Tulsi's Q Drop

The Creation of the Russia Hoax-Hoax

I figured that since the first part of The MechaHitler Reich was quite long, I’d give you the weekend to finish reading it and myself a break from writing about it. Also, I just had a bee in my bonnet about Tulsi Gabbard. —C.

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Last week, with the frenzied MAGA base stuck in Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories like wasps in a glue trap, Attack Rabbit Karoline Leavitt gave a briefing to the White House press corps. Cheerful and perky, in a hyper-controlled way, she pulled out her notes and began reading from them as if auditioning for a particularly dramatic role.

“Over the past few days,” she began,

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has unveiled shocking new evidence that former President Barack Obama and top aides in the Obama administration conspired to subvert President Trump’s 2016 election victory and undermine the democratic will of the American people—

The giant screen behind her suddenly flickered alive. It showed a flow chart titled THE CREATION OF THE RUSSIA HOAX. A convoluted scheme of arrows pointed to boxes with labels like “DEEP STATE LEAKS,” film-noirish photos of sinister-looking Obama officials, and faux-newspaper headlines: “Russian Hackers Acted to Help Trump in Election.” Using a red sharpie pen, someone had circled the words “SECRET RUSSIA MEETING” and scrawled an “X” in a box called “POTUS BRIEFING PULLED.” The chart was clearly the work of a lunatic.

Leavitt continued reading from her prepared text. Her voice was high and sparkly, as if she was announcing the winners of Greek Week instead of accusing a former president of high crimes against the Republic. The marriage of homecoming queen affect and salivating authoritarian rhetoric was incongruous, like Miss Teen Liberty playing Saddam Hussein.

… While publicly pretending to engage in a peaceful transfer of power, in private, former President Obama went to great and nefarious lengths to try to sow discord among the public and sabotage his successor, President Trump. The new evidence released by the Director of National Intelligence, who is here with me today, confirms that the Obama administration manufactured politicized intelligence which was later used as the justification for baseless smears against President Trump in an effort to try to delegitimize his victory before he even took the oath of office.

The truth is that President Trump never had anything to do with Russia. And the Russia Collusion Hoax was a massive fraud perpetuated on the American people from the very beginning. And the worst part of this is Obama knew that truth, and so did all of the other corrupt officials involved in this scam, including former CIA director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former FBI director James Comey, former deputy director Andrew McCabe, and many others.

Director of National Intelligence Gabbard’s report further confirms what we already knew. There was no collusion, no corruption except on the part of Barack Obama and the weaponized intelligence agencies at the time. The Russia hoax was a blatant lie, all jinned up by Democrat political operatives that were signed off on by pre then-President Obama and leaked to the news media to launch a year’s long witch hunt against President Trump and his first administration.

Allies of the president, including his own son, Donald Trump Jr., were disgustingly smeared as Russian assets and some even had their lives destroyed because of this vicious lie. The president’s first two years in office had this fake distraction hanging over it, and endless resources, time, and political capital were spent having to debunk these lies from the highest levels of our government.

Now, nearly 10 years later, thanks to the declassification of documents by Director Gabbard, the truth has finally come to light. And this truth vindicates President Trump, his family, and his many allies and associates who were smeared with defamatory lies. President Trump was right from the beginning about all of this, and we are grateful that justice can be served.

Now, we have even more damning evidence implicating those who tried to sabotage a duly elected president and did grave material harm to our republic. Thanks to additional important work done by CIA Director Ratcliffe, committee chairman Rick Crawford over the past few months, a newly declassified 2020 report prepared by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which DNI Director Gabbert has declassified, found that the intel community did not have any direct information that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to help wanted to help elect President Trump in 2016. And in fact, Russia was actively preparing for a Hillary Clinton victory.

But at the unusual direction of Barack Obama at the time, the intel community published implausible intelligence suggesting otherwise. Why? To sabotage the incoming president. This is truly one of the greatest political scandals in American history. and reporters at legacy outlets, some of which are sitting in this room today, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, were ridiculously awarded Pulitzer prizes for their perpetuation of this hoax—

You could tell she especially liked this part. She looked like a sorority president who’d snatched her rival’s boyfriend and told her about it on national television.

—It’s well past time for those awards to be stripped from the journalists who received them. It is not journalism to propagate political disinformation in service of the Democrat Party and those in the intelligence community who hand over out-of-context and fake intelligence to push a false political narrative. I will now pass it over to the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.

Leavitt had a satisfied glow, the unmistakable glint of a woman who’d once organized a smear campaign in a group chat and never came down from the thrill of it.

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Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard emerged from the wings, all martial discipline and the spirit of Aloha, as if refreshed from completing a silent meditation retreat and also commanding a drone strike. Her pure-white outfit evoked “serious stateswoman,” but with just enough “yoga-mom at a PTA coup” to say she was capable of dethroning the principal and leading the morning sun salutations without missing a beat.

Gabbard stepped up to the podium like she was returning from a classified mission to Mount Kailash, wearing the expression of a woman who had once achieved total spiritual union with the Absolute and found it—frankly—disappointing. “The stunning revelations that we are releasing today,” she said in a voice that was at once low, grave, and over-enunciated, “should be of concern to every American.” Her performance was pitch-perfect: not quite anger, not quite revelation; disciplined and resolute. The Pepe Le Pew White Stripe of Destiny in her hair lent her a mythic edge, as if she’d been touched by lightning or granted eternal wisdom by a sacred Indo‑Pacific fox spirit.

“There is irrefutable evidence,” she continued, “that details how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false.” She pronounced each syllable like a zen gong: There was something profound in these documents—if only you would feel them.

They knew it would promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, selling it to the American people as though it were true.

It wasn’t.

