Uncritically reported by Politico at the time, their claims helped legitimate the Big Tech censorship of the New York Post — America’s oldest continuous daily newspaper, where I serve as a columnist — which broke the laptop story. The emails put the lie to Joe Biden’s claims that he knew “nothing” about his son Hunter’s overseas business dealings and apparent influence peddling, not least Hunter’s 2015 role in connecting his father, then Barack Obama’s vice president, with executives from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm on whose board Hunter served.

Thanks to the combined efforts of Twitter (now X), Facebook, the mainstream media, and the Deep State, all this was buried, and Biden eked out a win.

Four years later, a resurrected Trump piled on the punishments for the “spies who lied”, as the Post dubbed the 51 officials. “The signatories willfully weaponized the gravitas of the Intelligence Community to manipulate the political process and undermine our democratic institutions”, he wrote in his Day One executive order, followed by last week’s memorandum banning them from secure buildings.

Trump believes that the actions of the ex-spooks was a major reason why he lost the blisteringly close election of 2020, in which fewer than 45,000 votes in five states made the difference. Yet with Biden out of office, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the magnitude of the crisis that goes beyond a single election: the corruption of both America’s security apparatus and its establishment political class as embodied by the Biden family.

In hindsight, the letter signed by the 51 spies should be seen as a domestic CIA election-interference operation in cahoots with the Biden campaign. It was part of a coordinated Deep State effort to ensure that Donald Trump wouldn’t win a second term and that the sins of Joe Biden remained hidden from the American people.

Five former CIA directors or acting directors signed the letter: Mike Hayden, Leon Panetta, John Brennan, John McLaughlin, and Mike Morell. That last was the principal author, who hoped he would lead the CIA if Biden won the election. In all, 41 of the 51 signatures came from the CIA.

Morell told congressional investigators from the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 that the letter had been solicited by the Biden campaign adviser and future secretary of State, Antony Blinken, in a call to Morell, who quarterbacked it through the CIA classification review process in record time.

We now know, thanks to Andrew Makridis, then the CIA’s chief operating officer, testifying before the Judiciary committee last year, that the letter was cleared for publication by then-CIA director Gina Haspel, a protégé of Brennan’s, who also had her fingerprints on Operation Crossfire Hurricane. The operation was the foundation of Russiagate, which framed the 2016 Trump campaign for “collusion” with the Kremlin, when she was CIA station chief in London in 2016.

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Morell told colleagues in an email that the letter was timed to appear on the eve of the final presidential debate to give Biden a “talking point to push back on Trump on this issue”. It worked like a charm, allowing Biden to deflect the bombshell revelations about his family’s international influence peddling.

“Look, there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant”, Biden coolly told the debate moderators. “Four, five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage”.

Trump kept harping on the laptop, with all its evidence of diamonds and millions of dollars that Hunter was paid by Chinese energy company CEFC, whose executives Biden had met in Washington. But Joe Biden denied it all: “My son has not made money in terms of this thing about — what are you talking about? — China”. He concluded his performance by looking down the barrel of the camera and addressing American voters at home: “You know his character. You know my character. You know my reputation is for honor and telling the truth. The character of the country is on the ballot.”

Yes, it was.

Getting Biden to his false vindication during the debate took a months-long team effort. In one of the regular meetings the FBI conducted with social-media companies to sound the alarm about supposed disinformation in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, somebody warned of a “hack-and-leak operations” by “state actors” involving Hunter Biden and “likely” to take place in October, according to a sworn declaration by Yoel Roth, who headed Twitter’s trust and safety department at the relevant time. The warnings were so specific that when the Post’s scoop first appeared, Facebook and Twitter recognized it and immediately throttled its reach.

Twitter claimed the story violated its “hacked-materials” policy. Officials with the company claimed that they couldn’t permit the release of journalistic material not authorized by the subject — a stance that would have rendered impossible the Pentagon Papers, the Abu Ghraib disclosures, and every other legendary scoop celebrated in journalism seminars across the land.

