51 Spies Who Lied to Save Democracy
The stated Mission of the United States Intelligence Community is to “serve the American people, and understand that our mission requires selfless dedication to the security of our Nation.” By the end of President Trump’s first term, the vast majority of the Intelligence Community had decided that the president was a clear and present danger to democracy. The survival of the republic depended on his defeat. Just weeks before the 2020 presidential election fifty-one brave Americans risked everything to stop the president from being reelected.
On October 14, 2020, America’s oldest newspaper published a bombshell story showing Hunter Biden made millions selling his father’s influence while he was Vice President. Their evidence came from a trove of emails, text messages, contracts, bank statements, travel receipts, photographs, recordings, and videos from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned in a repair shop. It didn’t take John Brennan, the former CIA Director, long to determine that the story was just the tip of an iceberg so big that it would sink Joe Biden’s candidacy and ensure a Trump victory on November 3rd. The problem with the laptop was that its contents would be very easy to corroborate with original sources from Apple, AT&T, Chase, American Airlines, and AMEX. Their only hope would be to discredit the laptop BEFORE another news outlet could dig in.
It was decided that a letter from the entire Intelligence Communication would be drafted discrediting the laptop as a “smoke bomb of disinformation pushed by Russia”. The task of gaining signatories fell to a team of former senior intelligence officers from Hollywood. After contacting more than 300 former officials they realized they had a problem. The dilemma for the Intelligence Community was that their Mission to protect the nation required adherence to three Principles:
Truth: We seek the truth; speak truth to power; and obtain, analyze, and provide intelligence objectively.
Lawfulness: We support and defend the Constitution, and comply with the laws of the United States, ensuring that we carry out our mission in a manner that respects privacy, civil liberties, and human rights obligations.
Integrity: We demonstrate integrity in our conduct, mindful that all our actions, whether public or not, should reflect positively on the Intelligence Community at large.
To undermine the evidence contained on the laptop it would be necessary to violate all three. The majority of former officials weren’t willing to sign the letter without reviewing the evidence for themselves. Sensing defeat, James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, came up with an idea that would discredit the laptop as Russian disinformation while giving the former officials cover. Clapper’s idea was to draft a ‘fifth paragraph’ stating,
“We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”
Clapper knew, as a current CNN analyst, that the media wouldn’t bother to point out that this paragraph rendered the letter meaningless. The team in Hollywood, armed with the fifth paragraph, managed to convince fifty-one former intelligence officials to put their careers on the line and publicly sign the letter. These fifty-one brave Americans were willing to violate every principle they had been taught to prevent President Trump from being reelected - saving democracy and the republic in the process. Polling shows that had the American people known the laptop and its contents were authentic they would have reelected President Trump in 2020 - proof that their lie saved the nation.
Here is their letter that saved democracy as we know it:
