Half the country hates Donald Trump, and even the half that thinks he’s doing a good job often flinch from his boorishness, his nasty public attacks, sometimes even on his own aides. For all the top talent he says he’s surrounded himself with, the president repeatedly attracts among the worst that Washington—and New York—have to offer. No doubt that’s one reason why whatever is thrown at him seems to stick.
At the same time, there is a growing consensus among reporters and thinkers on the left and right—especially those who know anything about Russia, the surveillance apparatus, and intelligence bureaucracy—that the Russiagate-collusion theory that was supposed to end Trump’s presidency within six months has sprung more than a few holes. Worse, it has proved to be a cover for U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement bureaucracies to break the law, with what’s left of the press gleefully going along for the ride. Where Watergate was a story about a crime that came to define an entire generation’s oppositional attitude toward politicians and the country’s elite, Russiagate, they argue, has proved itself to be the reverse: It is a device that the American elite is using to define itself against its enemies—the rest of the country.
Yet for its advocates, the questionable veracity of the Russiagate story seems much less important than what has become its real purpose—elite virtue-signaling. Buy into a storyline that turns FBI and CIA bureaucrats and their hand-puppets in the press into heroes while legitimizing the use of a vast surveillance apparatus for partisan purposes, and you’re in. Dissent, and you’re out, or worse—you’re defending Trump.
Recently, a writer on The New Yorker blog named Adrian Chen gave voice to the central dilemma facing young media professionals who struggle to balance their need for social approval with the demands of fact-based analysis in the age of Trump. In an article pegged to special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments of the Internet Research Agency, Chen referenced an article he had written about the IRA for The New York Times Magazine several years ago. After the Mueller indictments were announced, Chen was called on to lend his expertise regarding Russian troll farms and their effect on the American public sphere—an offer he recognized immediately as a can’t-win proposition.
“Either I could stay silent,” wrote Chen, “and allow the conversation to be dominated by those pumping up the Russian threat, or I could risk giving fodder to Trump and his allies.”
In other words, there’s the truth, and then there’s what’s even more important—sticking it to Trump. Choose wrong, even inadvertently, Chen explained, no matter how many times you deplore Trump, and you’ll be labeled a Trumpkin. That’s what happened to Facebook advertising executive Rob Goldman, who was obliged to apologize to his entire company in an internal message for having shared with the Twitter public the fact that “the majority of the Internet Research Agency’s Facebook ads were purchased after the election.” After Trump retweeted Goldman’s thread to reaffirm that Vladimir Putin had nothing to do with his electoral victory, the Facebook VP was lucky to still have a job.
Chen’s article serves to explain why Russiagate is so vital to The New Yorker, despite the many headaches that each new weekly iteration of the story must be causing for the magazine’s fact-checkers. According to British court documents, The New Yorkerwas one of the publications that former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele briefed in September 2016 on the findings in his now-notorious dossier. In a New Yorker profile of Steele this week—portraying the spy-for-corporate-hire as a patriotic hero and laundering his possible criminal activities—Jane Mayer explains that she was personally briefed by Steele during that time period.
The New Yorker has produced tons of Russiagate stories, including a small anthologyof takes on the Mueller indictments alone. Of course there’s one by the recently-hired Adam Entous, the former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the news that the Washington firm Fusion GPS, which produced the Steele dossier, had been hired by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee—a story that helped Fusion GPS relieve some of the pressure congressional inquiries had put on the firm to release its bank records. No doubt Entous will continue to use his sources, whoever they are, to break more such stories at The New Yorker.
One person at The New Yorker who won’t get on board with the story is Masha Gessen. Born in Moscow, Gessen knows first-hand how bad Putin is and dislikes Trump only a little less than she dislikes the Russian strongman. Yet in a recent New Yorker piece, Gessen mocked Mueller’s indictments: “Trump’s tweet about Moscow laughing its ass off was unusually (perhaps accidentally) accurate,” she wrote. “Loyal Putinites and dissident intellectuals alike are remarkably united in finding the American obsession with Russian meddling to be ridiculous.”
