The CIA’s Battle With Truth

Reconciliation might come if lies could be admitted without fear of prosecution.

When journalists of the British Broadcasting Corp., in a 2024 video, snipped Donald Trump’s speech before the Jan. 6 riot to remove his call for peaceful protest, then linked the remaining passage to words he spoke an hour later calling on followers to fight, they had to have known what they were doing.

On January 6, 2021, a mob stormed the US Capitol, disrupting Congress as it prepared to confirm Joe Biden's victory over Donald Trump. (AP File Photo)(AP)

Next they showed the Proud Boys marching on the Capitol as if in response to Mr. Trump’s instruction, though the Proud Boys march had taken place before Mr. Trump spoke.

“Mistakes are made,” a BBC official admits. Uh huh. The British public wasn’t watching closely enough to notice or be fooled. These were lies by journalists to please themselves.

I got a sense in late 2016 watching a network panel show: To on-air personalities, Mr. Trump was a gift they had been waiting for, a Republican so disreputable they could put words in his mouth with impunity, allowing them to strike triumphant gotcha poses.

This week two senior leaders of the British broadcaster stepped down over the actions described above and a question naturally occurs: Isn’t this pattern getting awfully old?

If Trump enemies like former Obama CIA chief John Brennan are now to be criminally prosecuted in the collusion hoax, at least it will be over events that actually happened. If some are charged with “process” crimes, such as lying to investigators, at least it won’t be the direct result, as it was for Trump associates, of investigations spawned by manufactured evidence.

And it’s already clear today’s defendants will get a much more sympathetic version of due process from the courts and judges than Trump defendants got.

But criminal prosecutions also won’t produce “truth and reconciliation”—to borrow the title other countries have used for air-clearing inquiries designed to allow the truth to be acknowledged by exactly those with the least personal, reputational and institutional incentive to acknowledge it.

This approach is liberating. It solves what I might call the Brennan problem, which afflicts officials who might otherwise have to spend their natural lives ducking and weaving about what they did in office. Indeed, because disinformation is part of Mr. Brennan’s profession, he might have been expected already to have obliquely acknowledged the CIA’s contribution to spreading false claims about Mr. Trump while still hanging onto a belief in the righteousness of its motives.

Except for a problem. It’s not the disinformation he and allies may find hard to admit, it’s the incompetence—the BBC-like incompetence. Like the BBC, in fact, their acts look competent only if their goal was to serve up a big win for Mr. Trump—to validate him and to discredit themselves. Then their method makes sense: attaching themselves repeatedly to fake evidence destined to be exposed as fake. The Steele dossier. The fabricated evidence of FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith. The lies about Hunter Biden’s laptop. At the start of it all, the flimsy Russian “intelligence” that FBI chief James Comey seized upon to justify improper acts in the Hillary Clinton email case, which likely ended up causing Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016.

Mr. Trump, I’m guessing, sees criminal prosecutions as counterprogramming for the impeachments to come. For the rest of us, the results can only be bad. “Truth and reconciliation” aims to make it no longer socially acceptable or personally necessary to lie about events everyone knows took place. Unfortunately this doesn’t work when the press itself is party to the coverup. Indeed, somewhere in his mind, Mr. Brennan must be thinking: If not for so willing and compliant and credulous a media, we would never have ventured as far and disastrously down this road as we did, which only worked to Mr. Trump’s benefit.

It’s an argument I’ve been making since May 2017, when the real premise for Mr. Comey’s actions in the Clinton case became known. Trumpers and anti-Trumpers should be united in pursuit of the truth. Mr. Trump and his supporters are rightly angry over government-sponsored lies. But anti-Trumpers should see that the results have only been perverse. The re-election of Mr. Trump? The untrammeled and retributive presidency he now exercises? Hard to imagine if not for the serial lies, and then their exposure, of the Clinton, Obama and Biden cabals, helped along by a compromised news media.

The absurdity only compounds itself. The need to protect past lies begets new lies. There can’t be reconciliation when large interests are invested in not facing the truth. The biggest and longest-lasting cost of this episode? Media figures and establishment media institutions who now go forward zombie-like, lying about what happened after 2016. Who knows what damage our country may yet suffer from this? Our generation has redefined the old slur “yellow journalism.” Its new meaning: journalism by journalists who, in their personal cowardice and cravenness, deny their audiences the truths that their audiences are owed.