Secretary of State Antony Blinken, then a top member of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, “set in motion” a letter signed by dozens of former security state dismissing the Hunter Biden “Laptop from Hell” story as having “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”.Yet deeper questions around how the letter was placed with the media remain largely unexplored.
Fake ‘Intel’.
Mike Morrell, a two-time Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), told the House Judiciary Committee that he put together the letter, signed by 51 former intelligence officials including the likes of ex-communist John Brennan. The move came after a call with Blinken, with Biden heavily relying on it to blunt then-President Donald Trump’s criticism of his family’s dodgy dealings during a head-to-head debate.
“Based on Morell’s testimony, it is apparent the Biden campaign played an active role in the origins of the public statement, which had the effect of helping to suppress the Hunter Biden story and preventing American citizens from making a fully informed decision during the 2020 presidential election,” accused Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Michael Turner, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in a letter to Secretary Blinken.
“This concerted effort to minimize and suppress public dissemination of the serious allegations about the Biden family was a grave disservice to all American citizens’ informed participation in our democracy,” they complained.
But while the fact that Antony Blinken may have rustled up a gaggle of security state alumni to suppress the laptop story is disturbing, it is in some ways less interesting than the question of how their letter was planted in the media and inserted into the wider narrative around the Biden family and supposed Russian disinformation in the first place.
Enter Natasha Bertrand.
The House Judiciary Committee says Morrell “explained that the Biden campaign helped to strategize about the public release of the statement” smearing the laptop story as a Russian conspiracy. Who was the ultimate vehicle for that public release? Natasha Bertrand, who only just turned 30, who was then a national security correspondent (in her mid-twenties) for POLITICO.
The question of why the Biden campaign and its allies in the security state community chose German-owned POLITICO seems an obvious one. It lives mainly online, with little traction among the general public and even news junkies often unaware that its low-circulation print edition exists. But POLITICO has a great deal of traction among political insiders, and relies on “anonymous sources” among them for much of its reporting.
Bertrand is the archetypal DC insider, having cut her teeth at Business Insider, followed by the Atlantic, NBC News, POLITICO, and now CNN. Her role appears to be that of official information launderer on behalf of America’s ruling class. Hardly a Walter Cronkite figure, she was only in her mid-twenties when she was tasked with hamstringing the laptop story — but had more experience with such hatchet jobs than one might expect.
She was a key figure in the promotion of the bogus Steele Dossier, originally published by the now officially dead BuzzFeed News, and related, equally flawed CNN reporting on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort being wiretapped by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Indeed, Bertrand was so involved in the dossier hoax that The Washington Post — hardly an outlet known for being sympathetic to Trump — published a lengthy article by media critic Erik Wemple on how she “bootstrapped her punditry [on the dossier] into a contributor’s role on MSNBC.”
Why would the security state turn to someone tied so closely to the discredited Steele Dossier to run the letter undermining the Laptop from Hell? Wouldn’t it make more sense to someone whose credibility wasn’t in tatters? Perhaps not if, like Greg Gutfeld, you believe she was given the letter precisely because she had pushed the dossier so enthusiastically.
https://twitter.com/KarliBonnita/status/1649523231001399298
Indeed, that Bertrand had fallen upwards from Business Insider to The Atlantic to POLITICO — with side gigs as a talking head for MSNBC and NBC — suggests the Steele Dossier coming apart at the seams was no bar to her career advancing.
The laptop story now being fully substantiated — and the anti-laptop letter fully discredited — has had no discernible impact on her either: she now covers national security for CNN, the self-styled “most trusted name in news”.
And her contacts in the security state? These remain alive and well. As recently as a few months ago she was selected to conduct a simpering semi-interview with Frank Figliuzzi, a former top FBI official, promoting his “amazing” book The FBI Way: Inside the Bureau’s Code of Excellence — a title that reads like a punchline post-Peter Strzok.
The job did little for her public profile, garnering fewer than 400 views. But did it further enhance her good standing among security officials for the next time they need someone to place a story for them.
