canine” relationship. When requests for censorship came in from the feds, Twitter obediently complied—even when the tweets in question were clearly jokes or posted on accounts with few followers.
Some Twitter executives were unsure what to make of this relationship. Policy Director Nick Pickles at one point asked how he should refer to the company’s cooperation with federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, suggesting it be described in terms of “partnerships.” Time and again, federal agencies stressed the need for close collaboration with their “private sector partners,” using the alleged interference by Russia in the 2016 election as the pretext for a massive government surveillance and censorship regime operating from inside Twitter.
Requests for content moderation, which increasingly resembled demands, came not only from the FBI and DHS, but also from a tangled web of other federal agencies, contractors, and government-affiliated think tanks such as the Election Integrity Project at Stanford University. As Taibbi writes, the lines between government and its “partners” in this effort were “so blurred as to be meaningless.”
The Deputization of Twitter
After the 2016 election, both Twitter and Facebook faced pressure from Democrats and their media allies to root out Russian “election meddling” under the thoroughly debunked theory that a Moscow-based social media influence operation was responsible for Trump’s election victory. In reality, Russia’s supposed meddling amounted to a minuscule ad buy on Facebook and a handful of Twitter bots. But the truth was not acceptable to Democrats, the media, or the anti-Trump federal bureaucracy.
In 2017, Twitter came under tremendous pressure to “keep producing material” on Russian interference, and in response it created a Russia Task Force to hunt for accounts tied to Moscow’s Internet Research Agency. The task force did not find much. Out of some 2,700 accounts reviewed, only two came back as significant, and one of those was Russia Today, a state-backed news outlet. But in the face of bad press and threats from Democrats in Congress, Twitter executives decided to go along with the official narrative and pretend they had a Russia problem. To placate Washington and avoid costly new regulations, they pledged to “work with [members of Congress] on their desire to legislate.” When someone in Congress leaked the list of the 2,700 accounts Twitter’s task force had reviewed, the media exploded with stories suggesting that Twitter was swarming with Russian bots—and Twitter continued to go along.
After that, as described by Taibbi, “This cycle—threatened legislation wedded to scare headlines pushed by congressional/intel sources, followed by Twitter caving to [content] moderation asks—[came to] be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement.”
Late in 2017, Twitter quietly adopted a new policy. In public, it would say that all content moderation took place “at [Twitter’s] sole discretion.” But its internal guidance would stipulate censorship of anything “identified by the U.S. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” Thus Twitter increasingly allowed the intelligence community, the State Department, and a dizzying array of federal and state agencies to submit content moderation requests through the FBI, which Chan suggested could function as “the belly button of the [U.S. government].” These requests would grow and intensify during the Covid pandemic and in the run-up to the 2020 election.
By 2020, there was a torrent of demands for censorship, sometimes with no explanation—just an Excel spreadsheet with a list of accounts to be banned. These demands poured in from FBI offices all over the country, overwhelming Twitter staff. Eventually the government would pay Twitter $3.4 million in compensation. It was a pittance considering the work Twitter did at the government’s behest, but the payment illustrated a stark reality: Twitter, a leading gatekeeper of the digital public square and arguably the most powerful social media platform in the world, had become a subcontractor for the U.S. intelligence community.
***
The Twitter Files have revealed or confirmed three important truths about social media and the deep state.
First, the entire concept of “content moderation” is a euphemism for censorship by social media companies that falsely claim to be neutral and unbiased. To the extent they exercise a virtual monopoly on public discourse in the digital era, we should stop thinking of them as private companies that can “do whatever they want,” as libertarians are fond of saying. The companies’ content moderation policies are at best a flimsy justification for banning or blocking whatever their executives do not like. At worst, they provide cover for a policy of pervasive government censorship.
Second, Twitter was taking marching orders from a deep state security apparatus that was created to fight terrorists, not to censor or manipulate public discourse. To the extent that the deep state is using social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to subvert the First Amendment and run information psy-ops on the American public, these companies have become malevolent government actors. As a policy matter, the hands-off, laissez-faire regulatory approach we have taken to them should come to an immediate end.
