We’ll say this about Hunter Biden’s laptop brigades: They know their history.

They also know their Orwell. “Who controls the past,” went the Party’s slogan, “controls the future.” And, of course, “Who controls the present controls the past.”

Much as the work Winston Smith did at the Ministry of Truth in 1984, James Clapper now does today in trying to rewrite history. Clapper, the professional liar who dutifully served as Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence and signed his name to the infamous “Letter of 51” warning us all just prior to the 2020 presidential election that Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation, is now blaming Politico, the pro-Democrat rag that published their letter along with an accompanying article.

“There was message distortion,” Clapper whined to Washington Post “fact-checker” Glen Kessler in a telephone interview: “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.”

Here’s paragraph five of the letter:

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.

Clapper doesn’t say much about the other 12 paragraphs in the letter, all of which either promote their credentials as honest and forthright experts or make the case that the incriminating emails found throughout Hunter Biden’s laptop are the work not of Hunter Biden himself but of those nasty Russians.

We were misquoted, he now seems to be saying, more than two years after the fact.

Clapper and his fellow disinformationists even used the circular ploy of “media reports” helping to make their case in the letter’s penultimate paragraph:

In addition, media reports say that the FBI has now opened an investigation into Russian involvement in this case. According to USA Today, “…federal authorities are investigating whether the material supplied to the New York Post by Rudy Giuliani … is part of a smoke bomb of disinformation pushed by Russia.” [Ellipses in original.]

That message, of course, from those “senior intelligence officials,” was then conveniently picked up by Joe Biden in the final presidential debate before the election, on October 22, 2020:

Look, there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan. They have said that this has all the characteristics — four, five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend Rudy Giuliani.

Clapper, who lays down lies faster than most of us can pick them up, told Kessler that he was “unaware of how Biden described the letter during the debate.”

Uh-huh. We can just picture Clapper watching the debate that night, waiting for the moment when laptop issue came up, waiting for Biden to respond with that prepared remark, and then smugly high-fiving a couple of his co-conspirators.

There were many elements to the rigging of the 2020 election, and this “Russian disinformation” ruse was certainly one of them. And now its perpetrators are trying to cover their tracks for the history books.

As Orwell put it, “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.”