I like words, but images are more powerful. Particularly if you are mass communicating.
I've spent a lot of time on the Russia Collusion story, the biggest political scandal of my lifetime. Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, the Intelligence Community, the New York Times, and the Washington Post could not have harmed the stability of our democracy and trust in institutions more if they'd been paid agents of the Kremlin (the same can be said about Donald Trump for his behavior since the 2020 election). Think of it as Watergate, but with the Times and Post on the side of the Nixon administration.
To do my investigation I did not watch any TV or cable news; I read. I read the Department of Justice IG Reports, the Mueller Report, all four of the Carter Page warrant applications, the Intelligence Community assessment, released publicly in January 2017. And the hundreds of pages of the Strozk - Page texts, the Confidential Human Source transcript regarding George Papadopolous, various litigation filings and FISA Court decisions, and the 5000+ pages of House Intelligence Committee interviews with 53 people, pages suppressed by Adam Schiff for more than a year until his hand was forced by DNI Grenell, who threatened to release them on his own (for more, read the 53 Transcripts series).
Here's what you can learn just from reading source documents about the most recent public event, the trial of Igor Danchenko. I predicted his acquittal, which I think the right result, but based on his own filings and the testimony of FBI agents at trial, this is what we also learned:
In the fall of 2016, the FBI offered Christopher Steele $1 million if he could substantiate the allegations in his dossier. Steele never responded.
The FBI agent handling Danchenko testified that Danchenko was responsible for 80% of the factual allegations and 50% of the analysis in the Steele dossier. (Correction, June 9, 2023; Reading the Durham report, this is Danchenko's personal assessment with which Durham concurs, but it is not that of the FBI agent).
The FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst, serving as the direct contact with Danchenko, confirmed the agency was never able to corroborate Danchenko's claims.
Danchenko's successful defense was based on his contention that when interviewed by the FBI, beginning in late January 2017, he told them that he was merely passing on gossip and stories he'd heard and did not stand behind the accuracy of any of it. Further, he did not know Steele would use the information as he did in the dossier. And, finally, he contended the FBI's questions were so vague and open-ended that his responses did not constitute false statement.
The FBI learned from Danchenko that Charles Dolan was the source of the allegation that during Donald Trump's pre-presidential Moscow visit he specifically requested the same hotel room President Obama had stayed in, and Trump then cavorted with prostitutes whom he asked to urinate on the bed. (This was the one allegation FBI Director Comey made sure to mention to Trump when he first briefed the president-elect on the dossier on January 6, 2017, and was highlighted in media coverage when the existence of the dossier became public).
Charles Dolan is a Democrat associated lobbyist in Washington who had served as Executive Director of the Democratic Governor's Association. He was Virginia State Chairman of the Clinton-Gore Campaign in 1992 and 1996, served as an advisor on Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign, and was a Clinton supporter in 2016. At the same time, Dolan also turns out to have represented the Kremlin in its public relations in the United States and was regularly meeting with Vladimir Putin's head of communications. [This was not the only Clinton-Kremlin connection in 2016; FusionGPS, the firm hired by Clinton's lawyers at Perkins Coie, which, in turn hired Christopher Steele to compile the dossier was, at the same time, representing a Putin-connected Russian oligarch in an effort to get Congress to repeal the Magnitsky Act which imposed sanctions on a number of Russian oligarchs. And Christopher Steele was working for yet another Kremlin connected oligarch at the time!]
We learned that after the interviewing FBI agents found out about Dolan's role, they recommended to their superiors that he be interviewed, a recommendation that was rejected.
Later, after these agents were assigned to Special Counsel Mueller's investigation, they again recommended interviewing Dolan, and again their recommendation was rejected (no surprise as Mueller's investigation was staffed by Clinton supporting lawyers).
The FBI agents also testified that Mueller had a team devoted to investigating the claims in the Steele Dossier, yet in his Congressional testimony in 2019, Mueller repeatedly asserted that investigating the dossier was "beyond his purview" and refused to discuss the topic. The Special Counsel was not being truthful. Turns out Mueller's team, like the FBI could not confirm the allegations in the dossier, and wanted to avoid admitting the truth, so they could keep the dossier story alive in the sympathetic mass media.
After determining Danchenko's role in the dossier, the FBI (and later the Mueller team) made him a Confidential Human Source (CHS), paying him $200,000 over the next two years, only terminating his status when the Mueller investigation ended. The effect of making him a CHS was to hide his identity and role and make it more difficult for anyone to find information damaging to the credibility of the collusion hoax.