Third, the administrative state has metastasized into a destructive deep state that threatens to bring about the collapse of America’s constitutional system within our lifetimes. Emblematic of the threat is the fact that “the intelligence community” has proven itself incapable of not interfering in American elections. The FBI in particular has directly meddled in the last two presidential elections to a degree that should call into question its continued existence. Indeed, the FBI’s post-9/11 transformation from a law enforcement agency to a counter-terrorism and intelligence-gathering agency with seemingly limitless remit has been a disaster for civil liberties and the First Amendment. We need either to impose radical reforms or scrap it entirely and start over.
The late great political scientist Angelo Codevilla argued that our response to 9/11 was completely wrong. Instead of erecting a sprawling security and surveillance apparatus to detect and disrupt potential terrorist plots, we should have issued an ultimatum to the regimes that were harboring Al Qaeda: you make war on these terrorists and bring them to justice or we will make war on you. The reason not to do what we did, Codevilla argued, is that a security and surveillance apparatus powerful and pervasive enough to do what we wanted it to do was incompatible with a free society. It might defeat the terrorists, but it would eventually be turned on the American people.
The Twitter Files leave little doubt that Codevilla’s prediction has come to pass. The question we face now is whether the American people and their elected representatives will fight back. The fate of the republic rests on the answer.’https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-twitter-files-reveal-an-existential-threat/?_hsmi=245368685&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8djEiArZi7oZ5bxPRk9siyxAf5O-y7uH2Lr5dJDxeOmKGkRT2WYpV3xb0dghLbTugfkLArvXGtbWKu_aRA5ZGi8ZL09Q
All I know is that if there is fraud (cheating) like 2020, whoever runs on the Democrat ticket will win!
Fraudulent ‘President Biden is widely expected to launch his reelection campaign at the start of the next year. While currently, Biden has said that he will take the holidays to consider whether he wants to run for a second term in office, there are many who would not like to see him running again. One Democratic strategist reportedly said that while he “love(s) the guy” he has doubts about whether or not Biden should run again.
Despite his age and low approval ratings, however, Biden, the White House and many in the Democratic Party have maintained that the President is completely certain that he will run for office again. These are some of the reasons that support the theory that Biden would run again.
1. No other Democratic potential candidates
Normally, when the President currently in office is not running for the next presidential election there is chatter as to who could potentially be a candidate. Usually, there are also candidates who start making visits to primary states and testing what the grounds think about them launching a campaign, however, currently there haven’t been any moves about other prospective Democratic candidates.
2. First lady Jill Biden has pointed towards Biden running again
In a conversation with French President Emmanuel Macron earlier this month, the first lady reportedly said that they are ready for her husband’s reelection campaign. This could be seen as a direct admission of the plans that Biden has for the upcoming presidential election. Many consider Jill Biden to be the first person that people should look at when considering what Biden’s next move will be, which strongly signals that he will be seeking reelection.’https://www.conservativefreepress.com/2022/12/31/proof-biden-running-again-in-2024/?utm_placement=CFPnewsletter
‘‘Taking out the trash’ refers to politicians releasing bad news when it’s least likely to be noticed, such as a Friday afternoon before a three-day weekend.
Both sides of politics do it.
But now, the US mainstream media have started doing it over their suppressing reporting of the Hunter Biden laptop during the 2020 election.
Senator Ted Cruz concludes that there is a confluence of institutions – media, Democrats, bureaucrats, universities and big business – determined to deceive and lie to the people.
This US establishment has learned from Beijing how to marry ideology – communism with either Chinese or American characteristics – with the potential to reap massive wealth from corrupting government to make them all Soros-like, new-style communist billionaires.
Added to that, building on abuses matured under Obama, they have dared to undermine traditional checks and balances so essential to our system.
This is done by weaponising and politicising institutions against their opponents, institutions which in a democracy must be above the political fray. Well described in Ted Cruz’s Justice Corrupted: How the Left Weaponized Our Legal System, this involves misusing the taxation bureaucracy (IRS) and the justice system (DoJ, FBI) against enemies. And don’t think Australia is immune. Just recall what Victorian authorities and the ABC did to Cardinal Pell.
