Former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden, who is on the advisory board of the left-wing media monitor NewsGuard, was one of the 50 former intelligence officials who had their national security clearance revoked by President Donald Trump for signing on to a 2020 letter that aimed to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop report as Russian interference.
In an executive order on Monday, Trump cited election interference in stripping Hayden and 49 others of their clearances, effective immediately, in order to remedy the "abuses of public trust."
In January 2024, the Justice Department confirmed that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden.
Since 2019, Hayden has been on the board of advisers at NewsGuard, a company that self-proclaims to be on a mission of fighting misinformation. FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, however, asserts NewsGuard is part of the censorship cartel and last month demanded a probe of NewsGuard and others over their efforts to limit free speech and engage in censorship.
Ferguson alleged that Big Tech and major ad agencies have been using so-called misinformation monitors to target conservative media. Such efforts include censorship through demonetizing the advertising revenues of right-leaning outlets.
Ferguson argued that the FTC should investigate and possibly bring prosecution on illegal boycotts that use advertising agencies to target media outlets based on their political views.
Ferguson specifically noted that NewsGuard has been used by major advertising agencies to block the flow of advertising and revenues to conservative media. Ferguson noted the advertising agencies have essentially outsourced censorship by using NewsGuard, an organization which "goes to great lengths to create the appearance of nonpartisanship and objectivity."
Trump's nominee to be the next FCC chair, Brendan Carr, wrote to major Big Tech companies last month, including Apple and Google, demanding they turn over documents relating to their use of media monitors like NewsGuard.
Trump signed an executive order on Monday banning the federal government from restricting Americans' free speech rights. The order is designed to prevent officials from limiting protected expression and to investigate prior instances of government censorship.
Hayden, meanwhile, last summer stood by signing his name to the letter that falsely determined Hunter Biden's laptop was the work of Russian disinformation despite its validity being established by the DOJ and FBI months earlier.
It added to a pattern of Hayden anti-Trump and anti-Republican sentiment.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., accused Hayden of promoting "politically motivated assassination" in October 2023 over his assertion that Tuberville was not a "member of the human race." Hayden, a retired Air Force four-star general and former director of the National Security Agency, was upset with Tuberville over his military holds.
In 2022, Hayden agreed with a journalist's social media post saying Republicans were more "nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible" than international extremists. Also at the time, he shared a post by a presidential historian regarding the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for sharing nuclear secrets with the reply, "Sounds about right." That came three days after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in search of classified documents that Trump possessed.
On Monday, Trump had the final word.
"Federal policymakers must be able to rely on analysis conducted by the Intelligence Community and be confident that it is accurate, crafted with professionalism, and free from politically motivated engineering to affect political outcomes in the United States," Trump wrote in the executive order regarding the Biden laptop letter, co-signed by Hayden.
"The signatories willfully weaponized the gravitas of the Intelligence Community to manipulate the political process and undermine our democratic institutions. This fabrication of the imprimatur of the Intelligence Community to suppress information essential to the American people during a Presidential election is an egregious breach of trust reminiscent of a third world country."