In the event, the laptop hadn’t been hacked. Rather, Hunter Biden had abandoned the waterlogged device in April 2019 at a Delaware repair shop without paying for services, granting the owner what lawyers call “constructive ownership.” Moreover, Twitter executives knew even at the time that their hacked-materials excuse was so much bosh, as we now know thanks to Elon Musk’s disclosure of the #TwitterFiles. But that didn’t stop them from locking the Post’s account for two weeks, silencing the newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton.

Something similar unfolded at Facebook. “Right on schedule,” a Facebook employee said of the timing of the laptop story in an internal chat obtained by the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the weaponization of government. “FBI tipped us all off last week that this Burisma story was likely to emerge,” an unidentified Microsoft employee wrote in another internal message.

The FBI, too, knew the Post story was not Russian disinformation. The agency had had possession of the laptop for 10 months, as prosecutors would tell a Delaware court during Hunter’s 2024 gun trial. The FBI’s forensic analysis, moreover, had concluded that the device belonged to Hunter, had not been tampered with, and was fit for use as evidence in court. CBS News reached the same conclusion after commissioning its own independent analysis of the laptop in 2022.

How did the FBI have possession of the laptop so much earlier? The Delaware store owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, became alarmed by content he found on the computer that he feared was a national-security risk. He handed the laptop to the FBI in December 2019. Nine months later, Mac Isaac handed Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, a copy of the hard drive, believing a batch of Ukrainian invoices would exonerate Trump during his first impeachment.

At the time, the Internal Revenue Service was investigating Hunter for tax violations related to his international dealings. But every time investigators Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler tried to follow a trail of evidence that led to Joe, they were obstructed by prosecutors in the office of the US attorney for Delaware, David Weiss, as Shapley and Ziegler would later tell Congress.

After they blew the whistle, Shapley and Ziegler were dismissed from their jobs. Still, their testimony derailed the suspicious sweetheart plea deal that the Biden Department of Justice had stitched up with Hunter’s lawyers, which would have amounted to probation on a couple of tax misdemeanors and immunity from future prosecution over other crimes.

The FBI knew something else, too. It had been spying on Giuliani in 2020 using a covert surveillance warrant on his iCloud. Agents thus had access to an email from Mac Isaac to Giuliani, from August 2020, disclosing information from the laptop that would damage Biden’s campaign. The FBI also would have had access to messages between me and Giuliani two months later, indicating that the New York Post was interested in the story.

To sum up all this in other words: The American security apparatus knew that the laptop was authentic; and that buried in the laptop’s treasury of bank statements, corporate documents, and homemade porn were emails that made the Democratic nominee for president look pretty bad. Nevertheless, intelligence officials at the highest levels pretended that the laptop was “disinformation” and prevailed upon Big Tech to censor the Post, with the mainstream media dutifully justifying the censorship in the name of protecting democracy.

Which brings us to Joe Biden’s grift. Depicted through the adventures of Hunter and his fast-talking uncle, Joe’s brother Jim Biden, the scale of the family’s corruption has slowly dripped into the public consciousness over the last four years. This is mainly thanks to congressional committees with subpoena power that sprang into action once Republicans retook control of the House in 2022.

But back in October 2020, the Post was on its own. In its first story, the paper revealed a 2015 email from an executive of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm, which was then paying Biden’s son $83,333 a month to serve on its board (his pay was cut in half after his father left the vice presidency). Vadym Pozharskyi, the executive, thanked Hunter for “the opportunity to meet your father” the previous evening in Washington.

That meeting, we later discovered, was a dinner organized by Hunter in a private room at Café Milano in Washington on 16 April, 2015, at which his powerful father met some of his colleagues from Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan. Upon the story’s publication, Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates told the media: “They never had a meeting”. Months after the election, the White House admitted that Joe Biden did attend the Café Milano dinner.

