by John Solomon
FBI agents took allegations from Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the midst of the 2016 presidential election and provably misled a court by omitting key information, in one case even doctoring evidence.
Fifty-one intelligence experts who derived their credentials from American taxpayers signed a letter cheered on by Joe Biden’s campaign to falsely portray Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation when the FBI had already corroborated it as authentic.
An official congressional select committee concluded a White House aide’s third-party hearsay account that Donald Trump tried to violently commandeer his presidential SUV on Jan. 6 was more credible than the Secret Service driver’s firsthand account – which it suppressed – that such an event never happened.
A White House official used the power of the bully pulpit to insist it was a “significant error” for journalists to report Joe Biden “willfully” kept and disseminated classified information when in fact that is exactly what the Biden Justice Department’s appointed special counsel had concluded.
Americans are being confronted by a painful reality that a Democrat-fed, taxpayer-funded media spin machine is increasingly creating false realities, untrue narratives and outright lies that are putting the country on a whipsaw rollercoaster where truth surfaces long after deceptive narratives or mistruths have affected elections or official actions.
Experts told Just the News that the deceptions of Democratic Party actors and their allies in media and government will be an issue on the ballot this November.
“As long as you have a party in power, which believes in things it can’t be honest about, and which does things you can’t be honest about, and which exists off of corruption to pay off its allies, you have to assume that they’re gonna lie,” former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich told the “John Solomon Reports” podcast on Tuesday “Because if they tell the truth, they’re going to be defeated. And they’re not suicidal. And I think that’s at the core of what’s going on.”
Asked how to change the dynamic, Gingrich said: “I think you have to win the next election.”
Kash Patel, the former House Intelligence Committee investigative counsel who helped unravel the falsehoods of the Trump/Russia collusion narrative so widely accepted, told the “Just the News, No Noise” television show that the Democrats’ obsession with Donald Trump have driven some to take the risk of spreading falsehoods just to defeat the former president.
Patel, a former federal prosecutor and chief of staff of the Pentagon, was accused by Democrats of misleading the public when he claimed Trump approved up to 10,000 National Guard to help protect the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. This week, his account was affirmed by multiple witnesses in a report released by Congress.
“The truth is it’s hard,” Patel said when asked about combating false narratives crafted in the nation’s capital. “It’s especially in this universe, in this sphere, that is the swamp, that is allergic to the truth because it destroys their political narrative of wanting to kneecap Donald Trump with disinformation campaign after disinformation campaign.”
Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative transparency watchdog Judicial Watch, told Just the News that Congress should retract the Democrats’ prior Jan. 6 report based on the information in it that has proved inaccurate. “The House Republicans should just take it, you know, say this is no longer a product we can vouch for as a U.S. Congress,” Fitton said.
“It was created under unprecedented circumstances. We have evidence of corruption surrounding how it was conducted and such. So we’re retracting it.”
The latest examples of the dynamic of falsehoods being belatedly erased by facts surfaced again this week when the House Administration’s Oversight Subcommittee unveiled a mound of evidence Monday that Democrats on the Jan. 6 select House committee withheld crucial details from the public that contradicted its conclusions.
Not 24 hours later, Special Counsel Robert Hur repudiated a White House effort that tried to falsely suggest that President Joe Biden had been “cleared” of wrongdoing in the handling of classified documents he secreted from the White House. “I did not exonerate him,” Hur said of Biden when questioned by a Democratic party congresswoman. “That word did not appear in my report.”
The effort to claim Biden had been exonerated began with Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House counsel’s office, who decried news organizations that reported that Hur’s report last month concluded Biden “willfully” retained and disseminated classified information.
Sams claimed such reports contained “striking inaccuracies” ignoring the fact that Hur himself used the words “willful” in his executive summary.
“To report that the special counsel ‘found’ or ‘concluded’ willful retention by the president is refuted by the conclusion that charges were not warranted,” Sams wrote in a letter to the White House Correspondents Association that rankled some media outlets as inappropriate pressure on the news media. ”…… The special counsel determined that the evidence refuted willful retention or disclosure.”
On Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee, Hur directly disputed Sams’ portrayal of his report.
“My team and I conducted a thorough, independent investigation,” Hur testified. “We identified evidence that the President willfully retained classified materials after the end of his vice presidency, when he was a private citizen.”
Hur also stated he believed Biden made false statements when he denied giving classified information to his autobiography’s ghost writer.
Sams, nonetheless, doubled down on his claims and his pressure on media on Tuesday as Hur testified, specifically criticizing a Washington Post headline quoting Hur as saying he had not exonerated Joe Biden.
“This is a very strange thing for the national media—and the Special Counsel—to fixate on,” Sams wrote on X. “In America, you’re innocent until proven guilty. The ultimate conclusion here was that charges are NOT warranted and the case is CLOSED. In other words, the President was cleared.”