The report that we released today shows in great detail how they carried this out. They manufactured findings from shoddy sources. They suppressed evidence and credible intelligence that disproved their false claims. They disobeyed traditional tradecraft and intelligence community standards, and withheld the truth from the American people. In doing so, they conspired to subvert the will of the American people who elected Donald Trump in that election in November of 2016.

They worked with their partners in the media to promote this lie, ultimately to undermine the legitimacy of President Trump and launching what would be a years-long coup against him and his administration.

We’re here today because the American people deserve the truth. They deserve accountability and they deserve justice.

When she finished, she stared at the press corps as though expecting gasps.

Leavitt chose the first reporter—a woman named Emily in the special MAGA press seat. Emily squirmed with pleasure. “Um, Director Gabbard,” Emily said, “Do you believe that any of this new information implicates former President Obama in criminal behavior?”

Gabbard replied evenly that she had referred the documents to the Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate their criminal implication.

The evidence that we have found and that we have released directly point to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment. There are multiple pieces of evidence and intelligence that confirm that fact.

Multiple pieces of evidence and intelligence, no less. A little frisson went through the audience. The next reporter, a man with a Spanish accent, asked, “Based on what you now see, do you believe President Obama is guilty of treason?” Gabbard said she would leave that to the Department of Justice, but “The expressed intent, and what followed afterward,”

can only be described as a years-long coup and a treasonous conspiracy against the American people, our republic, and an attempt to undermine President Trump’s administration.

The journalists’ ears perked up: That was news, and so crazy you could file a story about it, so this briefing wouldn’t be a complete waste of time. Another reporter then raised his hand and pointed out that the Senate Intelligence Committee—helmed by none other than Marco Rubio—had spent years looking into the same evidence and had come to the opposite conclusion. So had a years-long investigation by the Justice Department. He asked, “What do you now have that refutes those?”

She fixed him with a gaze of coastal calm and military readiness. “I’m not asking you to take my word for it,” she answered. “I’m asking you, in the media, to conduct honest journalism.” She urged the American people to look for themselves. The documents she had released—“close to 200 pages that point, in multiple references, multiple examples”

confirm the conclusions that that we have drawn that President Obama directed an intelligence community assessment to be created to further this contrived false narrative that ultimately led to a years’-long coup to try to undermine President Trump’s presidency.

“And it’s your belief,” the reporter followed up, “that those two previous investigations missed that, or covered it up?

“I’m telling you to look at the evidence.” She did not answer his question. “Look at the evidence,” she said again, daring him to challenge her. “And you will know the truth.”

The next reporter asked about Jeffrey Epstein. She told him she would keep the American people informed, folded her notes like sacred sutras, bowed faintly to the stunned silence, and walked offstage the way a mythic warrior leaves the battlefield: undefeated, unbothered, and serenely confident that neither he nor any other American—and certainly not Trump’s voters—would read a single word of the documents she’d released.

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Here are the documents:

• The first batch. A file containing a few Obama Administration and intelligence community memoranda and emails; some scheduling emails, a draft of the President’s Daily Briefing on December 8, 2016; and two ICAs, or Intelligence Community Assessments. The first, dated September 12, 2016, is titled “Cyber Threats to the 2016 US Presidential Election,” hereinafter “the 2016 ICA.” The second, from January 5, 2017, is called “Assessing Russian Activities in Recent Elections,” hereinafter “the 2017 ICA.”

• The House Intelligence Committee report—the oversight majority staff report produced by Republicans in September 2020. Kash Patel was one of the lead authors.

• The DNI memorandum. I’m not sure who wrote this—perhaps Gabbard did? Written in Trump Administration prose (lots of bold type, allusions to the Deep State, no big words) it purports to be a timeline of the treasonous coup.

Altogether, there are about 160 pages, but that could lead you to think that reading them all would take too much time. It wouldn’t. I’m just eyeballing it, but about a third of the material seems to be redacted,¹ like this:

The redactions are peculiar. Why does this look like a ransom note? Someone has carefully blacked out everything but the names of government agencies, which was obviously a time-consuming labor. I’ve never seen that before in a declassified document. I can’t imagine the rationale for it. Why leave in “DHS,” but not, say, conjunctions and articles? Would it be cynical to wonder if this has been contrived to appeal to the Q set?

There are also lots of blank pages, or nearly blank, and many pages only have one or two lines, like this:

There’s also a lot of unrelated stuff you can skip, like this:

The margins are huge, and there’s lots of space between each section. So I’d say there’s about 50 pages of actual reading. Easy reading, too. Nothing complex or allegorical. No old English or Norse. No statistical regressions. No math at all. If you can pass this middle school reading comprehension test, you can read these documents in less than an hour, and if you’re not willing to do that, you’ll have to take my word about what they say.

I’m serious. Do not argue with me about this unless you’ve read them.

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Before reading them, I was deeply dubious. I assumed Gabbard was wildly exaggerating. But I also assumed there had to be something in those documents, however minor, to support her argument. That’s how these things are done: You build your smear campaign around a kernel of truth, then pile so many lies and exaggerations on that scaffolding that in the end no one knows what’s up and what’s down.

So I was genuinely surprised—after all that drama and the buildup!—to discover that no, there is not one single word in these documents that says anything like what Gabbard claims. No reasonable speaker of English could read them and draw those conclusions. To the contrary, they confirm everything the Obama Administration and the intelligence community said at the time.

I was so puzzled by this that at first I thought I must have downloaded the wrong documents. But no, they’re the right ones, and they might as well be a Whirlpool washing machine manual for all the inculpatory evidence they contain.

