Another of the left-wing media’s campaign hit pieces on former president Donald Trump proved to be fake news, the Biden administration admitted on Thursday.
The White House acknowledged there was no conclusive evidence to support a New York Times smear that Russia had put bounties on US troops stationed in Afghanistan and encouraged the Taliban to attack them.
“The reason that they have low to moderate confidence in this judgment is in part because it relies on detainee reporting,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said. “… [D]ue to the challenging operating environment in Afghanistan … it’s challenging to gather this intelligence and this data.”
Psaki echoed the repeated disavowals by the Trump administration, who had been briefed on the claims at least twice by intelligence officials in 2019 and 2020.
Trump and his top national security officials maintained during the media feeding frenzy that the reports “have not been verified” by US military commanders and defense officials.
Former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany used the recent admission to castigate the biased press and to “gloat” (according to some reports) on the validation that it offered the Trump administration.
AMAZING!
From the White House podium, I said this intelligence was “not verified,” “no consensus” & that the NYTimes & Dems were “irresponsibly politicizing”
NOW WE LEARN: “US Intel Walks Back Claim Russians Put Bounties on American Troops”
Wonder what other stories were FALSE https://t.co/Op2IMmccUk
— Kayleigh McEnany (@kayleighmcenany) April 15, 2021
The story hit the mainstream-media echo chamber last June, creating a distraction for Trump at a time when America was engulfed in leftist violence stemming from weeks of nationwide race riots and a second wave of coronavirus cases was reportedly peaking.
Nonetheless, the Biden campaign capitalized on the baseless disinformation to relentlessly hammer Trump over Russia.
“His entire presidency has been a gift to Putin, but this is beyond the pale,” then-candidate Joe Biden said of Trump days after the reports first appeared.
“It’s a betrayal of the most sacred duty we bear as a nation to protect and equip our troops when we send them into harm’s way,” Biden continued. “It’s a betrayal of every single American family with a loved one serving in Afghanistan or anywhere overseas.”
The hoax was one of several attacks by the Times and other dedicated leftist media outlets that appeared to be coordinated with the Biden campaign and propelled by anonymous sources.
Others included a cherry-picked disclosure of Trump’s tax history and a disputed claim that he had disparaged World War I veterans as “suckers.”
A Times reporter who helped ‘break’ the phony propaganda about Russian bounties indicated that the CIA had a role in planting it.
One of the NYT reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story (originally attributed to unnamed “intelligence officials”) say today that it was a CIA claim. So media outlets – again – repeated CIA stories with no questioning: congrats to all.https://t.co/4GbUXBCOpI
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 15, 2021
According to The Federalist, neo-con warhawk Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo.—whose father, former vice president Dick Cheney, was one of the chief architects of the war with Afghanistan—may also have been a primary source in the false claims.
Cheney, who parted ways with the Trump White House after the president’s last-minute decision to abort a bombing against Iran, worked with House Democrats to block Trump’s proposed withdrawals from Afghanistan and Germany.
She later went on to help House Democrats impeach Trump for allegedly inciting violence during the Jan. 6 uprising at the US Capitol.
Trump recently endorsed Wyoming GOP chairman Frank Eathorne Jr. to replace Cheney, the third-most powerful House Republican, in next year’s congressional midterm elections.
The admission about the Russian bounty story comes as Biden proposes a plan closely mirroring that of the Trump administration for troop withdrawal in Afghanistan—with which America has been involved militarily for nearly two decades since the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
While the danger from foreign terrorist groups like Al Qaeda once justified a vast expansion of intelligence-gathering capabilities for agencies like the CIA, their egregious abuses of power, first noted during the Obama administration, have raised questions about where the true threat to democracy may lie.
If you don’t know that US intelligence agencies exist to spread disinformation and lie, then you know literally nothing about how the US Government functions.
And if you claim to be a “journalist” but mindlessly treat all US Govt claims as true with no evidence, you’re pitiful.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 15, 2021
In case anyone needs reminding, here’s a partial list of the ex-spooks who served as media figures in the Trump years: https://t.co/CJT8YGcvkN
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) April 16, 2021
Ironically, on the very day the White House confessed that the politically motivated Russia bounty story was false, Biden also announced a raft of new sanctions against Russia, including the expulsion of diplomats, claiming the country had interfered in the 2020 election.
NEW: Senior admin official tells reporters that the US intel community still only has low-moderate confidence in the intel about Russia placing bounties on US/coalition troops in Afghanistan, and for that reason none of today’s public actions against Russia are a response to that
— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) April 15, 2021
Some fear that the elevated rhetoric with Russia—including recent saber-rattling over territorial disputes in Ukraine, where the Biden family has maintained private business interests—is a diplomatic tinderbox that could break into yet another military quagmire.
Despite the claims of Russian meddling in the 2020 election, evidence has suggested that domestic interference within the US—including the social-media censorship of damning stories, later verified, from the recovered laptop of Biden’s son, Hunter—played an even larger role than anything Russia has been formally accused of.
Like the failed Hillary Clinton campaign that preceded him, Biden’s campaign may have been complicit in the spread of disinformation and encouragement of widespread, systemic vote fraud while using Russia as a scapegoat.
A recent Rasmussen poll indicated that 47% of Americans consider it likely that the election was fraudulently stolen.
The censorship of the Hunter Biden material and the Russia-collusion hoax both appear to have been part of the disturbing collusion pattern between deep-state intelligence operatives and left-wing media, which alarmingly have used their own false claims to justify a crackdown of reporting on the truth.
The same exact people — in media, politics and tech — who drowned the country in the Russia Bounty disinformation campaign (and so many other frauds like it) are the ones demanding the power to censor and police online discourse in the name of combating “disinformation.” https://t.co/8wiPJF2jWj
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 15, 2021
