Both of CNN’s moderators for Thursday’s presidential debate have deep ties to intelligence officials who peddled now-debunked conspiracy theories about former President Donald Trump.
Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are both intimately connected to former deep-state officials who pushed the now-discredited Steele Dossier and the hoax that reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was a product of Russian election meddling. The duo will preside over the first presidential debate Thursday between Trump and President Joe Biden.
Tapper published a story based on a leak from James Clapper, former President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, indicating that Russia had hacked DNC emails on behalf of Trump and that the Trump campaign had coordinated with Russian officials, according to RealClearInvestigations. Neither Tapper nor Clapper initially disclosed that this false reporting relied heavily on the now-discredited Steele Dossier.
Bash was married to Jeremy Bash, a former CIA chief of staff in the Obama administration, from 1998-2007. Both Jeremy Bash and Clapper were signatories to a 2020 letter from dozens of former intelligence officials falsely attesting that the Hunter Biden laptop story broken by the New York Post had “all the classic earmarks” of a Russian disinformation operation.
The laptop contents were later verified as authentic by various news outlets, including the Daily Caller News Foundation. The contents were deemed so reliable, in fact, that federal prosecutors working for Biden’s Department of Justice used them to prosecute Hunter Biden on gun charges for which he was found guilty this summer. (RELATED: Department Of Justice Acknowledges Hunter Biden Laptop Content Is Legitimate For First Time)
For his part, Tapper won a Merriam Smith Award for broadcast journalism for his reporting on Clapper’s leaks. He never disclosed his source, nor did he correct the record when Clapper lied to the American public, stating that the leaks had not come from the intelligence community, according to RCI. Clapper apparently repeated the same lie to then-incoming President Donald Trump.
However, Clapper owned up to the leak during a deposition with the House Intelligence Committee. CNN later hired Clapper as a national security analyst, making him Tapper’s co-worker.
Just an incredible sequence of events here.
-Clapper lied in a deposition about leaking very dubious intel to CNN
-Clapper then admitted he did it
-Tapper won a journalism award for running a credulous story on the leak
-Clapper also misled the public about the leak, claiming… pic.twitter.com/peOcrEtRMj— Emily Jashinsky (@emilyjashinsky) June 26, 2024
As for Jeremy Bash, he was not only a signatory to the Hunter Biden disinformation letter — he was deeply involved with its creation, and the coordinating of other signees, former Deputy CIA Director Mike Morrell testified, according to RCI. Morrell also stated that the purpose of the letter was “to help then-Vice President Biden in the debate and to assist him in winning the election.”
“We want to give the VP a talking point to use in response,” Morrell emailed to other intelligence community officials in October of 2020, a May 2023 House Judiciary Committee report reveals.
I was just made aware that CNN’s Dana Bash, who is moderating the first debate, was married to a CIA official who was one of the 51 intelligence agents that signed the fake letter calling Hunter Biden’s laptop “Russian disinformation” days before the last election…
Small world. pic.twitter.com/AWRDiyGHvA
— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) June 25, 2024
To this day, CNN’s newsroom employs journalists who parroted the intelligence claims or outright ignored the story.
Tapper made no mention of the laptop story on either of his two CNN shows in October 2020 following the New York Post’s report, according to a Fox News analysis of his show’s transcripts.
He did, however, have on multiple guests who called the laptop story “Russian disinformation” and a “right-wing conspiracy,” according to Fox News.
