Yet he repeatedly told him something was coming. Everyone to the second hearing of the Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. It’s terrifying, first of all and second of all, it’s consistent with our deposition of a FBI agent named Elvis Chan, who was working in the northern area of California northern California who had monthly and then weekly meetings with big tech executives about what he was referring to as a potential Russian hack and leak operation.

And in the sworn affidavit, an FEC affidavit from a senior Twitter person indicated that the Hunter Biden laptop was specifically mentioned as a hack and leak operation by the Russians. Knowing, by the way, in the fall and winter of 2019, the FBI had possession of the Hunter Biden laptop. Now stop and think about it. So the government was telling big tech that there’s going to be a hack and dump operation.

When it’s going to happen in October? Who it’s going to involve? Hunter Biden. So what’s going to happen? When it’s going to happen? Who it’s going to involve? And you step back and you say, how did they know? These guys are prophetic. How could they see the know? I figured that pressure would be brought to bear. As soon as I started seeing the names FBI DHS on some of these documents.

I knew this wasn’t going to last very long. But once I saw that, once I started to see emails and slack chats where there were recommendations from state agencies and federal law enforcement and even intelligence agencies about content moderation, I decided that that was the area that I wanted to focus on. And as a result, we were able to really to determine sort of one important thing, which was the line of communication that existed between the federal agencies and companies like Twitter.

Along with the internisign communications that were going on, they had set up a private portal to communicate with the government, which included DoD, the FBI included HHS, just included a lot of agencies to include what you hear them refer to as other government agency, which we all know is the CIA. There was a lot more going on than just a strategic relationship. The FBI and a number of other agencies were actually censoring Americans.

On August 6, 2020, the FBI briefed senators Grassley and Johnson, and according to the senator’s testimony last month in front of this committee, the briefing was bogus and done so someone could go leak that the briefing had happened and undermined the senator’s investigation. Not only were they working with big tech to try to prep the battlefield and make sure it be censored, but folks in the Senate were figuring out what Hunter was up to.

And it looked like the FBI went up and gave a briefing whose sole purpose was to leak to the media to say this could be disinformation. In September of 2020, government funded think tank gets involved. They do a tabletop exercise. The participants include the New York times, the Washington Post, and other mainstream media outlets. Facebook is there. Mr. Roth of Twitter is there. The organizer was the former CEO of NPR and the former head of news at Twitter.

The mock exercise is hosted by the Aspen institute. We are not here merely for a pleasant stay in the mountains to hear a few speeches and then go back to the mess that we are in. The Aspen institute is a very, very influential think tank. It’s sort of the American counterpart to the world economic forum. I mean, it’s obviously not on that scale, but it’s very extravagantly funded.

It gets money from lots of different sources, including from the US. Military, but it’s where sort of establishment neoliberal intellectuals gather to decide policy mostly out of the eyes of the public. These agencies or these groups served as cutouts for the government to censor Americans. This is a coordinated collusive effort backed by billions of dollars to censor everyone in the world, practically speaking. And Americans have special rights under our first amendment, so the government’s paying someone else, and they’re trying to influence these other organizations to censor Americans first amendment free speech.

In 2020, the Aspen institute held what they called a hack and leak tabletop exercise to prepare for the possibility that a story would come out about Hunter, Biden and Burima. It was that specific. In July and August of 2020, this institute was inviting prominent journalists, academics, and people from civil society organizations to get together and war game. It’s just a bunch of people in the room. Wargaming a particular scenario that they think may occur, and then in the end, I guess they’re kind of fixing the narrative of how they will respond to that certain scenario.

They were they were preparing for a story to come out. FBI knows it’s legit, knows it’s real, and then is telling sort of pre bunking this Hunter Biden laptop story and the contents of it ahead of time. And they also, according to Miranda Devine, had access to her emails and knew exactly when the story was going to be published. I mean, again, this is out of some sort of orwellian novel, but it was happening in the United States of America leading up to the 2020 election.

They had the laptop in their possession for a year. And Schellenberger writes about this in, I think it’s twitter files number seven, where he spells it all out. And he used, I thought, an appropriate term. He said it was like the government was pre bunking a story that they knew was likely to come out. And the reason they could prebunk it is because they had had the laptop in their possession for ten months prior to that.

