Yes, They're Going To Relitigate The 2020 Election

On Sunday, I noted the phenomenon we've seen since Trump's arrival as a political contender whereby received opinion has promoted a series of quasi-verities that go unquestioned, at least for a period of years, and anyone who doubts them is called a conspiracy theorist. Then something happens, and the quasi-verity collapses and turns out to have been a hoax. One that has continuing prestige, at least so far, is the idea that Trump is delusional or in denial that he lost the 2020 election, which was, as it's sometimes put, stolen fair and square.

But the history we've seen of such quasi-verities makes me skeptical. One of the shorter-lived examples promoted by received opinion was the idea that Hunter Biden's laptop was just Russian disinformation. Recent testimony from FBI whistleblowers has established that

The FBI “verified” the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in November 2019 and a federal computer expert assessed “it was not manipulated in any way,” IRS supervisory agent Gary Shapley told Congress in explosive testimony released Thursday.

. . . “In October 2019, the FBI became aware that a repair shop had a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden and that the laptop might contain evidence of a crime. The FBI verified its authenticity in November of 2019 by matching the device number against Hunter Biden’s Apple iCloud ID,” [whistleblower] Shapley said.

. . . Most news outlets ignored the laptop’s contents until well after Biden won the 2020 election, with the Washington Post and New York Times saying only in March 2022 that they had confirmed the authenticity of files.

This was actually a pretty short life for that particular quasi-verity. However, it's generally acknowledged that had the FBI acknowledged its authenticity, it would have been a bigger issue in the election and could conceivably have affected the outcome.

When President Donald Trump raised Hunter Biden’s laptop during the final 2020 presidential debate, Joe Biden dismissed it as a “Russian plant,” citing “five former heads of the CIA” who say it’s “a bunch of garbage.”

We now know this was patently untrue. The laptop was authentic. But at the time, almost no one in the news media questioned Biden’s false assertion. To the contrary, CNN questioned whether Trump had “spread Russian disinformation” during the debate by raising the laptop.

Twitter suppressed the New York Post story that broke the news of the laptop’s existence, preventing users from sharing the story or even sending it by direct message (a tool usually used to stop the dissemination of child pornography). Worse, the company suspended the New York Post’s Twitter account, as well as other accounts that shared the story.

By last June, we learned that Secretary Blinken was at least involved in coordinating a letter from 51 former spy-agency leaders that claimed The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop could be Russian disinformation.

Blinken’s October 2020 outreach to former CIA acting director Michael Morell was credited by Morell with inspiring the letter, though Morell says Blinken, then a Biden campaign aide, didn’t specifically ask him to write it.

But Jordan and Turner revealed that other letter-signers described Blinken as asking for the letter in their own depositions by the committees.

We've become generally aware over the past year that there was a coordinated effort to discredit the Hunter laptop story, but yesterday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan added important detail:

Jordan published documents showing the FBI's comments on the Hunter Biden story when it first broke and how FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan testified about his meetings with Facebook representatives.

Chan and Foreign Influence Task Force Section Chief Laura Dehmlow met with Facebook on Oct. 14, 2020, the day the New York Post published its story on the Hunter Biden laptop. Dehmlow met with both Twitter and Facebook that day.

At this time, the FBI had the laptop in its possession and knew that it was real, Jordan said.

Documents published by Jordan show that when a Twitter representative asked whether the story was real, an FBI agent said "yes," but an FBI lawyer jumped in, cutting him off with, "No further comment."

Dehmlow then said the FBI held emergency deliberations on how to respond to the question going forward. When the Facebook meeting was held later in the day, the FBI simply said, "No comment," when asked whether the Hunter Biden story was factual.

Twitter and Facebook then censored the story.

In December of last year, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan, who worked on the agency's Foreign Influence Task Force, testified in a lawsuit that he met weekly with Twitter and Facebook to "warn against Russian disinformation attempts ahead of the 2020 election". Although this testimony about the existence of these meetings was known at the time, Chairman Jordan's new allegation is that Chan purjured himself in this testimony.

In a sworn deposition in the Missouri v. Biden case, FBI special agent Elvis Chan, who is the main conduit between the bureau and big tech companies, claimed that apart from one instance, he was not aware of any meetings between Facebook and the FBI regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story.

In the same deposition, he also claimed that he had “no internal knowledge” of the FBI’s investigation regarding the troubled Biden son’s laptop.

The Facebook files reveal both claims to be false. An internal Facebook communication reveals that Chan had more than one meeting with Facebook regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story.

In addition,

When Facebook initially asked the FBI if the Hunter Biden laptop story was real, Laura Dehmlow, currently Section Chief of the Foreign Influence Task Force, said “no comment.” At that point, the FBI was fully aware that the laptop was real, according to Rep. Jordan.

What I find most intriguing about this latest data point is that it reveals an effort within the FBI under Director Wray, a Trump appointee working within his administration, to influlence social media with false information that would aid the Biden campaign. In tandem with the letter from 51 former intelligence officers discrediting the laptop story, it strongly suggests a coordinated effort within the organs of state security to influence the election in Biden's favor. That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.

Did anyone suggest to Director Wray that he should so this, especially in coordination with members of the intelligence community? If so, who? The FBI was fully aware that the laptop was authentic. Why did Wray allow the agency to promote this false information? What was Biden's role, or he role of close campaign advisors working on his behalf, in influencing these activities?

And this brings us to a bigger question, what is Biden's role in influencing the current prosecutions of Trump?

[A] story from the New York Times published in April 2022 is gaining new attention, especially after Smith indicted Trump for speech surrounding the events of January 6, 2021 last week.

"The attorney general’s deliberative approach has come to frustrate Democratic allies of the White House and, at times, President Biden himself. As recently as late last year, Mr. Biden confided to his inner circle that he believed former President Donald J. Trump was a threat to democracy and should be prosecuted, according to two people familiar with his comments. And while the president has never communicated his frustrations directly to Mr. Garland, he has said privately that he wanted Mr. Garland to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6," the paper reported.

. . . More than a year later and at the beginning of the 2024 presidential election, the Department of Justice has fulfilled President Joe Biden's demands Trump be indicted over January 6.

My sense is that the House Republicans have Director Wray in their immediate crosshairs, and that will be a conduit to get Attorney General Garland. An inevitable result of these efforts, fed by material that will inevitably emerge from discovery following Trump's third indictment, will be a re-litigation of the 2020 election and the question of how justified Trump was in believing it was "rigged" or "stolen". This willl also come out in the continuing Republican primary process: given the positions of anti-Trump candidates like Pence and Christie that Trump is delusional, this will be up for real debate.

I had originally expected that the August congressional recess would be a vacation with little news, but it looks like the Republicans have a sense of urgency, and this won't be the case.