Left-wing MSNBC Democrat Andrea Mitchell described President-elect Donald Trump’s “criticism [of] the intelligence agencies” as damaging to American cybersecurity measures. She also claimed that Trump was “hurting the morale” of intelligence personnel.
During Secretary of State John Kerry’s final press conference on Thursday, Mitchell presented the assessment of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper as a sacred cow beyond criticism while deliberately omitting Trump’s name in a reference to the president-elect:
“Mr. Secretary, Senator McCain said today that Russia’s hacking and attempt to interfere with the election were an ‘act of war.’ In that regard, how much is the criticism by the president-elect of the intelligence agencies hurting us in our ability to respond in real-time? because this is not a hypothetical, it’s happening now. It’s hurting the morale, according to a lot of people who talk to us. What is your assessment of that?”
Political and media observers should consider the types of intelligence agency employees that speak to MSNBC off the record.
Kerry declined Mitchell’s request to directly criticize Trump, opting instead to push the narrative that all intelligence agencies and relevant federal intelligence employees agreed that Russian President Vladimir Putin had directed the Russian state to hack the email accounts of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chairman John Podesta:
“The combined expertise of all of that [intelligence] community, probed and reprobed and reprobed, has come to a common assessment that the government of Russia engaged in a concerted effort to influence and interfere with the integrity of our electoral process. Now, that’s the conclusion.”
Kerry also denied that intelligence reports were dishonestly politicized for partisan purposes:
“They do not draw political conclusions. They put perceptions and facts and intelligence in front of you, and it’s up to us to ask them questions based on what they put in front of us.”
Dissatisfied with Kerry’s refusal to criticize Trump directly, Mitchell repeated her invitation while again omitting Trump’s name:
“How damaging is it that [intelligence agencies] are being criticized by the president-elect?”
Kerry again avoided the invitation to provide a direct criticism of Trump.
Watch the exchange below.
Mitchell regularly pushes the false narrative of universal consensus across the federal government’s intelligence agencies that Putin had directed the hacks of the DNC’s and Podesta’s email accounts to sway the election for Trump’s benefit.
Left-wing and Democrat-aligned media outlets regularly push a false narrative of “17 intelligence agencies” agreeing that Putin directed the hacking of the DNC’s and Podesta’s email accounts in order to “compromise and exploit endpoints associated with the U.S. election.” Clapper’s declarations are accepted by the usual suspects as representative of the informed consensus of all intelligence agencies.
Nebulous language such as “election hacking” is deliberately deployed in headlines, chyrons, and general reporting and commentary across left-wing and Democrat-aligned media outlets in order to mislead casual media consumers into believing that Trump’s electoral victory is somehow illegitimate.
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