Gabbard’s story doesn’t make sense even on its own terms, never mind the documents. Bref, she claims our intelligence agencies told Obama that there was no evidence Russia had hacked into our voting machines and changed the voting tallies, thereby handing the victory to Trump. Dissatisfied with this account, she says, Obama commissioned a phony intelligence report. The Steele Dossier, she says, was involved, even though it was “discredited.” Then the Administration leaked the conclusions of this report to a compliant media, triggering what Gabbard, like Trump, calls “the Russia hoax.” What that hoax was, precisely, Gabbard does not say. The point, she says, is that the story Obama Administration officials leaked to the media—having commissioned a phony report to this effect from the Deep State—was a lie, and these documents prove it.

Well, yes, that story would have been a lie, if that had been the story. But it wasn’t. In reality, Obama officials dutifully briefed the press (which is not the same as “leaking,” by the way) that there was no evidence that Russia had hacked into our voting machines and changed the voting tallies. There was evidence, however, that Russia had hacked the DNC’s computers and leaked documents that damaged Hillary Clinton. There was also evidence that Russia conducted an extensive online influence operation aimed at fomenting division among Americans, encouraging them to distrust their political institutions, and bolstering Trump’s campaign. That, like the claim Russia had hacked the DNC, was absolutely true.

Gabbard adduces newspaper headlines from 2017 referring to “Russian hacking” as evidence for her claim that Obama officials told the media that Russia hacked into our voting machines. Yes, that’s really her argument. Yes, it’s that stupid. I go back and forth between thinking she has to be conflating these things deliberately, because no one could be that dumb, and thinking she has to be that dumb, because if you were seeking to inculpate the Obama Administration, you’d come up with a story that at least superficially made sense.

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What do the documents actually show? They show that in late 2016—and under pressure, in particular, from Democrats in Congress—US intelligence officials rushed to write a report about Russia’s interference in the presidential election. Among agencies, there was some debate: Some analysts thought Russia merely wanted to sow chaos; others, that it had a clear preference for Trump. Eventually, the consensus leaned toward the latter, and a judgment publicly aired in the January 6, 2017, ICA.

All of this is normal. It was transparent. It was debated. It was never secret. It was not a plot, a coup, treason, a conspiracy, or remotely improper. What’s more, it was correctly reported by our major news organs. Here’s The New York Times’ story from December 9, 2016, for example. (This is the story whose headline was reproduced in that flow chart.) Note the following, in particular:

American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.

They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding [my emphasis]—which they say was also reached with high confidence—that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.

In the months before the election, it was largely documents from Democratic Party systems that were leaked to the public. Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks.

In Gabbard’s telling, the Russian hack-and-leak operation that targeted the DNC, using Wikileaks as a cutout, goes down the memory hole. The word “hack,” in her telling, can have only one meaning: Hacking into voting machines and changing the tallies, which would have meant Trump was an illegitimate president. She never mentions the DNC hack, even though it was front page news for days. It’s awfully strange: She obviously expects that we just won’t remember this.

If this seems hard to follow, it’s not my fault: Her story just makes no sense. She’s accusing Obama of having planted a fake story in the news, but no one reported such a story, at the time or since. She also claims that the phony intelligence report was based on flimsy evidence, including the “discredited” Steele dossier. She doesn’t mention the much more obvious point that led analysts to the conclusion that Russia sought to hurt Hillary Clinton, namely that they did hurt Hillary Clinton.

Here’s The Washington Post article whose headline also appears in the flow chart. Look for yourself, as Gabbard would say. It absolutely does not say that Russia hacked our voting machines. The article is entirely compatible with the leaked documents, as well as the many other analyses we’ve since seen, official and non-official.

Here’s another one of Gabbard’s flow charts. I’ll go through it point by point, just for thoroughness. (If you’re willing to take my word for it, you can skip ahead.)

1. The “real intel assessment,” she writes—correctly—was that “Russia and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting cyber attacks on infrastructure.” True.

   

2. Trump wins 2016 election. True!

3. The “POTUS briefing” that was “pulled” on September 8 reads as follows:

We assess that Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure. Russian Government–affiliated actors most likely compromised an Illinois voter registration database and unsuccessfully attempted the same in other states. …

• Possible Russian Government–affiliated cyber actors extracted voter data, mostly containing names and addresses of voters, from Illinois’s Board of Elections registration database in July that lacked adequate security safeguards. We also observed scanning and similar efforts against Secretary of State systems and websites in up to 20 more states from servers operated by a Russian-owned company with ties to Russian military cyber actors—the same infrastructure used against Illinois.

• We have low-to-moderate confidence in the Russian Government’s involvement because of our uncertainty about its utility for a state actor, a lack of observed effects from the low-profile operation, and the actors’ use of obfuscation techniques, which included substantial overlap with criminal actors using similar targeting patterns and tactics. The activities did coincide with high-profile Russian cyber-enabled data leaks during the election, which we assess probably were intended to cause psychological effects, such as undermining the credibility of the election process and candidates.

The rest of the report treats the vulnerabilities of the system and risks they anticipate in the future—it cites, for example, Alaska’s decision to permit the submission of absentee ballots through an internet portal as a potential avenue for mischief.

Gabbard describes this PDB as “pulled.” She does not say who pulled it, or why, and neither do the documents. It’s not even clear what “pulled” means. The word “pulled” is written on the document, but in another font, as if added subsequently.

If by “pulled,” she means that Obama sent this PDB back to headquarters, telling his briefers it wasn’t what he wanted to hear, it makes no sense: Asking for a phony ICA report wouldn’t require him to cancel the PDB. The PDB and the ICA are not the same. The PDB is a daily, all-source summary of information and analysis on national security issues. It’s produced only for the president and (if he chooses) key cabinet members and advisers. An ICA is the Intelligence Community’s official, coordinated evaluation of a broader problem. It’s often produced in a classified and an unclassified version; it’s meant for a wide audience, including Congress. There’s no reason Obama couldn’t have received that PDB and issued an order to create a phony report for Congress—no one would have been the wiser, since they would never have seen the PDB.

