Not steal. But rig as in distorting the political landscape.

A “rigged” election is not the same thing as a stolen election; stealing requires changing votes. “Rigging” is about changing the rules, the information landscape, or other factors that can influence voters using illegitimate means. Spreading misinformation can be a form of rigging, as of course censorship or “debunking” of true information.

I couldn’t say if the 2020 election was stolen–there certainly were irregularities as there always are in elections–because any vote changes or illegal ballots have to be in the right place in the right numbers, and no evidence has been accepted by courts indicating that enough illegal votes to change the results were cast.

Its issue is that letter that gave cover to Joe Biden when the Hunter Biden laptop, where 50 former intelligence officials claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop “had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.”

However deceptive this letter was, in itself, it was perfectly legal and I would oppose censoring it once it was published. It was a low-down dirty trick and it worked, but low-down dirty tricks are generally legal. Of course, media outlets should not have taken their claims at face value in the middle of a campaign, but that is a separate issue.

However, the wrinkle is this: because of the high rank these officials had the CIA had to preapprove the publication of the letter, and the CIA almost certainly knew the laptop was real (as the FBI also did, having had it a year). Further, there is substantial evidence that the CIA helped recruit further signatories for the letter, which would be a definite no-no. The CIA isn’t even supposed to be involved domestically, and certainly shouldn’t get involved in political campaigns.

In October 2020, in the run-up to the presidential election, the New York Post reported that Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was abandoned at a Delaware computer shop, contained embarrassing and possibly incriminating information about the Biden family. In a May 10, 2023, report the House Judiciary Committee revealed that on October 19, 2020, three days before the second presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Democrat candidate Joe Biden, then-Acting CIA Director Michael Morell sent the PCRB the finalized letter for review, calling it a “rush job,” and quickly secured its approval.

Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit after the CIA failed to respond to a May 11, 2023, FOIA request for:

Records and communications of the Prepublication Classification Review Board, Central Intelligence Agency, including emails, email chains, email attachments, text messages, cables, voice recordings, correspondence, statements, letters, memoranda, reports, presentations, notes, or other form of record, regarding an October 19, 2020, email request to review and “clear” a letter involving the Hunter Biden laptop story potentially having Russian involvement or being a Russian disinformation plot.

In a May 16, 2023, letter to CIA Director William Burns, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Michael R. Turner stated that the committees were conducting oversight of the October 2020 “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails” signed by 51 former intelligence community officials.

You can see the problem here. What this amounts to is the CIA willfully engaged in the spreading of disinformation in order to affect the outcome of the 2020 election.

This is hardly shocking, of course. We all pretty much know that the entire security state was rooting for Biden and actively helping him out behind the scenes. They had been working against Donald Trump since before he was elected–see the corruption at the FBI with slimy Jim Comey, Smirky McSmirk Peter Strzok, and the whole crew of corrupt FBI honchos who fed a media narrative that was utterly false.

This is just more of the same, with the CIA taking the role of the FBI in spreading disinformation and shutting down a story that hurt Joe Biden in the campaign. You have to wonder what else they did to shape the information landscape.

This is just another example of the #resistance that The New York Times and other MSM outlets cheered on. These paragons of democratic virtue actually encouraged our federal government to resist the democratic will of the American people because they chose the “wrong” man to be president, which is likely why they have swept all this corruption under the rug.

A totally corrupt government under a Democrat is far superior to an honest one run by a Republican.

By now I would be mildly shocked to find that some part of the law enforcement/intelligence bureaucracy didn’t conspire to undermine Trump and the democratic will of the American people, and I think we should expect things to get worse, not better, unless lots of people are drummed out of their jobs.

Chuck Schumer smirked that Trump was making a mistake annoying the intelligence community.

“They have 6 ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

So they do. So they do. And they showed us what they are willing to do.