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Mayorkas Appoints Officials Behind Hunter Biden Laptop Letter to DHS Intelligence Group

Mayorkas Appoints Officials Behind Hunter Biden Laptop Letter to DHS Intelligence Group

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former CIA Operations Officer Paul Kolbe are back.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former CIA Operations Officer Paul Kolbe signed a letter in 2020 stating Hunter Biden’s laptop was likely Russia trying to interfere with the presidential election.

We all knew the truth then. We know the truth now.

Thanks to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the men are back.

Clapper, Brennan, and Kolbe are in the new Homeland Intelligence Experts Group.

“The security of the American people depends on our capacity to collect, generate, and disseminate actionable intelligence to our federal, state, local, territorial, tribal, campus, and private sector partners,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas. “I express my deep gratitude to these distinguished individuals for dedicating their exceptional expertise, experience, and vision to our critical mission.”

I would laugh if our borders weren’t a mess or if these guys were serious people.

DHS said the group “will meet four times annually and leverage the expertise of each member to provide input on I&A’s most complex problems and challenges, including terrorism, fentanyl, transborder issues, and emerging technology.”

“The Homeland Intelligence Experts Group is being formed at a time of unprecedented challenge, with the U.S. intelligence enterprise facing threats from a range of malign actors, to include foreign nation-state adversaries, domestic violent extremists, cyber criminals, drug-trafficking cartels and other transnational criminal organizations,” said Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Ken Wainstein. “The Experts Group will be an invaluable asset as we navigate through this evolving threat and operating environment and continue to strengthen our efforts to protect the Homeland.”

I do not know how anyone can trust these men. Where shall I begin?

JAMES CLAPPER

James Clapper admitted he never saw evidence linking President Donald Trump to Russia in 2016:

“I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election,” former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified in 2017. “That’s not to say that there weren’t concerns about the evidence we were seeing, anecdotal evidence. … But I do not recall any instance where I had direct evidence.”

Clapper doubled down on the letter he signed about Hunter Biden’s laptop despite numerous media outlets and officials authenticating the laptop:

“Well, to answer your question, no, I don’t regret it. I thought, at the time, it was appropriate to sound a warning about, watch out for the dark hand of the Russians. In my case, this was on the heels of what I saw the Russians do in 2016 to interfere and influence the outcome of our election. So, I thought it was appropriate. I thought the letter was appropriately caveated by acknowledging we didn’t have any direct evidence. To this day, I still have not seen any official results of forensic analysis of that laptop, as to whether or not, in some way, the Russians messed with it.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley accused Clapper of lying to Congress. He told Congress he never discussed the Trump dossier with journalists. However, Clapper then admitted he spoke to CNN’s Jake Tapper about the dossier.

JOHN BRENNAN

Then there’s good old John Brennan. He’s a fine fella, isn’t he?

Declassified documents showed that Brennan told President Barack Obama about the idea to stir up a scandal between Trump and Russia to distract from her emails.

How about Brennan’s involvement in the spying on Trump’s campaign? Crazy: “Sources familiar with the records told Fox News that a late-2016 email chain indicated then-FBI Director James Comey told bureau subordinates that then-CIA Director John Brennan insisted the dossier be included in the intelligence community assessment on Russian interference, known as the ICA.”

Brennan called Trump treasonous, but it wasn’t “treason treason.” Okay, dude:

And that’s why I said it was nothing short of treasonous. I didn’t mean that he committed treason. But it was a term that I used, nothing short of treasonous.

MADDOW: But you didn’t mean that he committed treason, though?

BRENNAN: I said it was nothing short of treasonous. That was the term I used, yes.

MADDOW: That’s the – if we – if we diagram the sentence, nothing short of treasonous means it’s treason.

PAUL KOLBE

I cannot find too much about Paul Kolbe. No articles at LI mention him.

Kolbe currently serves as director of the Intelligence Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

I found an email to Kolbe from the House Judiciary Committee about the letter he signed regarding Hunter’s laptop.

The committee asked Kolbe to hand over all information about the statement. This letter came out in February 2023. The first letter to Kolbe went out in April 2022. Yikes.

Kolber’s 2021 New York Times essay about Russia’s SolarWinds hack made excuses for the hack because America does it, too.

Kolbe started the essay by scolding those who went off on Russia: “There is indignant howling over what is surely Russia’s role in infiltrating, again, the networks of the U.S. government and corporations — this time through a tainted software update by the company SolarWinds. Politicians of both parties have called it a virtual act of war. ‘America must retaliate, and not just with sanctions,’ Senator Marco Rubio said.”

You don’t have a great case, Kolbe, when you have to explain:

The United States is, of course, engaged in the same type of operations at an even grander scale. We are active participants in an ambient cyberconflict that rages, largely unseen and unacknowledged, across the digital globe. This is a struggle that we can’t avoid, and there is no need to play the victim. Just as we use cybertools to defend our national interests, others will use cyberweapons against us.

The National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency exist to break into foreign information systems and steal secrets, and they are damn good at it. They, along with the Defense Department, regularly use cybertools to purloin intelligence from servers across the world and to place foreign information systems and industrial infrastructure at risk. Ones and zeros can be more effective weapons than bombs and missiles. The exposure of Stuxnet, the Snowden leaks and the theft of C.I.A. cybertools revealed the sophistication and extent of capabilities attributed to the United States.