Of course it wasn’t published. It’s the PDB! It’s never published. It’s the most classified document in the world.

The dates on all of these documents, by the way, have been redacted (there’s no reason for this that I can imagine; dates aren’t inherently classified) so there’s no way to know whether they support the timeline Gabbard suggests.

An email sent on December 7 includes talking points based on “key lines from the draft PDB.” But this is not the “pulled” PDB, because it says something different. There are no clues about the date of the PDB that gave rise to this email. It’s not clear who drafted this email or for whom it was intended: all the names are redacted. It says:

ACTIVITY ON AND SINCE ELECTION DAY

We assess that foreign adversaries did not use cyber attacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome this year. (My emphasis.)

• We have no evidence of cyber manipulation of election infrastructure intended to alter results. [My emphasis.]

• There was, however, minimal targeting of election infrastructure probably by cyber criminals to steal data, although these efforts did not disrupt the election.

• Unattributed denial-of-service attacks against election infrastructure were reported on election day, including a 4-minute attack against an unspecified Illinois elections website that had no impact on the website’s availability.

• Since the election, cyber actors linked by signals intelligence to Russia’s SVR on 9 November conducted multiple election-themed spear-phishing campaigns. [My emphasis]

• Large quantities of emails—purportedly Clinton Foundation election postmortems from a Harvard University email address—were sent to individuals in national security, defense, international affairs, public policy, and European Asian studies organizations. Multiple US Government agencies report having received the emails.

4. There is no evidence in these documents—none—of a “secret meeting to plan the Russia hoax” on December 9. There is a memo describing a meeting of the NSC Principals Committee on December 9. The subject line of the memo says, “Summary of Conclusions for PC Meeting on a Sensitive Topic.” Indeed, the topic is sensitive: It treats the actions to be taken to punish Russia for its election interference. (These amount to a chastisement so trivial that reading them made me smack my head in frustration with the Obama Administration’s pusillanimity.) For example:

Principals agreed to deny Russia the use of its residential and recreational compound at Pioneer Point on the Chesapeake Bay. Principals also recommended, pending the views of the US Mission to the United Nations (USUN) and legal review, denying Russia the use of its residential and recreational compound in Glen Cove, New York. The Department of State noted its preference that any action against the compounds be delayed to, among other things, allow for a potential agreement on Aleppo to be implemented. State also will provide a matrix of possible Russian responses, both operationally and diplomaticallyJ to the closure of the compounds.

Not one word of this document could be construed as a plan to deceive the public in any way. To the contrary, the document concludes thus:

In other words, they agreed to publicly release information about the incidents on which they had been briefed in an earlier PDB. That’s it.

5. Nor is there a jot of evidence that Obama ordered the intelligence community to prepare a new assessment indicating the election was “hacked.” (All of these are Gabbard’s terms, taken from her flow chart, her press briefing, and her Fox News hits.) Perhaps she’s referring to this?

There is a memo with the subject heading, POTUS Tasking on Russia Election Meddling. It says this:

Given the circumstances, this is hardly a strange request, and certainly not a suspicious one; still less is it “treasonous.”

6. There is no “fake weaponized assessment” in these documents. The ICA report she presumably means, dated January 5, 2017, drew on a range of sources:

Many of the key judgments in this assessment rely on a body of reporting from multiple sources that are consistent with our understanding of Russian behavior. Insights into Russian efforts—including specific cyber operations—and Kremlin views of key US players like President-elect Trump and Secretary Clinton derive from multiple corroborating sources.

Some of our judgments about Kremlin preferences and intent are drawn from the behavior of Kremlin-loyal political figures, state media, and pro-Kremlin social media actors, all of whom the Kremlin either directly uses to convey messages or who are answerable to the Kremlin. The Russian leadership invests significant resources in both foreign and domestic propaganda and places a premium on transmitting what it views as consistent, self-reinforcing narratives regarding its desires and redlines, whether on Ukraine, Syria, or relations with the United States.

This is absolutely correct. No one who was paying attention to Russian state media in 2016 had any doubt who the Kremlin supported. No one paying attention to Trump had any doubt about why, either. The candidate who was guaranteed to do immense harm to American power and prestige, who said NATO was “obsolete,” who said he wanted to “team up” with Russia to go after ISIS, who hired Paul Manafort as his campaign manager, for God’s sake?

I could go on for pages about the things Trump did and said during that campaign that caused me, without any access to classified information, to reach the same conclusion our intelligence analysts did. But I’ve written about this before and I’d be repeating myself. Of course Russia wanted Trump to win. You hardly needed the CIA to see this. (They wanted Tulsi Gabbard to be our Director of National Intelligence, too.)

It’s absolutely normal for officials to brief the media on reports like this. This information wasn’t classified. It’s not a coup: It’s transparency.

The rest of the assessment doesn’t contradict the “pulled” PDB, or any other document in this file. For example:

Key Judgments:

• Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.

• We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in the summer of 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments based on a body of intelligence reporting and the public behavior of senior Russian officials and state-controlled media. We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment based on sensitive information not included in this version of the assessment; NSA has moderate confidence in this judgment based on the same sensitive information. NSA’s confidence in this judgment would be elevated to high with additional corroborating sources. [My emphases]

• Moscow’s approach evolved over the course of the campaign based on Russia’s understanding of the electoral prospects of the two main candidates. When Moscow assessed that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign began to focus more on undermining her future presidency.

• We assess that Moscow refrained from the full spectrum of actions it could have taken to influence the US election. We judge that the Kremlin could have disclosed additional material and could have conducted attacks on electoral infrastructure in the runup to and on Election Day.

