Former Trump administration intelligence official Cliff Sims issued a scathing rebuke of former Politico (now CNN) journalist Natasha Bertrand and her disregard for accuracy when reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 election.
Natasha Bertrand earned the number 1 spot on Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow’s list of “Top Eight Hunter Biden Laptop Deniers” due to her publishing “the now-infamous letter from over 50 former intelligence officials declaring the laptop ‘Russian disinformation.'” As Marlow detailed:
This article became the centerpiece of the effort to marginalize and discredit the laptop and the reporting of the New York Post. Though the letter suggested that the laptop narrative merely had the hallmarks of disinformation (read: she had zero actual evidence it was Russian or disinformation), the piece reverberated throughout the media and political landscape.
Because sometimes in the era of weaponized fake news, blatant speculation = “fact.”
The letter, given to Politico by an aide to disgraced ex-CIA chief and Russia-collusion hoaxer John Brennan, became the go-to excuse for censoring the laptop.
While outlet after outlet continued bandying this excuse, one of Politico’s own reporters was able to independently confirm some of the laptop’s content while all this was going on.
According to former Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Strategy/Comms Cliff Sims, he explicitly warned Bertrand prior to her report that then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe had rebuked Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff’s claim that the Hunter Biden laptop stemmed from a Russian campaign to smear Joe Biden.
As relayed by Sims over a week later on October 27, John Ratcliffe issued a primetime address to the country warning that several foreign entities, including Iran, were attempting to meddle in the 2020 election to hurt then-President Donald Trump. The following day, Bertrand reportedly called Sims claiming that two anonymous “senior officials” told her that Ratcliffe “went off script” with his comments about Iran. Sims said he pushed back hard.
“The intelligence was clear about Iran’s intention to hurt Trump,” Sims said in his Twitter thread. “The country’s top counter-intel official had even called them out publicly months before.”
Sims then shared a statement from August 7, 2020, “relaying the Intelligence Community’s assessment of what Iran was up to.”
“How could Ratcliffe go ‘off script’ when it’s his script? We were still writing his remarks in the motorcade on the way to the press conference, right up until moments before he went on stage. The whole angle of the story made no sense,” lamented Sims.
Sims added that Natasha Bertrand simply “didn’t care” in regards to accuracy and that he later got into a heated argument with Bertrand’s editor Blake Hounshell, who then called him a “garbage person” and ran with her story about Ratcliffe going off script anyway. Lo and behold, Biden’s own National Intelligence office confirmed in 2021 that indeed Iran had attempted to meddle in the 2020 election to hurt then-President Trump.
In the end, CNN hired Natasha Bertrand and the New York Times hired Blake Hounshell despite the inaccurate reporting by both.
In 2018 and 2020, Breitbart Senior Contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption. Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter Biden and Joe Biden flew aboard Air Force Two in 2013 to China before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism.
Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’s investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing to even have a ten percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
Hunter Biden is the subject of a brand new narrative film, My Son Hunter, marking Breitbart’s expansion into film distribution. The film was directed by Robert Davi (Goonies, License to Kill, Die Hard) and stars Laurence Fox (Victoria, Inspector Lewis, The Professor and The Madman) as Hunter Biden; Gina Carano (The Mandalorian, Deadpool, Heist) as a Secret Service agent; and John James (Dynasty) as Joe Biden. It was produced by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney (Gosnell movie, FBI Lovebirds: Undercovers) from the Unreported Story Society. The film is available RIGHT NOW for Streaming and Downloading at MySonHunter.com.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.