On top of all this, it turns out Danchenko, a Russian citizen and U.S. resident, had been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI from 2009 to 2011. At the time, Danchenko was working at the Brookings Institution, a liberal DC think tank, to which he'd been recruited by Fiona Hill, later a vocal opponent of Trump. The investigation started after Danchenko reportedly told two Brookings co-workers that they could "make a little extra money” if they were to "get a job in the government and had access to classified information"; the investigation was upgraded when the FBI learned Danchenko had prior contacts with known Russian intelligence agents. The FBI ended the investigation when it erroneously believed Danchenko had fled the country.
To repeat, these are not the prosecution allegations - these are admissions in Danchenko's own filings and from the testimony of FBI agents at trial.
But that's a lot of words, isn't it? And it's only a small portion of the relevant evidence. If I have enough time, and you have enough patience, I think I can persuade you that my views on this are correct. But that's a lot of time and a lot of words to a very small audience. As Pappy O'Daniel (1) says in the link above, I'm merely "one at a timing", not mass communicating.
Now, let's do images.
Those images are powerful, immediately recognizable to most Americans, and they stay with you. No words needed.
I hate looking at them and being reminded of that day.(2) It doesn't require you believe this was an insurrection. I don't, but I do believe it was a riot and a disgraceful day for America. And brought to you courtesy of Donald Trump. Do I believe Trump planned it? No, Trump doesn't do planning, but his reckless rhetoric fired up his most gullible supporters over what was a ceremonial event, the counting of electoral votes. And, once it happened, while his aides frantically spent hours trying to persuade him to say something publicly to quell the rioters, he was watching it all on TV.
I envision Trump watching it just like Laurie (Vera Miles) watches her suitors fighting over her in The Searchers. Laurie didn't plan it, but she sure likes that they care enough to fight for her.
Trump and his acolytes loved trolling to "own the libs" but ended up creating the greatest political "self-own" of my lifetime. January 6 was only the culmination of a series of Trump appearances and Trump influenced events that created indelible images - like his out of control presence at the Covid press conferences.
Unless you are a hard-core "stop the steal" person you find the photos above to be repulsive. That's why it was another self-own when the full tapes of the riot were released and featured extensively on right-wing media. Do I think some of those arrested have been charged and sentenced excessively? Yes, but that's not the issue here. When the full video is being used to argue that the narrative about January 6 is misleading, all I can say, over and over again, if I'm a Democrat, is "don't throw me in that briar patch". If you want to argue that a bare-chested painted guy wearing a buffalo head roaming around Congress is the good guy and represents Trump and the GOP you are really bad at politics, and every time you show these images you are pushing away anyone other than your hard-core supporters.
The very real damage Trump did by his actions leading to the creation of those images is that the real danger to American democracy is today's Democratic Party. The Biden administration is the most radical in American history, devoted to undermining the foundations of this country, rewriting its history, and the most race-obsessed administration since that of Woodrow Wilson. Trump's disorganized, impulsive rabble has no institutional foothold, and, like Trump himself, is simply incapable of doing long-term strategic thinking and planning, unlike the progressive New Racist warriors who now dominate American institutions.
But with January 6 and those easily remembered and accessible images, Donald Trump gave the Democrats their Reichstag moment, their great opportunity to effectively cast Republicans as the true threat to democracy, a threat justifying limits on speech, limits on conduct, and denying educational and job opportunities to those who dissent. Any time those images are seen, and every time someone tries to justify aspects of that riot, it just reinforces the Democratic message.
We've already seen the effects in the actions and Executive Orders of the administration. That it wasn't worse in terms of Congressional action during the first two years of the administration is only because of Sinema and Manchin in the Senate. We were left dependent on those two Democrats after Trump, in classic passive-aggressive campaign mode, undermined the two GOP Senate candidates in the special election of January 2021. After all, if they had won it would have undermined his claims about the alleged steal of the Georgia election in November.
Happy to talk with you about Russia Collusion or you can read the links above, but I think Donald Trump's images are much more influential.
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(1) Pappy O'Daniel really existed, though he was governor of Texas, not Mississippi as portrayed in O Brother, Where Art Thou? W. Lee ("Pappy") O'Daniel rose to fame as a singer in a band he put together to promote the flour company he worked for. Eventually O'Daniel started his own company, Hillbilly Flour, and formed a new and very popular group, Pat O'Daniel and his Hillbilly Boys. After two terms as governor, in 1941 O'Daniel won a special election for the U.S. Senate. In a close race, Pappy defeated Lyndon Baines Johnson by using the time-honored Texas Democrat tradition of withholding voting returns from certain Rio Grande districts until LBJ leaning districts had finished their reporting, allowing Pappy supporters to create enough votes to win. LBJ learned his lesson, employing Pappy's techniques in 1948 to win a very close U.S. Senate race.
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