• Further intelligence has come to light since Election Day that, when combined with Russian behavior since early November 2016, increase our confidence in our assessments of Russian motivations and goals, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.

The conclusion to which Gabbard takes exception—that Putin favored Trump—is largely based on an open source assessment of Russian behavior, and not, as she (and the House Intel Committee) insist, “flimsy evidence.” For example, they write:

Putin publicly indicated a preference for the President-elect’s stated policy to work with Russia, and pro-Kremlin figures spoke highly about what they saw as his Russia-friendly positions on Syria and Ukraine. Putin contrasted President-elect Trump’s approach to Russia with Secretary Clinton’s “aggressive rhetoric,” according to Russian press reporting. [My emphases.]

I noticed all of this at the time, and so did everyone else who paid even the slightest bit of attention to Russia’s activities.² It wasn’t a secret.

Writing “DISPROVEN STEELE DOSSIER” doesn’t make any part of her theory true.

There’s no point in me going through every other page, line by line, to show that they don’t say what she says. Read them yourselves, just as she recommends. The documents are a record of the government doing what governments are supposed to do: arguing over the intelligence, assessing risk, and publishing its conclusions. To call this a nefarious conspiracy is to reveal either a complete ignorance of intelligence work or a total contempt for reality. In Gabbard’s case, both.

The contents and conclusions of the documents Gabbard released have been openly and endlessly discussed in congressional hearings, Inspector General reports, and the broad investigative literature surrounding the 2016 election interference. The January 6, 2017, Intelligence Community Assessment has been available to the public since 2017 in both classified and unclassified versions.

Its findings—that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to undermine faith in our institutions and to help Trump—were debated at the time, as was the NSA’s more cautious endorsement. The ICA’s internal disagreements were explicitly disclosed in footnotes and media coverage. The House Intelligence Committee’s criticism—that the ICA process involved political bias and “tradecraft failures”—was debated publicly at the time, and the Democratic minority issued a sharply dissenting view. The documentation was redacted, but the arguments were hashed out incessantly in the press and in hearings.

Analytical disagreements, especially over how strongly to weight Putin’s preferences, were openly discussed in 2017 and again in 2018. The NSA’s dissent was printed in the ICA itself. The Steele dossier was the subject of endless debate. (The public has somehow come to believe that the dossier’s only claim was that Donald Trump peed on a Russian bed, and since no one has come forth to corroborate that—as if anyone would—it has concluded that Steele has been discredited, even though much of the dossier has been confirmed. No amount of explaining what “unfinished intelligence” means will allay this confusion. Steele’s name has been raked through the mud, which is a hell of a reward for a man who did exactly what we’d hope someone would do under his circumstances; to wit, he let the FBI know what he’d come across. I doubt anyone will be foolish enough to make that mistake again.)

In 2020, over five volumes, a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report helmed by none other than Marco Rubio thoroughly examined Russian interference and endorsed that ICA’s main findings. Their report is among the most rigorous public assessments we have. It was released in full, save for the redaction of classified information. (It is far more thorough and serious than the House Intelligence Committee’s report, which is a fairly silly partisan exercise, and which represents what the French call an effort to enculer une mouche en plein vol—an idiom evoking the time-wasting and petty nitpicking of a man endeavoring to bugger a fly in mid-flight.)

During the four years of Trump’s presidency, none of his handpicked DNIs thought these documents worth releasing. In 2020, the intelligence community again assessed that Putin had a strong preference for Trump:

We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US. We have high confidence in our assessment; Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect US public perceptions in a consistent manner.

A key element of Moscow’s strategy this election cycle was its use of proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration.

Does Gabbard even know this? Was that assessment, too, the product of a treasonous plot?

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On her Fox News hits, the structure of Gabbard’s argument is roughly same as that of the Nunes Memo or the unmasking non-scandal or the Twitter-files non-scandal: Locate a completely minor procedural irregularity or normal analytical dissent and declare it a “smoking gun.”

But those flow charts are pure QAnon, and that’s what’s unusually disturbing about this. Trump and Gabbard did not choose this line of attack merely to distract the base, nor even to satisfy Trump’s narcissistic need to invert the charges that have been rightly levied against him—to wit, that he orchestrated a treasonous plot to subvert the will of the people by delegitimizing a fair and free election. Those are, obviously, among the reasons they’re making these claims—and very transparently so. (Whether anyone in the administration realizes this consciously is an interesting question. I don’t know the answer.)

But there is an even more important logic to this. The heart of the QAnon cult is the notion that a cabal of Satanic cannibal child molesters, in league with the Deep State, is running a global child sex trafficking ring. Adherents believe that Donald Trump is secretly leading the fight against this ring. The administration’s refusal to release what they believe is the Rosetta Stone of this plot—the Epstein files—threatens the fundamental ontology of QAnon. If proof emerges that Trump was a participant in Epstein’s Schweinerei (and obviously he was—how could they be so stupid?), their worldview will collapse.

That’s why Trump needs these claims, presented this way. These flow charts and Gabbard’s vocabulary are aimed at a base that has been promised a day when all the pedophiles and Democrats—who are presumed to be one and the same—are arrested. That day is what the QAnon devotees call “the Storm.” They will understand the message of these charges perfectly: The Storm is coming.

The whole thing is a Q drop—sprawling webs of inference, innuendo, paranoia, circles, arrows, acronyms, random boxes labeled “THEY,” federal agencies reduced to acronyms like magical glyphs: “FBI ➡️ CISA ➡️ NGO ➡️ WHO???” Passive voice. Ominous capitalization. Was THIS planned?” “Who BENEFITS?”“Connections? DEEP TIES??” Every institution is somehow connected to every other. The CDC touches the WHO touches the WEF touches the DNC touches the PTA of a public school in Bethesda. “Coincidence?” someone asks, having drawn a glowing pentagram around an NIH grant spreadsheet. Suddenly: “Why is no one TALKING about this?”

