James Clapper: I Didn't Lie About the Laptop Being RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION. I "Merely" Said It Might Be RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION. It Was the Media (Who Now Employs Me) Which Deliberately Lied About My Words and Took the Nuance Out of Them.

The media, such as CNN, your employer?

This is absurd. As Glenn Greenwald points out below, The Fifty-One IC Coupists now have to say something about why they lied.

Their new claim? We didn't lie, we expressed very nuanced, caveated misgivings, which the media removed from our words to promote a sensationalistic and conclusory "THE LAPTOP IS A RUSSIAN FORGERY" claim.

But that's bullshit. Clapper knew what the media was saying about the laptop; he was a paid commentator on CNN.

He had ample opportunity to correct any misimpressions by saying, "Actually, we're forming no conclusions about whether it is or isn't RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION. You're misquoting us."

But they didn't do that because they always intended their cowardly, CYA "has all the hallmarks of RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION" formulation to be misreported by the media and misunderstood by the public.

This was always the intention -- and that's why there was no correction about the media's claimed "misreporting" until now.

I'll go a step further: When Clapper was asked by his CNN colleagues behind-the-scenes about the "has all the hallmarks" language, "Does this mean it is RUSSIAN DISINOFORMATION or merely that it might be?," I guarantee you he said something like, "We're 99.99% sure it's disinformation, we just have to caveat it because Intelligence Analysts are very careful and exacting about their assessments, and don't want to claim absolute certainty. We also wouldn't want to expose sources and methods to detail why we know this."

Which the media took to mean, "Okay, it is RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION, we know from the authors, on background, that's what they really mean. Strip the 'hallmarks of' language away, and just report it's RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION."

Do not forget that when CNN and other leftwing organizations refused to publish hte bald, concocted lies of the Steele Dossier, despite Clapper and Comey telling them to report it, because there was no "news hook" for it (Comey, bafflingly, said that's the reason CNN gave him for not reporting it; why was Comey debating the Steele Dossier's reportability with CNN at all?), these men conspired to attach it via a paperclip to the President's Daily Briefing, to move it physically close to actual verified intelligence, thus giving Jake Tapper and Carl Bernstein and Evan Perez and Jim Sciutto the "news hook" to report it that they had asked Comey to give them.

This was all worked out with these "CNN Reporters" -- they all participated in an IC op to contrive a way for an otherwise-unreportable, unverified bit of bullshit from the Clinton campaign to become associated with a high-level intelligence briefing, which it was certainly not, just so CNN's Democrat Operatives could "report" the fact that it had been paperclipped to the intelligence part of the briefing.

Comey did this.

And Clapper did this.

And of course Tapper, Bernstein, Perez, and Sciutto were coconspirators. It's possible one of these "journalists" actually suggested contriving a reason to brief the president about it, just so it could then be leaked that the president had been briefed about it.

So I don't want to here from James Clapper, a known perjurer, that was an innocent naif regarding planting a lie in the media.

posted by Ace at 03:55 PM

| Access Comments