This is the same guy who tried to convince everyone that Russia had a hand in Hunter’s laptop.

I also thought Russia was bad because it interfered with the 2016 election?!?!

What a hypocrite.

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Comments

Gee, what could go wrong here?

    Concise in reply to gonzotx. | September 20, 2023 at 9:20 pm

    If I could go back in time to the ’80s and warn ;people that Biden would be president, they’d look at me in disbelief and say, not unless there was some kind of national voter fraud scheme.

They’re trusted by half the country and all of the administration.

they figured that Hunter would be a bridge too far

They will complement the current DOJ perfectly. President Xi couldn’t be more pleased.

The dirty cops and spooks are brazen in the new American police state,

Look on the bright side. With these three guys all on the same committee, we will all instantly know what NOT to believe.

“The security of the American people depends on our capacity to collect, generate, and disseminate actionable intelligence to our federal, state, local, territorial, tribal, campus, and private sector partners,”

Is anyone else not surprised that accurate, timely, believable and non-politically biased weren’t characteristics he found essential?

    CommoChief in reply to Gosport. | September 21, 2023 at 8:06 am

    That and no explanation about the failure to act against or monitor the ‘known wolves’ about whom our domestic law enforcement from FBI/DHS down to local PD already possessed info.

Mayorkas is a troll like no other. No shame, No principles. He just doesn’t care and loves tweaking those who do.

The Experts Group members are the following:

John Bellinger, Partner, Arnold & Porter (Former Legal Advisor, Department of State and National Security Council)

John Brennan, Distinguished Fellow, Fordham University School of Law and University of Texas at Austin (Former Director, Central Intelligence Agency)

James Clapper, CNN National Security Analyst (Former Director of National Intelligence)

Rajesh De, Partner, Mayer Brown (Former Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy and NSA General Counsel)

Thomas Galati, Senior Vice President, East Coast Security Operations, NBC Universal (Former New York Police Department, Chief, Intelligence and Counterterrorism)

Tashina Gauhar, Senior Director, Compliance, Strategy and Policy, The Boeing Company (Former Associate Deputy Attorney General and Deputy Assistant Attorney General, National Security Division, Department of Justice)

Asha M. George, Executive Director, Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense (Former Subcommittee Staff Director, House Committee on Homeland Security)

Karen Greenberg, Director, Center on National Security, Fordham University School of Law.

Emily Harding, Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of the International Security Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies (Former Deputy Staff Director, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence).

Paul Kolbe, Senior Fellow and former Director of the Intelligence Project, Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center (Former Operations Officer, Central Intelligence Agency)

David Kris, Co-Founder, Culper Partners LLC (Former Assistant Attorney General, National Security Division, Department of Justice)

Michael Leiter, Partner, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom (Former Director, National Counterterrorism Center)

Elisa Massimino, Executive Director, Human Rights Institute, Georgetown Law.

Gregory Nojeim, Senior Counsel and Director, Security and Surveillance Project, Center for Democracy & Technology.

Francis Taylor, Principal, Cambridge Global Advisors (Former Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis, DHS).

Caryn Wagner, Former Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis, DHS.

Benjamin Wittes, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies, The Brookings Institution, and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief

As usual, we’ve no list of the staff. Recall it was McCain’s head of staff working as bag man between McCain and Ukrainian embassy officials.

Fat_Freddys_Cat | September 21, 2023 at 9:03 am

I would say these are serious men–seriously bad. I don’t think their shenanigans are accidental.

So we’re going to have a bunch of treasonous, pathological liars advising our illegitimate, treasonous administration on intelligence.
Gee, what could go wrong?

It’s the payoff for signing the letter! I would have been more surprised if signatories didn’t get any Gov’t $.

They are laughing at you.

This also shows how much they fear Trump: not at all.

Will Clapper and Brennan continue as CNN contributors while in their new roles as Biden Admin contributors? Could it be a contractual requirement?

This is one of the worst appointments by an administration that has set new lows in the quality of its appointees to sub Cabinet level positions

“That’s the – if we – if we diagram the sentence, nothing short of treasonous means it’s treason.”

How about that?! Rachel Maddow actually had a moment of clarity. It must have been a rush!

    Milhouse in reply to DaveGinOly. | September 21, 2023 at 6:55 pm

    Maybe, but there’s a Supreme Court decision that says she’s wrong. Calling someone a traitor, or saying that what they have done is treasonous, is not an accusation that they have committed the crime of treason, just as calling someone a bastard is an insult to them, not to their parents.

Are “domestic violent extremists” different from violent domestic extremists? Are they violent extremists who have been domesticated by marrying? If they’ve been domesticated, then they shouldn’t be violent. It sure is a good thing we have “experts” handling this.

retiredcantbefired | September 23, 2023 at 4:05 pm

I see no one commented here about CISA (a unit of DHS) being dropped from Judge Doughty’s injunction by the 5th circuit. Or about the pseudo-nongovernmental organizations that play a crucial role in the censorship complex, also cut out of the injunction by the 5th Circuit.

It’s as though Missouri v. Biden doesn’t matter at this site.

Who wants the Federal government to win this case?