Gabbard is a native in the QAnon vernacular. Everything is “controlled,” “scripted,” “censored.” The charts always imply there’s a master narrative, imposed by a nefarious force: Big Tech, the intelligence community, the DNC, WHO, Oprah. Never assert, always suggest, let the audience fill in the crime. At a glance, maybe it looks logical: boxes, arrows, color-coding? But try to follow the logic and you find yourself in Escher’s basement. The arrows are non sequiturs. There’s no evidence. Like all good conspiracy theology, it flatters the viewer. “Only the awake can see the connections.” “The media won’t report this. But I will.” Tulsi Gabbard plays the clairvoyant priestess, decoding the symbols in a Twitter séance.

Like Q, she avoids being nailed down. She’s not “left.” She’s not “right.” She’s above it all—here to show you what both sides are hiding. The ambiguity lets the flowchart grow in any direction. Left-wing psyops? Right-wing donors? Foreign agents? All roads lead to the TRUTH (™). She even concludes with the ritual invocation to do your own research.

(Hey, do you think Tulsi could be Q? Wouldn’t that explain a lot?)

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I’m baffled, to be honest. She stood at that podium and lied—flagrantly, shamelessly, which is not the baffling part; that’s just the Trump Administration way. But then she put those documents online, where everyone could see them.

That’s not how any of this works. When Joseph McCarthy held up a piece of paper and said, “I have here in my hand a list of names,” he didn’t pass out a mimeographed copy of that list revealing it was just a recipe for tuna casserole. How incompetent could this woman be? She had one job: flog this Q drop so hard they stop talking about Epstein. Or until they go back to believing that soon, Trump will arrest all the pedophiles. But she declassifies evidence against the conspiracy theory she’s supposed to sell? And she posts it online?

It’s a weird mistake, because otherwise, this was all so elaborate, so crafty, so premeditated. Trump lies because he actually believes every narcissistic fantasy that pops into his head. But she really thought this one through. She worked so hard on her crazy-person flow charts and her graphics for Twitter.

She really had me going, too. I was honestly shocked when I looked at the documents and saw there was literally nothing there. Not just “not much,” or “Bah, humbug.” Literally, not one thing.

If she’s going to make stuff up out of whole cloth, why wouldn’t she do it right, go the distance, and forge documents that support the lie? At the very least, she could have just said that she saw those incriminating documents, but couldn’t release them because they’re so, so secret. What kind of idiot releases documents that directly contradict her big lie, then looks journalists in the eye and says, “Look at the evidence and you will know the truth?

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These are the hypotheses I’ve come up with. I’m not sure which is right:

1. The only person for whom she put on that performance is Donald Trump, and she knows full well he doesn’t and won’t read anything. (It worked: She was about to lose her job, or so it was widely rumored; now, Trump is introducing her as the “hottest person in the room.”)

2. She believes she’ll hypnotize people by saying what she does in a low, calm voice and relying on the power of suggestion and repetition to do the rest. By the time she’s done repeating this story fifty times on FOX, the public—or at least, the only part she cares about, the MAGA base—will see things in those documents that just aren’t there.

3. She believes the MAGA base is completely illiterate, to the last. She’s absolutely confident that they’re either too lazy to read the documents or unable to read.

4. She’s counting on the remarkable power of social pressure to compel conformity, as in the famous Asch experiments. She believes that when people fail to find evidence of a dastardly plot in those documents, they’ll wonder if perhaps they just don’t understand the secret inner workings of the Deep State well enough to see how this absolutely, indisputably proves a treasonous conspiracy. They’ll be too afraid of looking stupid to admit this, so they’ll pretend to understand it, and when someone else—who is equally afraid to admit that he doesn’t understand it—says, “Those documents sure do prove that treacherous conspiracy, alright. Boy, howdy. Never seen anything more treacherous and conspiratorial,” they’ll nod vigorously. The whole MAGA base will go around insisting to one another that they see the Emperor’s resplendent new robes.

5. She’s counting on confirmation bias, betting that if she feeds the base a bunch of documents with lots of redactions and inscrutable acronyms like “SIA JAG,” they’ll fill in those blanks with the story she told them—since that was exactly what they believed in the first place.

6. She trusts the MAGA base to be in on her little game. She thinks they’ll read the documents, see that everything she said was a lie, smile knowingly, and go along with the pretense—“Yes, those documents sure do prove that Obama committed treason!”—because they know it will make people like me go mental.

7. She figures that no one remembers what happened that long ago, and no one ever read, or if they did, they certainly don’t remember, the Mueller report, the Justice Department’s IG report, the Senate Intelligence Committee report, the Durham report, Ratcliffe’s recent report, what the Obama Administration actually said, what the media actually reported, or who did what and to whom. So she figures it’s safe to make up an imaginary timeline—and if anyone says, “Huh? That’s not what happened,” she’ll say they’re fake news.

8. She’s talked herself into believing that those documents say what she claims. The power of suggestion, repetition, social pressure, and confirmation bias have untethered her from observable reality. She’s been soaking in MAGA soup for so long that she’s gone as cuckoo-loonytunes as Donald Trump himself.

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The thing that just wigs me out is seeing the whole GOP going along with it. It’s terrifying because while her theory is a joke, Trump is deadly serious about prosecuting the people at that meeting for a capital crime. I promise you that.

The media has chosen to laugh at this, ignore it, or dismiss Gabbard’s stunt and her documents peremptorily, but they can’t. They’re not getting it. This isn’t a normal administration. It’s not early-stage authoritarianism anymore. This is the real thing.