The reversal of claims in the face of evidence has surfaced several times in the past decade. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., now his party’s nominee to be a U.S. senator, repeatedly told Americans he had personally seen evidence that President Donald Trump colluded with Russia. Schiff never produced such evidence. Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded there was no such evidence. So too did a second special counsel, John Durham.
“Neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” Durham concluded last year.
The 51 intelligence analysts, organized by former CIA Director Mike Morrell who admits he crafted the letter to help Biden’s campaign, had no proof to substantiate their claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop that surfaced during the 2020 election was Russian information operation and possible disinformation.
IRS whistleblowers later presented evidence to Congress that the FBI had corroborated the laptop as authentic and free of foreign influence months before the letter was made public.
A day before Hur’s smackdown of the false portrayals of his report, Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., unleashed a report that revealed the Democrat House Jan. 6 committee withheld from the public evidence that directly contradicts its 2022 findings, specifically star witness Cassidy Hutchinson’s claim that Donald Trump tried to “violently commandeer” his presidential SUV and take it to the Capitol. That committee added a false conclusion that Trump had never authorized sending National Guard troops to the Capitol ahead of the tragic event.
As to the allegation that Trump tried to commandeer “The Beast,” as the presidential SUV is known, Loudermilk’s report released testimony from the Secret Service driver who took Trump to his Jan. 6, 2021 speech on the Ellipse and back to the White House. The driver, who wasn’t identified by name, directly contradicted Hutchinson’s story about Trump trying to grab the wheel of the presidential SUV and take it to the Capitol, the report said.
“The driver testified that he specifically refuted the version of events as recounted by Hutchinson,” the report states. “The driver of the SUV testified that he ‘did not see him reach [redacted]. [President Trump] never grabbed the steering wheel. I didn’t see him, you know, lunge to try to get into the front seat at all.’”
As to the allegation that Trump wanted a riot to happen on Jan. 6 and never offered to deploy the National Guard, the new report also concluded that Trump did, in fact, instruct his staff ahead of Jan. 6 to offer 10,000 National Guard troops to the Capitol for extra security. The report added that the riot could have been prevented had Capitol Police, Washington D.C. officials and congressional leaders better heeded intelligence suggesting there would be violence that day.
“Acting Secretary Miller and Chairman (Gen. Mark) Milley met with President Trump regarding the D.C. Government’s RFA.299. In this meeting, President Trump approved acting Secretary Miller activating the D.C. National Guard to support law enforcement,” the report noted.
The report also said White House Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Ornato confirmed that the next day White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows talked with Washington D.C. officials and discussed a troop deployment of up to 10,000 National Guard members.
“In Ornato’s January 28, 2022, previously unreleased transcribed interview with the Select Committee, he stated, ‘I do recall a conversation, I believe, it was with Mr. Meadows and the mayor, Mayor Bowser,’” the report stated. “’… I had walked in for something, and I was there, and he was on the phone with her and wanted to make sure she had everything that she needed … and I remember the number 10,000 coming up of, you know, the President wants to make sure that you have enough.’”
Both Patel and Trump had insisted for years the troops had been authorized and the help wasn’t accepted, but their accounts were disputed, panned or dismissed. But none of these facts were disclosed to the public by the January 6 committee.
Trump told Just the News on Monday he believes the ability of U.S. government officials to weaponize information and mislead the public is one of the greatest threats to the nation.
“I talk about the enemy from within, and the enemy from without the enemy on the outside and the enemy on the inside,” he told the “John Solomon Reports” podcast. “And I’ll tell you what, in many ways, the enemy on the inside is far more dangerous than China and Russia.”
Washington, even in times of scandal, wasn’t always this way. Partisans were willing to call out their own when evidence substantiated wrongdoing, Republicans like Pete McCloskey and Lowell Weicker did it during Richard Nixon’s Watergate and others did when George W. Bush’s administration was found to have misled the public about the existence of weapons of mass destruction to justify the war on Iraq.
Democrats did it several times too, especially during the Clinton era scandals involving Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky. The venerable Pat Moynihan said that the American people deserved an in-depth probe of Hillary Clinton’s windfall from her Whitewater dealings.
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Don Riegle, D-Mich., once opened a hearing into how a Clinton White House lawyer improperly tried to influence an investigation into a savings and loan at the heart of the Whitewater scandal with an admonition of his own party’s star witness.
“You crossed the line,” Riegle scolded Clinton White House lawyer Bernie Nussbaum. “I think you had no right to inject yourself. … This was one time when you should have bit your tongue if you had to bite it in half.”
Today, crossing the line too often has become a determination only in the eye of the political beholder.
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John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist, author and digital media entrepreneur who serves as Chief Executive Officer and Editor in Chief of Just the News. Before founding Just the News, Solomon played key reporting and executive roles at some of America’s most important journalism institutions, such as The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Newsweek, The Daily Beast and The Hill.
Photo “United States Capitol” by Andy Feliciotti.
