“In particular, the IC must restore confidence in its political neutrality to rectify the damage done by the actions of former IC leaders and personnel regarding the claims of Trump–Russia collusion following the 2016 election and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop investigation and media revelations of its existence during the 2020 election.” (Project 2025, Section 2.4: Intelligence Community, Dustin J. Carmack, page 244, paragraph 5.)

Let’s unpack that. For a couple of years, Trump got to shout “hoax” when it was suggested that his campaign colluded with Russia. They suppressed the Mueller report. The media even reported that there was “no collusion!” both at the time, and while Trump was in office and could control the narrative. By 2021, we were seeing the truth as more and more of Trump’s cronies turned states’ evidence to avoid prison time (see Paul Manafort¹, who admitted colluding with Russia as part of the Trump campaign.)

From the linked article:

“The findings are part of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s fifth and final bipartisan report investigating Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. This volume is primarily focused on counterintelligence threats and the wide range of Russian attempts to influence both the Trump campaign and the election.

The report builds on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation — and while it was consistent with the Mueller Report, it in fact goes further:

The committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin was personally behind the hack and leak operation that published stolen Democratic Party emails, and that WikiLeaks — the website that published them — played a key role and “very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort.”

Need more?

“Far from a hoax, as the president so often claimed, the report reveals how the Trump campaign willingly engaged with Russian operatives implementing the influence effort.” [Source]²

“The committee’s lengthy investigation further enforced Mueller’s findings that Russia engaged in a sweeping and multipronged effort to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, which has led to a bipartisan push in Washington to further address election interference threats from Russia and other foreign adversaries.” [Source]³

“Even though Republicans have repeated this ad nauseam to the point where The Free Press would blithely state it as fact, it is simply not true that the Mueller report “found no credible evidence of collusion.” [Source]⁴

More: There was Trump-Russia collusion – and Trump pardoned the colluder⁵. Curative journalist, professor, attorney and author Seth Abramson⁶ wrote an entire book about it – “Proof of Collusion”⁷, which painstakingly details Trump’s DECADES of history with Russia.

So for Carmack to continue to carry water for the “hoax” lie is insulting.

As for the Hunter Biden laptop story – yes, a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden existed. It is also a fact that the chain of custody was irretrievably broken in between the time that Hunter Biden left his laptop at a repair shop, and the FBI came into possession of it. In fact, the shop owner made a copy of the external hard drive and it passed through Rudy Giuliani’s and Steve Bannon’s hands before coming to the attention of the public (Giuliani provided the materials to the New York Post, alleging that they had been “found” on an abandoned laptop at a computer repair business.) More about that timeline here.⁸ Suffice it to say, the Hunter Biden laptop story suffers from a dearth of credibility:

“The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post.” [Source]⁹ 

In short, there was no proof of corruption by the Bidens that was verifiable, and no proof that it was a Russian operation that was verifiable, despite 51 former intelligence officials signing a letter indicating that the whole thing was very LIKE Russian disinformation¹⁰. (Republicans love to claim that these bipartisan intelligence officials claimed outright that the laptop was Russian disinformation and hold that false narrative up as a smoking gun that the intelligence community is compromised/biased in favor of Democrats. In fact, they merely cautioned that the story had all of the familiar earmarks of such an operation.) Also? They were correct. See below.

What it turned out to be (and what was verifiably embarrassing for the Bidens), was just an awful lot of compromising pictures of Hunter Biden with prostitutes, using illegal drugs. Should the story have been suppressed by social media? No, I don’t think so. But the narrative that the Republicans at the time were pushing was simply not true, and Republicans became so desperate to manufacture a scandal from the laptop that the whole fiasco culminated in Marjorie Taylor Greene showing pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis on the House Floor¹¹.

In short, giving oxygen to either of these deeply embarrassing lies in order to make the point that the intelligence community should endeavor to be politically neutral, should embarrass a serious person. Especially since Carmack seems to be indicating that the manufactured laptop narrative should have been given MORE partisan oxygen, and the verifiable Russian collusion should have been swept under the rug and allowed to be referred to as a “hoax”, despite actual evidence of its veracity. This is the very definition of partisanship, instilling zero faith that whatever noise made by Carmack to the contrary, the Intelligence Community will remain devoted to Donald Trump.

Additionally Lev Parnas, who worked for Trump and was central to the efforts to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden, testified before Congress that Russian operatives made up the whole thing¹², and the Trump campaign ran with it, knowing it was false.

“The only information ever pushed on the Bidens and Ukraine has come from one source and one source only: Russia and Russian agents,” he said, adding that impeachment proceedings against Biden were “predicated on a bunch of false information that is being spread by the Kremlin.”

Gene Hamilton goes on to claim in Section 3.8 that there was “no collusion”, so I provide even more evidence and analysis there.