Erdoğan stitched up his military brass using exactly this technique—bombshell revelations of a coup plot in the media; massive indictments that no one actually read; journalists who didn’t read them either, or who were so deep in the tank for Erdoğan that they saw what they were told to see and wrote story after hysterical story about the dastardly plot; a public baying for the coup-plotters’ blood.

The difference is that by the time these cases went to court, Erdoğan had total control over the Turkish judiciary. I don’t think many judges in the United States would go along with this, so there’s a good chance it will just get laughed out of court. On the other hand, there are a lot more judges in the tank for Trump, like Aileen Cannon, where she came from. There are no guarantees.

It’s appalling to see everyone in the GOP studying the new script and falling in line. The Justice Department immediately announced that it had formed a Strike Force to investigate these documents. I didn’t know what a Strike Force was, or how it differed from a Task Force, so I looked it up:

The Strike Force Model consists of interagency teams made up of investigators and prosecutors that focus on the worst offenders engaged in fraudulent activities, including, chiefly, health care fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, bank fraud, money laundering offenses, violations of the Anti-Kickback Statute, false statements offenses, Title 42 offenses, Title 26 offenses, and Title 21 offenses, in the highest intensity regions. The Strike Force Model uses advanced data analysis techniques to identify aberrant billing levels in health care fraud “hot spots”—cities with high levels of billing fraud—combined with traditional investigative techniques to target suspicious billing patterns as well as emerging schemes and fraudulent practices that migrate from one community to another.

Sounds appropriate.

Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn called for a special counsel to be appointed to conduct an investigation. Again, I’m left wondering whether these people are idiots, completely incompetent, or if they’ve all lost their minds. Their slavish subservience to Trump really puzzles me. Did either of those senators look at these documents? Maybe they’ve been too busy to read them, but isn’t that why they have staffers? They know this is nonsense.

I guess they, too, are playing to that same audience of one. But I truly don’t understand what bonds these men to Trump, psychologically. Why do they do it? Lindsey Graham, in particular, is a man vested by the Constitution with immense power—a sitting United States Senator, chairman-emeritus of major committees, wielder of oversight, subpoena, and the privilege of the Senate floor. He’s nearly untouchable in his home state. He has tenure, gravitas, committee clout. Why does he so desperately crave the approval of a man who commands neither moral authority nor intellectual respect? Why does he scurry, unbidden, to the cameras to prove his loyalty, like a valet who’s spotted the master’s Bentley turning the corner? Why does this Paladin of Palm Beach move through the halls of power not as a senator, but as a court eunuch in a declining empire?

You might expect senior senators to be offended by the spectacle of state secrets paraded as partisan kabuki; or disturbed by the abuse of classification, the demeaning of the Department of Justice, and the transformation of their party into a low, stupid cult of vendetta and grievance. It’s pathetic, but it’s also just baffling. What kind of person sells his honor and his dignity for a plate of shrimp and a tee time at Mar-a-Lago?

Grown men and women, behaving like a herd of enchanted cows, stampeding off a cliff at the faintest moo from Mar-a-Lago. None of them have to do it. Most of them are secure in ruby-red districts and gerrymandered fortresses. There’s no guillotine above their necks. Trump isn’t Stalin. They won’t be shot in the basement of Lubyanka. He doesn’t control the army or the IRS (yet). He barely controls his own syntax and sphincter.

Yet they’re all playing along with it. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, on Twitter: “These reports from Director Gabbard make Watergate look like child’s play!” (She has an acute feel for Watergate, I suppose, having watched reruns of Forrest Gump.)

The only one willing to say the obvious is Bolton:

I can only conclude that they enjoy it. They enjoy the abasement, the lunacy, the public swallowing of pride and all of their prior statements. You half expect to see Ted Cruz emerging from a dungeon in leather and a ball gag, whimpering, “Please call my wife ugly again, Master.”

It’s a cult with a rotating series of loyalty tests. The more visibly you degrade yourself, the more power you accrue within the group—a bit like Maoist self-criticism sessions. So we have a ruling class that chooses to humiliate itself in submission to a man who insults them, mocks them, endangers the republic, and forces them to lie to the public in ways so ludicrous as to prove their utter degradation. He offers them nothing in return but the joy of shared cruelty and media oxygen. Do they realize that everyone regards them as worms, I wonder?

And what are we to make of journalists like Matt Taibbi and Megyn Kelly, both of whom have the option of tactfully averting their eyes from those documents and talking about something—anything—else? Why are they going through this charade? Taibbi’s telling the world that these documents are stunning, definitive vindications. Taibbi knows how to read, and he probably did read the documents. So he not only knows he’s lying, he knows that everyone else who read those documents knows he’s lying. It’s actually uncomfortable to watch. Those two both have some kind of masochistic kink. Kelly carries water for a man she should have slapped across the face. Taibbi’s now known as the guy you call when you’re wealthy enough that you no longer have to tell your own lies.

It’s a stunning display of epistemic nihilism. When the US’s top intelligence official releases a document whose plain text contradicts her and a passel of politicians and journalists solemnly echo her, there’s only one real message: domination. We can make up anything. Two plus two equals five. You can’t stop us.

Gabbard’s stunt is not without precedent. Her career has long been an exercise in strategic harmony with authoritarian interests, ideological estrangement from liberal democratic norms, and a strangely persistent consonance with Russian talking points. She doggedly stumped for Assad way past the point where this had become utterly obscene. She blamed NATO “provocations” for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. She dutifully repeated Russia’s fairytales about US biolabs. There’s a reason Russian propagandists call her “our girlfriend.”

Now she presides over a campaign to discredit the US intelligence community and burnish the myth of Trump’s victimhood. In the process she is further confusing Americans about what, precisely, Russia did in 2016—and why Russia isn’t our friend, no matter what Trump imagines about his mind-meld with Vladimir Putin. Her suggestion that intelligence analysts had no cause to suspect something odd about Trump’s relationship with Russia is absurd, and it is nonsense; the links between Trump and Russia are longstanding and deep and a great deal of money has been involved. This alone should have wholly disqualified him for high office.