It was just one of the dozens of meetings he had during his vice presidency with his son’s foreign partners, after which millions of dollars would flow into the family coffers. Hunter would also call his father and put him on speaker phone when he wanted to impress a prospective client or partner, according to Devon Archer, Hunter’s former business partner. Another email published by the Post described a plan to allocate 10 percent of a lucrative Chinese venture to “The Big Guy” — the code name Hunter’s partners used to refer to Joe Biden.

It would take another three years for James Comer, chairman of the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee, to identify 20 shell companies created by Hunter and his partners, into which more than $30 million flowed from Chinese and other foreign entities after Joe Biden became Obama’s vice president. Incremental payments were made from those companies to at least 10 Biden family members, including Joe Biden himself.

Comer released bank records revealing that “Joe Biden received $40,000 in laundered China money from the account of his brother, James [Jim] Biden, and his sister-in-law, Sara Biden, in the form of a personal check”. He uncovered another $200,000 check to Joe from Jim. Both checks were labeled “loan repayment,” and the White House maintained that Joe had kindly helped his brother when he was in need; Comer could find no proof to suggest otherwise.

Even so, evidence from the laptop suggests that Hunter had paid for upkeep and maintenance of Joe Biden’s Delaware estate, as well as the monthly bill for his father’s private cellphone. Hunter footed the bill for a lot of family expenses through the years and often griped in family discussions that he never got sufficient credit. In one message on the laptop, he complains that he has had to “pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years”.

For months after Joe was sworn in as president, Democrats and their media allies ignored the laptop. Some were still in denial right up until the moment last December, when Joe Biden broke his promise not to pardon Hunter.

Days before Hunter was to be sentenced over a felony gun conviction in Delaware and felony tax fraud in California, Joe Biden gave his son an unprecedented “full and unconditional pardon” for any crime he might have committed stretching back 11 years to January 2014, the year of Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution, which brought the country under the influence of the vice president from Delaware and opened the door to Biden-family self-dealing.

The pardon timeline covered all the Ukraine grift, and most of the China grift, everything that would implicate Joe Biden in Hunter’s influence-peddling. That’s another way of saying that Joe Biden effectively pardoned Joe Biden.

Then, on 27 December, new photographs emerged from an activist lawsuit against the National Archives showing then-Vice President Biden introducing Hunter to Chinese President Xi Jinping and other Chinese Communist Party dignitaries in Beijing a decade earlier. To Chinese eyes, it was clear when Hunter followed his father off Air Force Two that this was American power come to do private business. A few days later, Hunter would receive a 10 percent stake in the Chinese equity firm BHR. Hunter’s business partner in the venture, Jonathan Li, is pictured in several Beijing photographs gladhanding Joe Biden.

But the scope of Biden’s pardons went far beyond Hunter. Preemptive unconditional pardons were also granted to his brothers Jim and Frank and their wives, and his sister Val and her husband. Jim, who was deeply involved Hunter’s China dealings and had been under investigation by the Department of Justice over various deals invoking Joe’s name. Frank, the youngest, spent years avoiding paying a court-ordered $1 million to the children of a Florida man killed in a high-speed hit-and-run. A few years later, at age 49, he was arrested for shoplifting in a Florida Blockbuster when he allegedly stuffed two DVDs down his pants.

As with Hunter, Joe pardoned his siblings for all nonviolent crimes they may have committed going back to January 2014, in what seems to many like an implicit admission of guilt for the period when Joe’s power and influence in the world garnered a fortune for his family.

For many Democrats on the day of the pardon, disappointment with Joe turned to bitter rancor. Big Tech, the Deep State, and the corporate media conspired to suppress evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption, and then he made fools of them all. He refused to give up power when he should have, and when they discarded him too late, he snookered them with an unelectable nominee, Kamala Harris, whom he had selected as his veep to fulfill a pledge to hire a woman of color.

“No one fucks with a Biden,” he is reportedly fond of saying. You could see in the old man’s sly, lopsided grin as he turned away from the camera one last time after his party’s election drubbing, that the muscle memory of a machine politician was in full working order. In his one last act of political bastardy, Joe Biden blew up the Democratic Party. Now, as Donald Trump lays waste to all their works in Washington, they only have themselves to blame.

