Mike Morrell, the Hillary-Connected Ex-CIA Head Tasked by the Biden Administration to Cook Up the "51 Intelligence Officials" Letter, Also Lied to Those Officials to Get Their Signatures

Why don't you believe these Regime-Approved Officially-Credentialed Government Experts, you rubes, conspiracy theorists and assorted other bumpkins?

The ex-CIA chief who wrote the letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials falsely claiming that emails from Hunter Biden's laptop published by The Post before the 2020 election were Russian disinformation misled his fellow signatories when he assured them that he would "clear the statement with the Publication Review Board at CIA" the following day.

...

Morell asks the CIA alumni in the group to "highlight your Russia work" in their affiliations when they sign the letter and assures them that he will secure pre-publication clearance from the CIA "tomorrow."

But the letter was published by Politico the following day, Oct. 19, 2020, leaving no time for the required pre-publication security review by the CIA, a lifelong obligation for all former agency employees, and a process that could take several months.

The review would have created the possibility -- slim though it was -- that someone in the CIA would say "This letter is a lie, we know from the FBI that the laptop is genuine."

Besides, the letter was contrived just to give Joe Biden a rebuttal for Trump in a debate. The debate was scheduled to take place in three days.

No time for any fact-checking. The facts weren't important.

The strategic lie needed to be put out as soon as possible.

It also omitted the boilerplate disclaimer required by the CIA to be included in any such intelligence assessment, which would have declared: "All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the Central Intelligence Agency." ...

"Either he lied or somebody at the CIA violated their own policies," says lawyer Tim Parlatore, who has spent the past year pursuing the 51 intelligence officials on behalf of Trump.

"When you think about the speed at which the CIA works in their pre-publication process, that would be pretty stunning to get an OK that quickly without the required disclaimers. It would implicate someone within the CIA in the plot against the president [Trump]."

He points out that the CIA and other government agencies have harshly punished other such breaches of the vital security provision.

Former Navy SEAL Matthew Bissonnette was forced to pay the federal government $6.8 million for violating pre-publication and non-disclosure obligations when he published his book "No Easy Day," about his role in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Parlatore did not receive a reply from John Hoffister Hedley, chairman of the CIA's Prepublication Classification Review Board, when he wrote last May urging action on the "egregious breach by several former CIA employees that appears to have been overlooked by your agency."

The Regime does not punish Regime operatives acting in service of The Regime. It promotes them.

By the way: Mike Morrell was instrumental in creating the official lie about what happened during Benghazi, to protect Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Sources on the ground in Benghazi during the 2012 terror attack are pushing back hard on former CIA acting director Mike Morell's testimony on Capitol Hill, where he defended his role in shaping the administration's narrative and claimed politics were not involved.

As part of Morell's testimony on Wednesday, the former acting and deputy CIA director acknowledged that he overruled the guidance of the top CIA officer in Libya at the time. That official told Morell the attack was not an "escalation of protests," but Morell said he had to weigh that against analysts who concluded the opposite. He ultimately went with the analysts -- whose assessment later turned out to be flawed -- saying the chief of station's report was not "compelling" and was based on loose evidence.

The account has many close to this investigation fuming. One operator watching the hearing told Fox News: "He doesn't have any idea what happened that night. Why is he speculating? He wouldn't have to speculate if he talked to the people in Libya that night, or others who were watching."

Another said Morell either still has no idea what happened that night, or he is covering for someone. "Human intelligence takes precedence over everything else and he had no better intelligence than multiple reports from credible sources coming from the ground that night," one operator said.

Morell rejected accusations that he downplayed the role of terrorists in editing the so-called "talking points," which formed the basis of then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's faulty claim that the attack sprung from a protest. He testified that he believed the attack was both a terror attack and a protest.

While Morell would not say how many Americans were in Benghazi that night, he did say that "many more lives would have been lost" if CIA security officers and members of the military hadn't responded.

That, too, elicited criticism from the field. Multiple sources have said they could have responded sooner, while others still feel their requests to respond were ignored, and they haven't been given a reason why. "People aren't going to forget, people in our community are dealing with this ... on a daily basis and their lives are still at risk," one contractor said.

Fox News has previously reported that intelligence on the ground within the first 20 minutes was consistent that a terror attack was underway. Yet in Wednesday's testimony, Morell said analysts didn't know for sure and the only way he knew Al Qaeda was involved was through classified sources -- and that's why it was taken out of the talking points. But later in the testimony, Morell said he did not take out Al Qaeda from talking points, and that a group of "officers" from another CIA department did.

But one intelligence expert with close knowledge of the attack questioned those claims. "To pretend he was deferring to analytical judgment is not true," the source said. "He changed analytical judgment. ... Heck, that's in the Senate Intelligence Report."

Morrell also allowed his superior -- General Petraeus, I believe -- to offer a false claim to Congress about Benghazi, by not correcting him during congressional testimony despite the fact that he personally knew the claim to be false. Specifically, I believe the question was whether Hillary Clinton or Susan Rice interfered with the making of the "Benghazi talking points." Morrell knew they had -- because he had spoken to them about how to draft them.

But he allowed Petraeus, sitting right in front of him, to say there had been no political interference.

The background for that incident is here.

So yes, he is a Regime operative.

posted by Ace at 04:05 PM

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