by Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag
Russian President Vladimir Putin is once again interfering in US elections and exercising control over Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, say the media and Democratic politicians. On Monday, Rep. Nancy Pelosi told MSNBC that Putin was blackmailing Trump with “something financial.” On Wednesday, Rep. Dan Goldman said, “Every election, it seems, the Republicans are used… either wittingly or unwittingly by Russian intelligence to try to interfere in the election.” And today, CNN notes, “Yet another US election appears to be falling prey to Russian interference…”
But there is no evidence that Putin is blackmailing Trump, that Russian intelligence services are using Republicans, or that Russia is interfering in the 2024 election. Justice Department special prosecutor Robert Mueller could not prove that President Trump or his campaign had colluded with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election. And multiple sources say that US intelligence found that Russia favored the election of Hillary Clinton, not Trump and that then-director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), John Brennan, worked with partisans of then-president Barack Obama to “cook the intelligence” to show the opposite.
To be sure, there is evidence that the Russian government spreads disinformation. For example, on Tuesday, Justice Department Special Counsel David Weiss alleged that an FBI informant named Alexander Smirnov lied when he claimed a Ukrainian natural gas company had given millions of dollars in bribes to the Biden family. Weiss wrote that Smirnov admitted Russian intelligence officials “were involved in passing” him the story. The revelation proves that there is no evidence of Biden family influence peddling and that the Russian government is actively interfering in the 2024 election, concluded some journalists.
In truth, the allegations by Weiss about Smirnov prove no such thing. It is well established that President Biden’s son, Hunter, and brother, James, sold access. There are many emails and text messages, for example, showing the two men promising meetings and involvement from President Joe Biden in various business deals. And one of Hunter Biden’s business partners has testified that selling access to Joe Biden was at the center of various deals the men sought with investors around the world, from Ukraine to China.
While the claim that the Russian government is actively interfering in the 2024 election should be understood as a conspiracy theory, we know that Russian interference in the 2016 election was too trivial to have any measurable impact. As such, exaggerating Russia’s influence by conflating it with “interference” is a form of “disinformation,” defined as an effort to mislead people deliberately. No reputable political scientist has produced any evidence that Russia’s trivial social media advertising or its alleged involvement in the release of emails of Democratic officials, which is itself in serious question, had any influence over the outcome of the election.
What’s more, there is now strong evidence that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been involved in disinformation efforts aimed at maligning Trump supporters as a dangerous and foreign threat to American democracy. The FBI last year was caught orchestrating a fake kidnapping of Michigan’s governor. FBI whistleblowers offered strong evidence that the FBI is hyping the threat of domestic extremism and terrorism as part of a broader counterpopulist campaign. And now the evidence is growing that the FBI is spreading false information about alleged January 6 pipe bombs and is, with the Secret Service, covering up the activities of its agents that day.
The series of stories on Public and Racket last week demonstrate that Russiagate was an elaborate and illegal fabrication concocted by the US Intelligence Community (IC) in coordination with the Clinton campaign. Meanwhile, the CIA, Justice Department, and National Archives all are withholding evidence about the Russia hoax. These events all raise an important question: What’s behind the incessant conspiracy theorizing by Democrats and the mainstream news media over Russian election interference?
Clinton Cash, McCarthyism, And Nihilism
In the spring of 2015, HarperCollins announced the publication of a new book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, by investigative journalist Peter Schweitzer. After word of the book leaked to the media, a major Democratic strategist named Brent Budowsky sent an email to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. “I am now seriously pissed off that there is a real chance that her candidacy and the Democratic Party could be destroyed by these self-created dangers,” which, he said, included “foreign donations and paid speeches and hustling gold mining deals…”
Budowsky was right to be worried. Bill Clinton had accepted $500,000 for a single speech in Russia, the Clinton Foundation had accepted $150 million from people or entities tied to Russia or the Uranium One company, which Russia’s nuclear company owned, and Podesta served on the board of an energy company that had received $35 million in investments from the Russians, according to Fallout: Nuclear Bribes, Russian Spies, and the Washington Lies that Enriched the Clinton and Biden Dynasties, a 2020 book by investigative reporters John Solomon and Seamus Bruner.
The mainstream news media covered Schweitzer’s allegations to such a great extent that, by the end of the year, voters told pollsters that the Clintons’ financial ties to Russia were their top concern, even over and above former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s destruction of a computer server holding her email correspondence reported Solomon and Bruner, according to Soloman and Bruner.
The Clinton campaign felt they needed to neutralize their Russia liability, which eventually led it to hire the opposition research company Fusion GPS, which paid a former British spy named Christopher Steele to create a memo falsely alleging that the Russian government-controlled Donald Trump through a sex blackmail operation.
The IC likely had its own concerns about how Trump would handle US foreign policy, and particularly his commitment to NATO. Trump said in 2016 that NATO was “obsolete” and that US defense spending to protect NATO allies was unreasonable. “NATO is costing us a fortune and, yes, we’re protecting Europe with NATO but we’re spending a lot of money,” he said.