This obvious threat inflation, which should be familiar after September 11, is used by governments and private corporations alike to award themselves more unaccountable power. To work, it relies on the public being cowed by the expertise and authority of institutions that operate in secret. These methods have proved to be highly effective for defending the power of America’s bureaucracies.

The problem with bureaucratised secrecy is what it does to the rest of society. As illusions come to seem real and formal mechanisms of truth-seeking appear blocked off, conspiracies offer themselves as a virtuous alternative. To encourage this in a country that already has a deep, native strain of paranoia and wild truth-seeking is a dangerous gamble.

The elements of fantasy and stagecraft present on January 6, from the costumed pageantry at the storming of the Capitol to the Broadway kitsch at its anniversary commemoration, point to the event’s dual origins in the US security state and the paranoid imagination that is a byproduct of government secrecy run amok.

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“Secrecy is an institution of the administrative state that developed during the great conflicts of the twentieth century. It is distinctive primarily in that it is all but unexamined,” the scholar and American statesman Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote toward the end of his long career in public life, when he turned his attention to the power in the shadows.

Moynihan, a Democratic Senator from New York, was known for his polarising work on race, poverty and the breakdown of the American family. But in his final published book, the liberal Cold Warrior delivered a revisionist account of the US conflict with the Soviet Union. Though he never wavered on the righteousness of the anti-Communist cause, Moynihan argued that the effort had been weakened and warped by the growth of a bureaucratic culture of secrecy. He delivered a measured but devastating attack on the underworld of administrative institutions better known today as “the deep state”.

In Secrecy: The American Experience, published in 1999, Moynihan argued that US policy had been systematically distorted by intelligence agency assessments that exaggerated the economic and military power of the Soviet Union. Because the agencies operated in secret, the exaggerations were not only shielded from scrutiny but had the perverse effect of fuelling their own growth. Over time, this process fundamentally transformed the American political system. “Secrecy is a form of regulation,” Moynihan wrote in the book’s opening line. This new form of regulation supervened democratic procedures and transferred power to bureaucracies operating in the shadows of the elected government.

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Despite his criticisms, Moynihan maintained that secrecy was “at times legitimate and necessary”. But he observed a typology of secrets in which there were two critical distinctions. The first was between secrets applied to foreign affairs in the interest of national security, and those used domestically to regulate the activities of American citizens. The second, related division was between functional and symbolic secrets.

Influenced by the sociologist Edward Shils’s 1956 book The Torment of American Secrecy, Moynihan elaborated a theory of secrets as social agents in bureaucratic societies. In his introduction to Secrecy, the historian Richard Gid Powers describes the contours of that approach: “Drawing on Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, [Moynihan] saw how he could discuss secrecy as a form of regulation (Weber) that could often take a ritualistic form (Durkheim) in order to stigmatize outsiders and critics (as distinguished from the functional secrecy that seeks simply to keep critical information from the enemy).”

As secrecy expands into a basis of governing power, what is human — to fear the unknown — metastasises into a culture of consuming paranoia and conspiracy. Moynihan was not alone in foreseeing this outcome. The American diplomat George Kennan, another stalwart of the Cold War, expressed his own reservations about the normalisation of espionage as an instrument of policy. “We easily become ourselves the sufferers from these methods of deception,” Kennan warned. “For they inculcate in their authors, as well as their intended victims, unlimited cynicism, causing them to lose all realistic understanding of the relationship, in what they are doing, of ends and means.”

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Unlimited cynicism occluding cause and effect for perpetrator as well as victim — who may not be so easy to tell apart — is an apt framework with which to approach the inept fantasy of insurrection that took place on January 6, 2021, in Washington D.C.