But that is the further point of this exercise—to inoculate Americans from hearing anything about those links, or considering Vladimir Putin’s role in our current disorder. This farce sends a message—particularly to intelligence officials—that this isn’t a topic you want to touch. It teaches Trump’s supporters that they need pay no attention to warnings that Putin is an enemy and a monster, nor to accounts of the way Russia’s intelligence services manipulate American citizens, pervert their moral standards, and profoundly confuse them about what is true.

Russia is already gleefully amplifying this story:

The most galling thing is the brazenness. Gabbard’s Q-drop is a public affront to reality and a calculated act of contempt for truth. It’s also an act of pure contempt for Americans. The documents are there. You can read them. They don’t say what she says they say. The contempt, in this spectacle, is less in what is revealed, but in what is assumed—and assumed, it seems, correctly: that no one will read them anyway.

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Note: I have, as I almost always do, gone back after mailing this newsletter and corrected typos, grammatical errors, and a few sentences that struck me as awkward or unclear. All of the changes were stylistic except the sentence I added to the end of the paragraph that begins, “But that is the further point of this exercise … ” (It’s the third paragraph from the bottom.) I added it because I’d meant to say that but just forgot, and it’s an important point.—Claire

Worth your time

From Campaign Rhetoric to Fascist Threats: Trump Targets Obama

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Also of note

Musk ordered shutdown of Starlink satellite service as Ukraine retook territory from Russia. Reuters investigated his order and its implications for countries increasingly reliant on his Starlink internet service:

During a pivotal push by Ukraine to retake territory from Russia in late September 2022, Elon Musk gave an order that disrupted the counteroffensive and dented Kyiv’s trust in Starlink, the satellite internet service the billionaire provided early in the war to help Ukraine’s military maintain battlefield connectivity.

According to three people familiar with the command, Musk told a senior engineer at the California offices of SpaceX, the Musk venture that controls Starlink, to cut coverage in areas including Kherson, a strategic region north of the Black Sea that Ukraine was trying to reclaim.

“We have to do this,” Michael Nicolls, the Starlink engineer, told colleagues upon receiving the order, one of these people said. Staffers complied, the three people told Reuters, deactivating at least a hundred Starlink terminals, their hexagon-shaped cells going dark on an internal map of the company’s coverage. The move also affected other areas seized by Russia, including some of Donetsk province further east.

Upon Musk’s order, Ukrainian troops suddenly faced a communications blackout, according to a Ukrainian military official, an advisor to the armed forces, and two others who experienced Starlink failure near the front lines. Soldiers panicked, drones surveilling Russian forces went dark, and long-range artillery units, reliant on Starlink to aim their fire, struggled to hit targets.

As a result, the Ukrainian military official and the military advisor said, troops failed to surround a Russian position in the town of Beryslav, east of Kherson, the administrative center of the region of the same name. “The encirclement stalled entirely,” said the military official in an interview. “It failed.”

Elon Musk didn’t like what Media Matters had to say about the Nazis on his platform. So he’s suing them out of existence:

In November 2023, Media Matters published research showing that ads appeared on X next to antisemitic and pro-Nazi content. The report—along with a post in which Mr. Musk endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory—contributed to an advertiser exodus from X that cost the company more than $75 million in revenue through the end of that year. … Mr. Musk took aim at Media Matters, telling listeners, “We will pursue not just the organization, but anyone funding that organization. …

Some involved in the group wanted it to consider declaring bankruptcy or making concessions to settle the litigation, since Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, seemed undeterred by the cost or setbacks. X filed lawsuits against Media Matters in other countries, including Singapore and Ireland, in what lawyers for the advocacy group called “a vendetta-driven campaign of libel tourism.” When a US federal court ruled that the Irish case should be shut down and the Singaporean one paused, X appealed.

CB—This is an appalling case. The First Amendment has no meaning if Musk is allowed to get away with this.

I watched it happen in Hungary. Now it’s happening here:

The American officials and academics who, like me, lived in Hungary during this period would often tell ourselves stories to explain this submissiveness: that docility is rooted in Hungary’s oppressive Communist past, that its democracy was simply too young to withstand a strongman.

Then I returned to the United States, and what I’ve witnessed over these past months at home has exposed those stories as wishful thinking. Here, too, powerful people are responding to authoritarian advances just as their Hungarian counterparts have — not with defiance, but with capitulation, convinced that they can maintain their independence and stay above the fray.

… So they all made deals that Mr. Orban engineered: peace with the strongman, in exchange for subjugation and humiliation. Going along is what did them in. … To the stewards of our nation’s great cultural and commercial institutions: Don’t dupe yourselves. The illusion that you are smarter than the strongman, that you’ll outmaneuver him with silent cleverness, is just that—an illusion. Now, more than ever, your principled leadership matters.

I thought the same thing when I lived in Turkey: This country just doesn’t have much of a gift for democracy. Must be the Ottoman legacy. I’m appalled by my own blindness, now.

What’s inside Zelensky’s urgent new bill to restore anti-corruption agencies’ independence.

1. Usually, when a page or a paragraph is sensitive, they strike the whole offending page or paragraph, even if it includes words that aren’t, inherently, classified. Like so:

Sometimes they strike out a single word, or a sentence, like so:

2. If the Cosmopolitan Globalist had existed then, you would have received a similar brief from me. But my conclusions wouldn’t have been as hedged. There’s a reason the idea of Trump as the Siberian Candidate antedated—by many months—the release of this report. He was acting like it. So was Russia. Here’s one account of what was clearly observable at the time.