Meanwhile, in the Australian mainstream media echo chamber, hardly a day goes by when there is not some attack on Donald Trump, all the while ignoring damning evidence on the Biden family such as that released through the coming Republican-dominated House Oversight Committee.
Yet not only were Trump’s achievements remarkable, domestic and foreign, he was alone among Western leaders courageous and honest enough to walk out of the ruinous Paris Climate Accord.
The only salvation for the free world can come from the next real Republican president. Fortunately, the choice will be made by the best judges, registered Republican supporters voting as primaries stretch across that great country, albeit at an infuriatingly leisurely pace. As to the Paris Accord, while this is doomed to have zero effect on the climate, a trite application of the follow-the-money principle indicates its sole beneficiaries are, unsurprisingly, the usual assorted billionaires.
These especially include the murderous multi-billionaire gangsters in Beijing who are bleeding the Chinese people dry while profiting from their infamous sideline, the on-demand trade in human organs ripped out of the living bodies of healthy young Muslims, Christians and Falun Gong practitioners.
Meanwhile, they are laughing all the way to the bank as our leaders line up to sign up for net zero, something Alan Jones long ago warned would be a ‘national suicide note’.
This is nothing more than a betrayal of Australia, a veritable treason of the elites.
Just on that, the uninformed (especially those exposed to modern education) were no doubt scared by the recent official ‘State of the Climate Report’, which was, of course, the intention.
While its assertion of increasing temperatures was reported in the mainstream media as unquestionable fact, scientist Jo Nova points out that satellites show that, despite an increase in CO2 (which Peter Ridd points out is greening Australia), there has been no warming in Australia in the last ten years.
But, she says, if you use thermometers in carparks, near runways, or close to incinerators, you’ll find the increase that will ensure the grants keep flowing in. Helped by lowering past readings, perhaps?
To return to the media taking out the trash, we saw a spectacular example over Thanksgiving when CBS suddenly announced they had finally authenticated the infamous Hunter Biden laptop.
But they’re still pretending there’s no evidence to show Joe Biden was the ‘Big Guy’ receiving 10 per cent from the sale of access and influence into Washington.
Two years before, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, presenter Lesley Stahl forbade President Trump from even referring to the laptop because the story ‘could not be authenticated’.
But Stahl curiously never asked for authentication when Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi cast doubt on whether the Holocaust had occurred.
Cruz says that the story about the Hunter Biden laptop and the Biden family’s corrupt dealings with foreign powers, was ‘incredibly inconvenient’ because it broke in the New York Post just before the 2020 election and could have affected the way the establishment had decided the vote should go.
So, he says, the FBI contacted ‘their buddies in big tech’ to ask them to suppress this on the tired old ground that it was ‘Russian disinformation’.
This blatant lie was conveniently supported by an open letter from more than fifty former senior ‘intelligence’ officials .
Acting in concert, Cruz says, Facebook and Twitter then took down not just the story but the New York Post.
Rather than asking Biden about the laptop, the mainstream media preferred to ask him about such important issues as the flavour of the ice cream he would so ostentatiously eat in front of them.
Now, after two years, and with the 2020 and 2022 elections safely out of the way, the mainstream media are changing their story.
For two reasons. First, Republicans have won the House and are already starting investigations to show that Joe Biden lied and was the ‘Big Guy’ raking in his 10 per cent.
Their recent first report has been almost totally ignored by the mainstream media and its Australian echo chamber. But as hearings begin in the New Year, the mainstream want to be able to say: ‘Nothing new here. We’ve already covered that.’
The second reason the mainstream media are changing direction is that the establishment have decided that their ‘useful idiot’, Biden, is in fact no longer useful. This is not only because he is being exposed as the Manchurian candidate this column warned of as long ago as 24 October 2020, but also because he is threatening to stand in 2024.
