(Deroy Murdock, Headline USA) Amid the tsunami of good that Donald J. Trump has unleashed since returning to the presidency, one wave deserves sustained applause.
As I suggested last September, Trump revoked the security clearances of the 51 intelligence operatives who intimated that Hunter Biden’s Laptop from Hell was mere Kremlin propaganda.
These “Spies who lie,” as the New York Post dubbed them, earned this rebuke—at least. The federal government granted them secret clearances to help protect U.S. national security, not perpetrate blatant election interference and turbocharge censorship.
The Post’s Oct. 14, 2020, exposé discussed the laptop and its extensive evidence of the Biden crime family’s elaborate global shakedowns. In short, Hunter and Joe Biden’s brother Jim swapped access to “the Big Guy” for a Porsche, jewelry, a Chinese-financed shopping spree, countless other luxuries, and $30 million in cash payments, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., estimates.
After consulting Biden–Harris campaign aide Antony Blinken (who became secretary of state), former acting CIA director Michael Morrell invited 50 other former intelligence officers to sign an open letter that trivialized the Post’s exclusive for containing “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” These spies had no evidence to support this Big Lie.
Democrats then used the ex-spies’ letter to browbeat Facebook, Twitter (now X), and other social-media platforms into hiding the Laptop from Hell. In fact, Twitter (pre-Elon Musk) froze the Post’s account for 15 days!
Federal agents also twisted arms in Silicon Valley to bury the Post’s dispatch.
“The FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, on Aug. 26, 2024.
After the Post’s scoop emerged, “We sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply,” Zuckerberg explained. “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
Meanwhile, during his final, Oct. 22, 2020 debate against Trump, Joe Biden invoked the ex-spies’ fake letter to smear the Post’s true story as “a bunch of garbage.” The pro-Biden media lapped this up and used the “garbage” line to conceal the Post’s story even further.
Team 51’s abuse of their secret clearances proved highly effective.
According to a Nov. 24, 2020, Media Research Center/Polling Company survey of 1,750 Biden voters in seven swing states, 45.1% knew nothing about Hunter’s laptop. Among these voters, 9.4% said that this fact would have shifted their support to Trump, a third-party contender, or none of the above.
Had Biden lost 4.2% of his votes, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin would have slipped from his fingers and into Trump’s hands. This would have given Trump 311 Electoral College votes and four more years in the Oval Office. Imagine: Trump would have completed his second term Monday, rather than commence it.
Team 51 includes such luminaries as former director of national intelligence James Clapper and ex-CIA directors John Brennan, Michael Hayden, and Leon Panetta. They and others have savored book contracts, TV deals, and lucrative consulting arrangements. In short, these snakes have suffered zero consequences for deceiving the American people as they conducted their most solemn civic duty: choosing the president of the United States.
“The signatories willfully weaponized the gravitas of the Intelligence Community to manipulate the political process and undermine our democratic institutions,” Trump’s executive order states. “This fabrication of the imprimatur of the Intelligence Community to suppress information essential to the American people during a Presidential election is an egregious breach of trust reminiscent of a third world country.”
President Trump fired a torpedo into the hull of the USS Deep State. He had every right to rescind these scoundrels’ security clearances. This special privilege is intended to keep the American people safe, free, and prosperous—not to spread lies, bamboozle voters, and steal elections.
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor.