As the Clinton campaign worked to frame Trump as a Russian asset, the CIA had its own reasons to undermine his candidacy. Public and Racket reported last week that Brennan directed Five Eyes nations to spy on Trump’s associates. Although the Steele dossier appeared to have been commissioned independently from the federal government, Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS. Not only that, but Bruce Ohr knew Steele and expressed to him his negative views of Trump.
While this information helps fill in some of the gaps that exist in terms of understanding how the Russia collusion conspiracy theory began, it does not explain why the media and Democratic politicians continue to push it. Part of the reason appears to be that, though the Russia conspiracy theory was debunked several years ago, many Democratic voters continue to believe it. As such, the conspiracy theory offers a readily available cognitive framework in which to put concerns around Trump and MAGA Republicans.
The Russia conspiracy theory has the additional benefit of triggering the same “out-group” heuristic triggered by Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade of the 1950s. By casting Trump and MAGA Republicans as aligned with a hostile foreign power, it is easier to justify unethical and illegal behaviors to persecute them. We saw this previously when leaders of the Censorship Industrial Complex, such as Renée Diresta and Alex Stamos, first generated media hysteria over “foreign disinformation” before implying that “domestic disinformation” from MAGA voters was somehow connected to Russian disinformation attempts. McCarthyism is the process of re-framing domestic political opponents as foreign enemies.
At the same time, it’s not clear that the Russia conspiracy theory still has the power it had from 2017 to 2020, which raises the question of why Democrats are still using it. The answer may be that the Democrats do not feel they have much else to run on in 2024. Trump is ahead in the polls, and Democrats’ fears that he and other Republicans will completely ban abortion appear to have subsided. Biden and the Democrats got almost everything they wanted on climate change.
As such, the Russia conspiracy theory signifies the emptiness or nihilism of the Democratic party. It has achieved the agenda it set out to achieve on everything from health care to climate change to LGBT rights. It has now little left to advocate for beyond demonizing its political opponents as Putin’s puppets.
The legacy news media’s coverage mirrors this nihilism of the Democratic Party. They have shown themselves committed to promoting messages and narratives that their audiences and advertisers want to hear rather than fairly and accurately reporting the truth in ways that inform their viewers and readers. The news media’s one-sided and misleading coverage of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories reflects an empty commitment to making money and advancing the party line. The older commitment to reporting the truth, which still existed to some extent in 2015 when the media reported on Clinton Cash, is all but gone.
Independent Journalists Stand Up For Whistleblowers
We are in an exceedingly dangerous moment. The Censorship Industrial Complex remains fully financed and powerful. It is currently generating a scare through mainstream news media outlets that AI deep fakes somehow threaten American democracy. The IC routinely hypes apparently fake security threats, including domestic terrorism and disinformation. The news media is retaining and even promoting individuals who promote conspiracy theories while firing seasoned investigative reporters like CBS’s Catherine Herridge. The CBS executive who fired Herridge “got rid of her enemies under the guise of budget cuts,” a source told the New York Post. The degradation of journalism has been accompanied by assaults on democratic institutions. Democrats appear increasingly willing to violate judicial norms and laws in order to prevent a Trump election victory.
At the same time, the collapse of the Russia collusion narrative shows the failures of the corporate news media. After spending years spreading disinformation, traditional media have seen a massive decline in audience. Meanwhile, platforms like X and Substack allow independent journalists to compete and gain influence.
And there has been a groundswell of support for Herridge accompanied by outrage at CBS’s behavior. “Many of us were shocked after Herridge was included in layoffs this month,” wrote law professor Jonathan Turley in The Hill today, “but those concerns have increased after CBS officials took the unusual step of seizing her files, computers and records, including information on privileged sources. The position of CBS has alarmed many, including the union, as an attack on free press principles by one of the nation’s most esteemed press organizations.”
Reporting from Public, Racket, and other journalists has debunked many of the mainstream media’s Russiagate claims that may have otherwise gone unchecked. Because of independent media, we now know that the FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and the National Archives and Records Administration appear to be withholding key documents from the public. Before leaving office, Trump attempted to declassify many documents related to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, yet government agencies have yet to release the full versions. Due to this lack of transparency, it is up to courageous whistleblowers to come forward and share the truth.
The media and Democrats may continue with their conspiracy theories about Russia and Trump, but the environment has changed significantly from 2019, when half of all Americans still believed Putin indeed had something, whether sexual or financial, with which he was blackmailing Trump. Voters will note that the Russian invasion of Ukraine occurred on Biden’s watch, not Trump’s. And while CNN will no doubt continue to claim that the US is “falling prey to Russian interference,” a growing number of Americans will suspect that CNN has fallen prey to McCarthyism and nihilism.
McCarthy was Right all along about the Commie Scum