The ultimate treachery the mainstream media plans is to block Trump or any good Republican candidate from becoming President and making America great again.’https://spectator.com.au/2022/12/taking-out-the-trash/
If the 2020 election had been fair most conservatives would have accepted the fact. HOWEVER, it was not a fair election that put Basement Joe into the WH. Basement Joe is a senile demented elderly man who needs a handler for every occasion. Sad but true! Sleepy belongs in a home for seniors and NOT in the WH.
Anyway, HBO has made a documentary trying to show Sleepy as the man for the time! Let’s just trust there is a change in Congress this November!!!! A change in Congress may save America until 2024 when there just might be a FAIR election and a CONSERVATIVE American will be in the WH!!
- Our bureaucrats, it seems, have no boundaries when it comes to a former president of the United States. What a precedent to set. Let us compare that to how they treat themselves.
- When Hillary Clinton’s emails were found to contain classified information, some marked at the highest levels of classification, the FBI did not raid her home in Chappaqua, New York. They did not overturn her office or closets when classified emails turned up that she had not sent back to the government or when she wiped the data on her personal server with BleachBit, which meant the government would never know the full extent of the documents Clinton kept. Why was she treated differently by the FBI?
- Consider the case of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who lied to the Senate when he declared that the intelligence community had no mass surveillance program collecting data on Americans. Not only did he lie in his public testimony before the committee, he also refused to acknowledge his lie and instead tried to explain it away.
- [Clapper] also refused to acknowledge his lie and instead tried to explain it away. Because Clapper is a protected bureaucrat, he faced no consequences, and even joined CNN as a paid national security contributor, regularly attacking former President Trump. CNN does not note that he perjured himself before Congress — with evidence — when they put him on the air.
- Hayden also stated that the [CIA interrogation] tapes were destroyed, “only after it was determined they were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative, or judicial inquires.” Again, all evidence points to the contrary, and Hayden is wrong to make these clearly false assertions.
- Hayden’s efforts, however, were just another in a long line of efforts to cover up the actions of unaccountable bureaucrats, who not surprisingly, were never held legally accountable.
- My candid advice to Biden, Hayden, Clapper, and many other media commentators, is to consider your own records — and be careful what you advocate.

Former CIA Director Mike Hayden, shortly after the FBI raided the home of former President Donald J. Trump, responded to a tweet by Michael Beschloss in a way that, apart from disregarding any presumption of innocence, seemingly endorsed the idea that Trump was a spy who, for allegedly having taken classified documents, should be executed by the government, as the Rosenbergs were in 1953 for having passed US nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. “Sounds about right,” Hayden wrote over of photograph of the Rosenbergs on Twitter.
Full disclosure There is a bit of history between Hayden and me. I opposed his nomination to be CIA director, by saying at the time, “Bottom line: I do believe he’s the wrong person, the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Hayden’s comment reflects what many fear: that there is a real double standard for certain Americans versus protected bureaucrats, politicians, and those favored by a mainstream media that has been accused of behaving like an arm of the Democratic Party (here, here and here). When President Joe Biden stood in Philadelphia before a blood-red wall flanked by U.S. Marines whom the Commander-in-Chief used as political props, he did not condemn Hayden’s suggestion to execute the former president; instead, he attacked everyday Americans with whose politics he disagrees.
When local Democrat official Robert Telles was arrested in the alleged murder of a Las Vegas reporter who investigated him for having an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate, you would have been hard pressed to know he was a Democrat. The media simply left that fact out of the story or buried in later paragraphs. Similarly, there was not much coverage of the Democrat political operative who hired a hit man to kill a political opponent. Similarly, when a North Dakota teen was run over and killed, the mainstream media ignored the suspect’s claiming that he did it after a political disagreement with the teen, whom he labeled a “Republican extremist.”
President Biden, where is your condemnation of this Democrat political violence? How about the FBI agents who raided the home of former president Trump and reportedly rummaged through the former first lady’s clothes closets and took Trump’s passports? Was this not politically excessive, President Biden?