Another native Russian-speaking reporter, Julia Ioffe, formerly with The New Republic and more recently, The Atlantic, has some similar reservations. In a September 2016 article for Politico, she threw cold water on the legend of Carter Page, master spy and wheeler-dealer. As Ioffe reported, virtually no one in Moscow had ever heard of Page.
From the beginning, Gessen saw the collusion story as dangerous, not because she supported Trump but because it fed into a fantasy that convinced Trump’s opponents that they need not bother with the difficult and boring work of procedural politics. And who were the would-be agents of America’s salvation? Spies—the former British spy allegedly responsible for the dossier and countless American intelligence officials using anonymous press leaks to manipulate the American public.
This is why we can’t have nice things. FISA is a valuable tool with which to fight terrorism. As the saying goes, if you aren’t doing anything illegal, you don’t have to worry about the government spying on you. The risk is that an unscrupulous regime might get their hands on it and abuse the living $hit out of it, like the Obama administration apparently did.
By the way, to you “reasonable gun control” fans, THIS is a perfect example of why gun registration will NEVER happen. Liberals simply cannot be trusted with the rights of citizens.
Says someone who would take away the fundamental right of every woman to exercise sovereign control over the reproductive function of her own body in the blink of an eye.
@Greg: No one is trying to take away reproductive right. Some people are concerned with the rights of the unborn or those who are borne alive and then terminated.
That, no doubt, explains their opposition to sex education in public schools, to the coverage of birth control drugs and devices by health insurance, and their advocacy of state intrusion into the privacy that should exist between a woman and her doctor.
Maybe they should worry more about the already born and less the unborn.
@Greg:
Yeah, we wouldn’t want to cut in on Planned Parenthood’s body part business. Liberals are really concerned about the lives of children… unless they get in the way of a good time. Then, dig ’em out and sell the parts.
@Bill… Deplorable Me: You see Greg believes a human life can be terminated if the person is not self aware. Age does not matter to him or if they are aware and then lose it. It’s a pretty gruesome position.
@Mully:
That would define 99% of all liberals.
@Greg:
Russian Collusion being a farce — the topic of the conversation.
Greg’s response?
“ABORTION!”
“But, but…BLUE!”
@Greg: And yes, we know you concede on the Russian collusion nonsense. I’m glad to see you have nothing else to say on this national embarrassment that has made us a laughing-stock world-wide, all thanks to liberal cowardice.
You lost the election. Turn your attention to engineering another no-name demagogue like Obama to run in 2020. I’d steer clear of the Winfrey/Weinstein ticket, however. Liberals, and liberalism, are pretty unpopular with the vast majority of Americans, these days.
@Nathan Blue, #8:
When someone throws out a bullshit derogatory generalization like “Liberals simply cannot be trusted with the rights of citizens,” the topic of the conversation has already been changed. I was simply pointing out the utter hypocrisy of the statement, when it comes from anyone who believes the State should deprive an entire gender of sovereign control over their own bodies.
This is about as intrusive as it is possible for government to become. The State has no such right. Nor does any church have the right to impose its own beliefs about when a person has come into being upon everyone else.
I personally don’t approve of abortion, but it is not my place or expectation that everyone be made to believe and behave in accordance with what I approve of. Women have a fundamental right to decide for themselves whether to continue their pregnancies. Their bodies are under their own authority.
@Greg:
That’s not bullshit. It’s a proven fact. Gun ownership is a RIGHT, the 2nd Amendment. Liberals are trying DESPERATELY to erase that right by any means possible, legal or not. Now, abortion is an implied right. Abortion is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution or Bill of Rights. NOWHERE. And, even then, as always happens, liberals abuse that “right” by stretching it to taxpayer funding and partial birth abortions right up to the moment of legitimate birth… then market the bits and pieces.
No. Not “bullshit”. A legitimate concern.