Joe Biden has announced his intent to appoint MSNBC pundit Jeremy Bash to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, a board that is supposed to advise on intelligence matters.
While Bash was Chief of Staff at the CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense, in both roles for Secretary Leon Panetta, and served in other intel positions, there are a couple of big problems with his appointment.
First, Bash was one of the 51 people who signed the infamous intel letter claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop was likely “Russian disinformation” despite admitting they had no evidence on which to base that conclusion. He went even further in his comments on MSNBC.
“This looks like Russian intelligence. This walks like Russian intelligence. This talks like Russian intelligence,” Bash claimed on MSNBC on Oct. 19, 2020. “This effort by Rudy Giuliani and the New York Post and Steve Bannon to cook up supposed dirt on Joe Biden looks like a classic Russian playbook disinformation campaign.”
Bash also called the emails “mysteriously created” and claimed they were “probably hacked through a Russian intelligence operation.” He called it “collusion in plain sight.”
“At a minimum, it’s conspiracy to engage in computer crimes and hacking in violation of criminal laws,” Bash told Rachel Maddow of the emergence of the laptop emails. “It’s also potentially conspiracy to engage in election interference.”
The laptop is real but the intel officials who tried to shut it down as “Russian disinformation” themselves interfered in the election. Joe Biden even relied on the letter during a debate to dismiss the laptop, despite likely knowing the laptop was real. In addition to the intel letter, there was also suppression by social media and regular media. Even the FBI allegedly tried to suppress it, according to whistleblowers. All of this may have changed the course of the election. A recent poll showed that 79 percent of Americans believe the election would have had a different result if people knew the truth.
In addition to the intel letter and his comments about the laptop, Bash also made statements that weren’t true about the Trump-Russia probe.
And during the height of the Trump-Russia probe, Bash asserted that the FBI and a federal judge found “people in Trump’s organization were colluding with the Russians.” Bash also claimed in April 2017 that the FBI had verified “at least some elements of the [Steele] dossier” and that Trump aide Carter Page had “knowingly engaged in foreign intelligence clandestine collection” with Russia.
So this guy has burnt any credibility he might have had. But on top of that, this looks like Biden giving someone a plumb appointment who wrote a letter that benefitted him in the election. Not a good look for Joe Biden.