For four years, while Donald Trump was President, US intelligence agencies colluded with members of Congress and the media to foment a conspiracy about collusion between Trump and Russia. The claims relied on secret smoking gun evidence that was supposedly in the possession of the proper authorities and would, any day, result in the President and his associates being tried for treason. Of course, this never happened, because what the secrecy concealed was not damning evidence, nor merely the lack of it, but the record showing how Clinton lawyers, ex spies, and current federal agents had, together, manufactured the false collusion narrative. Predictably, the official state-sanctioned conspiracy produced as its mutant offspring the counter-conspiracies of the Right, of which the most notorious was QAnon, a group that would play a leading role in the Capitol riot.

Feeding on the cynicism of his supporters and the brazen interventions of the deep state into the 2020 election — most notably the suppression of reporting on Hunter Biden’s business ties on transparently spurious national security grounds — Trump spent weeks after the vote stoking the fury of his supporters with a manic “stop the steal” campaign that made no distinctions between reasonable questions of electoral interference and ridiculous ones, and showed little concern for the line between protest and mob violence. The day after the riot, the president, realising that he had gone too far, denounced his supporters who had attacked security officers and breached the Capitol building as having “defiled the seat of American democracy”. Not long after, he was back to defending them. At no point did he accept any responsibility for the national humiliation.

While Trump has continued his stop the steal campaign, in terms of both cynicism and impact, it is dwarfed by what his opponents have carried out in the government and press. There is considerable evidence that US security and intelligence agencies had prior knowledge of a planned march on January 6 and were present in some capacity among the groups that breached the Capitol. We know, for instance, that a leader of the Proud Boys, a group that the Wall Street Journal called “key instigators” of the Capitol Riot, spent the past decade as a “prolific” FBI informant.

An investigation by the New York Times based on confidential records and sources found that “federal law enforcement had a far greater visibility into the assault on the Capitol, even as it was taking place, than was previously known”. The Times’ efforts pick up on reporting on the FBI’s role in the riot by the Right-wing news site Revolver, which has focused on Ray Epps, the former president of the Oath Keepers militia movement. Epps, who unlike some 700 other people involved in the riot has never been arrested or charged with a crime, can be seen on video taken at the riot telling people to “go into the Capitol”.

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The FBI has a record of hyping up threats and encouraging terrorists plots that it can then bust to justify its mission. Consider an ongoing case involving the plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. For months the plot was marshalled as evidence of the existential danger posed by Right-wing extremist groups, but those claims have unraveled as it turned out that the FBI had 12 informants inside the organisation accused of planning the crime. The informants “had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception”, reported Buzzfeed. “The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.”

And yet these dubious pseudo-events, which never posed any immediate threat to America’s democracy or its security establishment, are compared to the worst attacks in American history. At the January 6 commemoration last week, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi brought out liberal godhead Lin-Manuel Miranda along with the cast of Hamilton to perform a virtual performance. This moment of supreme kitsch was only scarcely more ridiculous than Vice President Kamala Harris, in her commemorative remarks, comparing the largely symbolic riot to Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

The purpose of these gross exaggerations is to demand that Americans forfeit their rights in the name of security and convince the public, or some electorally significant fraction of it, that it is wise and just for the US government to prosecute a counterterrorism campaign against Trump supporters. The project uses the full power of the American security establishment as a get-out-the-vote arm for the Democratic party.

Secrecy, like conspiracy, dulls the impact of reality. Long after they have been exposed, the afterlife of secrets continue to debase the currency of truth. It is notable, for instance, that contrary to the inflamed rhetoric from the White House and prominent Democrats, no charges related to insurrection have been brought against any of the more than 700 defendants charged with participating in the Capitol riot. Instead, the government has mostly pursued a strategy of seeking the harshest sentences possible for trespassing. To one side, this is evidence that no insurrection took place; that even the government doesn’t believe the threat it’s selling. But to the other side it has roughly the opposite meaning, signalling that the US government is soft on Right-wing extremism and that power is working behind the scenes to protect the coup-plotters.

It remains necessary to counter lies with truth, but not sufficient. Until the rule of secrecy itself is ended and power in democracies again becomes visible and accountable, the arms race of paranoia and conspiracy will continue. That way lies ruin.