So here you have people from The New York Times, like David Sanger from The Washington Post, like Ellen Nakashima. She’s a big national security reporter. Garrett Graff, who is both at the Aspen Institute but also writing for Wired at the same time, there were reporters from CNN, from other organizations. They’re all coming to this thing where they are planning in advance how to deal with a true story about Hunter Biden and his connections to Burisma.

A lot of these so called journalists have just simply become advocates and journalism. I mean, when you know the investigative journalist that’s exposing corruption, that’s a very important role to play in our society. And I think it’s shocking the number of so called journalists that are perfectly willing to go along to parrot the talking points of the current administration. Basically, what they do, they are preparing for how to discount and non report and non cover the story.

The thing that’s remarkable for me is that when the actual Burisma story broke in The New York Post, when Hunter Biden’s laptop was reported on by The Post in October, the existence of this tabletop exercise instantly became newsworthy. So that tabletop exercise is interesting. So what the left is they have this narrative about 2016 where you had a series of leaks of emails allegedly taken by the Russians.

No one disputed the authenticity of the emails, but they were politically problematic. So 2020 comes around and they say, okay, well, are there going to be leaks of other information that is true that’s going to be politically problematic? How do we handle the release of true information that hurts our candidate? And the plan was to just censor it, attribute it to Russian misinformation and censor it. All the people who were there and reporting on this, even if it was off the record, they should have been deeply nervous because, oh my God, we participated in this thing, preparing to non cover a huge story involving a presidential candidate.

This is going to come out. I either have to report on this or admit it or something. None of them did. They all quietly non reported the existence of this thing with the exception of Wired. Wired did a little notation saying that the exercise had happened. They all kind of stuck together. And it’s remarkable, right? Because I was raised as a journalist. You’re on the side of the public.

The public wants to know this stuff. This story should have been out there. The American people should have been able to make their own determination of how that affected their vote. And the idea that government was working with the press and with big tech to suppress that ought to scare the bejesus out of everybody. How could that happen? And then we see stuff like again, like the Aspen Institute business, where it’s a whole bunch of journalists agreeing sort of tacitly to do something that’s totally unethical.

And how does that happen? How do you trust another person in the room isn’t going to fink on you to the rest of the world? I thought that was remarkable. When I saw those documents, I thought, man, this must be a deeply entrenched system if they’re so comfortable doing this kind of thing and not worrying that this is going to come out. Finally, as if on queue, five days later, on October 1951, former intel officials sign a letter with the now famous sentence, the Biden laptop story has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.

Look, they all knew adverse information about Hunter and Joe Biden was going to come out, and they all knew what to do when it happened. And I don’t think you needed to make a lot of phone calls once it came out for them to start pushing their narratives. I mean, how many phone calls did it take to get that 51 person letter to be signed lying to the American people about Hunter laptop being disinformation? Well, by the documents, we’re seeing not that many phone calls, all of which were originating from the Biden campaign.

The guy who put the whole letter together, Mike Morell, former Acting Director of the CIA, he said, we did it because we wanted Joe Biden to have something to use against President Trump in the final debate. And we wanted that because we wanted Joe Biden to win with their title. All 51 had their title on there, giving it the weight that, oh, this has got to be accurate, when in fact it wasn’t.

Well, it gave a talking point to Joe Biden that the media could also echo and latch onto, that this story was to be ignored and cast aside. And it was an abuse of these individual security clearances because we trust them, because they have national security clearances, they have access to information the rest of us don’t have, and they put out a political talking point that was based on political expediency rather than a truthful analysis of what the laptop was and what its implications were.

It reminds you a lot of psychological operations. I mean, the military has been doing psychological operations for a long time, and you had a concerted effort by multiple government agencies, which kind of meddled in our election. It meddled in the COVID affairs and other things as far as trying to influence Americans or sway their opinions in a different way, or even censor Americans who spoke out against the narrative that was being pushed.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. In his 1961 Farewell address, president Dwight Eisenhower warned of, quote, the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military industrial complex. He feared public policy would become the captive of a scientific, technological elite. What’s happened is Congress has willingly ceded this authority of these faceless agencies who’ve gotten more and more power.

Civil society organizations are supposed to watch the government. The news media is supposed to watch both. But what we see in the censorship industrial complex is they’re all working together in what they call the shared endeavor. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent family of tomorrow.

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