When Hillary Clinton’s emails were found to contain classified information, some marked at the highest levels of classification, the FBI did not raid her home in Chappaqua, New York. They did not overturn her office or closets when classified emails turned up that she had not sent back to the government or when she wiped the data on her personal server with BleachBit, which meant the government would never know the full extent of the documents Clinton kept. Why was she treated differently by the FBI?
Our bureaucrats, it seems, have no boundaries when it comes to a former president of the United States. What a precedent to set. Let us compare that to how they treat themselves.
As a former House Intelligence Committee chair and U.S. ambassador, I have long dealt with our intelligence and law enforcement communities and can cite chapter and verse how these bureaucrats have protected themselves. Consider the case of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who lied to the Senate when he declared that the intelligence community had no mass surveillance program collecting data on Americans. Not only did he lie in his public testimony before the committee, he also refused to acknowledge his lie and instead tried to explain it away. Because Clapper is a protected bureaucrat, he faced no consequences, and even joined CNN as a paid national security contributor, regularly attacking former President Trump. CNN does not note that he perjured himself before Congress — with evidence — when they put him on the air.
The case that is perhaps most illustrative of the double standard was the 2005 destruction by CIA of 92 video tapes, comprising hundreds of hours of material, on the agency’s enhanced interrogation program.
For those who do not remember the enhanced interrogation program, it was a CIA program that attempted to gain valuable information, intelligence from captured al-Qaeda members about the plans, intentions, and capabilities of the organization.
The enhanced interrogation program was extremely controversial when it, along with the existence of secret prisons, was leaked to the media, but Jose Rodriguez, the director of operations for the CIA at the time, staunchly defended it. The CIA claims that it provided valuable insights into al-Qaeda, including information that eventually led to the successful raid that resulted in the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. Others have concluded the program was tantamount to torture, including Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who conducted a review, and the European Court on Human Rights.
As one the members of the “Gang of Eight” top congressional leaders briefed on the most sensitive intelligence, we were briefed on the “enhanced techniques” in 2004. It was difficult to imagine how they would be used or what the impact would be on a prisoner. We were told that we would be briefed on what techniques would be used on what individuals before they would be used again. We were never presented with the challenge of a review during my tenure.
As awareness of the program became public, Congress tried to get a better understanding of how it worked and how effective it was and just how far it had gone. Viewing those tapes would have been extremely helpful in making oversight determinations, but Rodriguez had ordered them destroyed.
How does that happen? When Congresswoman Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee at the time, first learned of the tapes in2003, she warned the CIA in writing not to destroy them. White House Counsel Harriet Miers also urged the CIA not to destroy the tapes. Additionally, in May of 2005, Senator Jay Rockefeller requested documents about interrogation on behalf of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In addition, lawyers for 9/11 defendant Zacarias Moussaoui requested the videos for the defense of their client, and Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema requested information on the interrogation program for court proceedings involving another detainee.
Despite congressional pressure, directives from White House lawyers, and federal legal proceedings, Rodriguez made the call to destroy the tapes in a secret cable written by Gina Haspel, who would go on to become CIA director under President Trump.
No one was ever charged for destroying the tapes. As far as I know, no homes or offices were ever raided to uncover evidence. But because these unaccountable bureaucrats took this action, the American people, Congress, and the courts will never know what really happened during this controversial period of American history.
What of Michael Hayden’s role in all of this? After The New York Times advised the Bush White House that it would be running a story on the destruction of the tapes, Hayden wrote to the CIA staff that congressional leaders had been briefed on the existence of the tapes and their planned destruction. Wrong. I had not been briefed on the existence or destruction of the tapes when I became chairman in 2004 and Jane Harman had earlier objected to the tape destruction in 2003.
Hayden also stated that the tapes were destroyed, “only after it was determined they were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative, or judicial inquires.” Again, all evidence points to the contrary, and Hayden is wrong to make these clearly false assertions.
Hayden’s efforts appear to be just another in a long line of efforts to cover up the actions of unaccountable bureaucrats, who not surprisingly, were never held legally accountable.
My candid advice to Biden, Hayden, Clapper, and many other media commentators, is to consider your own records — and be careful what you advocate.’https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18965/washington-double-legal-standards