Authored by James Bovard,

In the closing address at last month’s Summit for Democracy, Secretary of State Antony Blinken piously proclaimed, “As President Biden has said, democracy doesn’t happen by accident… It requires constant effort.”

Or in the case of the 2020 election, it required deceiving American voters.

The House Judiciary Committee revealed that Blinken, then a top Biden adviser, orchestrated the letter from 51 top intelligence officials claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop was nothing but a Russian disinformation campaign.

Blinken contacted former acting CIA chief Mike Morell, who swayed scores of other former top officials — including three ex-CIA chiefs — to sign that letter to debunk the biggest threat to the Biden presidential campaign.

In the final presidential debate on Oct. 22, Joe Biden invoked that letter from former intelligence officials to deflect Donald Trump’s attacks on Biden family corruption.

Polls show that Biden would have lost the election if the media had accurately reported the contents of that laptop.

Biden pretended that letter arose spontaneously from the patriotic sentiments of former officials.

But the letter was “triggered” by Blinken’s call to Morell, who then contacted his former colleagues.

Blinken’s ploy may have swayed Biden to appoint him secretary of state.

The media are mostly ignoring or downplaying the revelations of Blinken’s machinations.

If the roles were reversed, cable news and front-page headlines would be screaming about a villainous Trump operative pulling official strings to whitewash the Donald.

MSNBC would be howling about the death of democracy, and CNN hosts would be sobbing hysterically about the dirty deal.

But when Team Biden does it: nothing to see here, move along.

How many presidential elections can Democrats seek to dishonestly rig without suffering any penalty flags from media scorekeepers?

Shortly before the 2016 election, senior Hillary Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan peddled false claims linking the Trump Organization to Russia.

The Federal Election Commission last month levied a $113,000 fine on the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for their deceptive funding to cover up their role in the Steele dossier.

The FBI, which was apparently willing to pay any price to defeat Trump, offered former British spy Christopher Steele $1 million in cash if he could prove the charges in that dossier before the 2016 election.

There was no proof — but that didn’t stop the FBI from using the dossier to get warrants to spy on Trump campaign officials from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Jake Sullivan is now Biden’s national security adviser.

Did he get that gig in part because of his willingness to lie for Democratic kingpins?

Avril Haines is Biden’s director of national intelligence.

Did signing the Hunter laptop letter help her snare that plum job?

The letter Blinken finagled would not have been so influential if journalists were not shamelessly docile to federal job titles.

Inside the Beltway, former intelligence kingpins are viewed like royalty or at least second-tier aristocracy.

But the CIA has a long record of secretly intervening in dozens of foreign elections.

In 2019, former CIA director Mike Pompeo summarized his agency’s motif: “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses.”

Former CIA chief James Woolsey insisted in 2018 that the CIA intervenes in elections “only for a very good cause in the interests of democracy.”

Yet the letter from former spooks was instantly revered by journalists as if it were handed down from Mt. Sinai.

For the Washington political elite, defeating Donald Trump was the ultimate good cause to save democracy.

Biden talks as if his 2020 election victory was the result of practically a divine incarnation of the “will of the people.”

Unfortunately, presidential elections are irrevocable regardless of how many voters were conned.

How much official deceit can democracy survive?

Any notion of “informed consent” by voters is a mirage if federal agencies and former officials have the power to endlessly distort the news.

Shortly after he became secretary of state, Blinken boasted that the US government doesn’t sweep problems “under the rug. . . . We deal with them in the daylight, with full transparency.”

That pledge apparently did not extend to Blinken’s own tampering with the 2020 election.

What else is Blinken hiding, and when will the next shoe fall?