The "Real Trouble"

A few years ago there was a study of Harvard students comparing their knowledge of American history when they were entering freshmen to when they were university graduates.  The results were that they were less knowledgeable after four years at Harvard.  Not actually surprising.

I was reminded of this reading a New York Times puff piece on NPR President Katherine Maher, published on December 30. A Times reader would finish the piece not having any idea why Maher is controversial and as a less knowledgeable and informed citizen than before reading,

Before getting to the Times article, let's review what we knew about Maher before the article was published.

Katherine Maher is the daughter of a Goldman Sachs executive and grew up in the very wealthy suburban town of Wilton, Connecticut.  I'm from Wilton's significantly less wealthy neighboring town of Norwalk, so know Wilton quite well.

Armed with a university degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from NYU, Maher did post-graduate work in Cairo and Damascus.  Academic Middle Eastern studies as a field was initially funded by the Federal government back in the 1950s in the expectation that it would train experts in that area of the world who could help advise the government.  The 9-11 postmortems found that these programs were abject failures in providing graduates who could make accurate assessments of what was happening in the Middle East.  Instead, the programs had been taken over by academics hostile to the West and instead used to promote the theory that later became known as settler-colonialism, in which the West was responsible for everything bad that happened in the Islamic world.  This was the setting in which Maher was marinated (and its only gotten worse since then).

Post-graduate employment followed with UNICEF, the World Bank, and the National Democratic Institute.  In 2014 she joined the Wikimedia Foundation, initially as Chief Communications Officer and then becoming Executive Director, remaining with the organization until 2021.  Along the way Maher also joined the Council on Foreign Relations and the Atlantic Council.  During the Biden Administration she was on the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board.  She has all the right credentials.

The Wikimedia Foundation sets the strategy for Wikipedia and, under Maher's direction, it made a significant change in its approach. By 2014, Wikipedia was beginning to have credibility and reliability issues due to its editing process and susceptibility to manipulation.  However, its stated purpose was still to be an accurate reflection of current knowledge.  That was to change with Maher.

According to an article in the August 2024 edition of Pirate Wires,  "How the Regime Captured Wikipedia, the proposed changes generated controversy within Wikimedia:

"The controversy was ultimately about who would control the site containing “all the world’s knowledge,” and hundreds of millions in Wikipedia funding. Would the site’s community of decentralized, uncompensated editors continue to govern it according to its principles of openness, transparency, and neutrality, or would a handful of highly paid NGO technocrats re-orient Wikipedia toward endorsing and promoting the ever-shifting currents of the Western elite social justice regime? "

"The Movement Strategy, also known as Wikimedia 2030, was indeed a massive undertaking. Launched in 2017 by then-WMF executive director and CEO Katherine Maher, the strategy would be a complete re-imagining of WMF and Wikipedia’s mission. Where Wikipedia had been built on the principle of decentralized knowledge, the Movement Strategy would veer into the hyper-centralized space of top-down social justice activism and advocacy."

"As the driving force behind the Movement Strategy, Maher would directly endorse this view in comments revealed after she took the top job at NPR this year, in which she said she opposed the “free and open” ethos of Wikipedia because it was rooted in “white male Westernized construct” that precipitated the “exclusion of communities and languages.”

Further, Maher played a critical role in establishing the Wiki Endowment:

"The central aspect of WMF’s new financial strategy was the establishment of the Wikimedia Endowment, a pool of money that, as its name suggests, is designed to fund the organization essentially “in perpetuity.” Distinct from Wikimedia's budget, which funds Wikipedia's day-to-day operations, the Endowment was set up in 2016 as a donor-advised fund at leftist mega-fund, Tides Foundation, an $800 million fund that’s part of the wider Tides Center, a network of such funds “that partners with social change leaders and organizations to…accelerate social justice.” The Tides Foundation’s IRS 990 filing lists its mission as “Grantmaking through funds to accelerate the pace of social change.” 

When you use Wikipedia you will often see a page asking for donations to support Wikipedia.  However, this is misleading because Wikipedia has more than enough funding to continue its current operations.  Instead, your donations go to the Wikimedia Endowment which funnels money to left-wing causes.

Maher bragged about her accomplishments.  According to Katherine Maher's Color Revolution in the April 2024 edition of City Journal:

In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she “took a very active approach to disinformation,” coordinated censorship “through conversations with government,” and suppressed dissenting opinions related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.

In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, the “the number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” These speech protections, Maher continued, make it “a little bit tricky” to suppress “bad information” and “the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.”

Maher’s general policy at Wikipedia, she tweeted, was to support efforts to “eliminate racist, misogynist, transphobic, and other forms of discriminatory content”—which, under current left-wing definitions, could include almost anything to the right of Joe Biden.

The City Journal goes on to note:

On the surface, this appears to be a contradiction. Maher backed dissent abroad but suppressed it at home. She not only censored content at Wikipedia but also supported deplatforming then-President Donald Trump, who opposed the domestic revolution following the death of George Floyd. “Must be satisfying to deplatform fascists,” Maher wrote on Twitter, after Trump was effectively removed from social media. “Even more satisfying? Not platforming them in the first place.”

This is not hypocrisy; it is the politics of friend and enemy. For Maher, “democracy” means the advancement of left-wing race and gender ideology all over the world. This requires elevating progressive dissidents overseas, while suppressing conservative dissidents at home. For partisans of Color Revolution, dissent and censorship are not in contradiction—they are two sides of the same coin.

This misuse of "democracy" is common across leftists in the countries of the West.  According to EU bureaucrats, voting the way they want is supporting democracy but voting against the desired policies of bureaucrats is anti-democracy.  In the United States context, any opposition to progressive policies is anti-democractic. 

In a 2021 TED Talk, Maher explained was quite frank about her philosophy:

"That perhaps, for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth and seeking to convince others of the truth might not be the right place to start.  In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that's getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done."

I'm pretty confident that by "common ground" Maher means agreeing with her positions. 

What Maher did to Wikipedia, and her statements about why or, as she would say, "intentionality", demonstrate why she is such a danger to a free society.  Wikipedia has always had its problems, but under Maher it deteriorated into a propaganda machine that is now integrated into larger communication networks. While Wikipedia is still useful if you want to find out the release date of Reach Out (I'll Be There) by The Four Tops or the birth and death dates for a person, it is useless when it comes to any topic that progressive ideology believes is political.  The network designed for spreading Wikipedia's agitprop includes Google, where Wikipedia results show at the top of every search (Google also poured more than $200 million into the Wikipedia Foundation), and many of the AI models include Wikipedia as one of the sources used for their training.  The result is Google searches and AI incorporate deliberately misleading information approved by Maher and people who think like her.

It's also why total control of social and traditional media is so important to people like Maher and why progressives became so hysterical when Elon Musk took control of Twitter.  That progressives still controlled most social and traditional media was not the point.  Any outlet they could not control in order to suppress dissent is considered a danger to democracy.  In the case of Twitter pre-Musk, people were banned or suspended for misgendering, accounts were permanently suspended for merely posting Department of Justice crime statistics without making any comment, or accounts suppressed if then-President Trump retweeted them. I saw all of this happen; these weren't nutcase conspiracy or hardcore MAGA accounts, they just happened to not be progressives, or were progressives who dissented from orthodoxy on a particular topic.

In Maher's worldview everyone should be like her in following the strict progressive line, not deviating one inch.  In 2016 she criticized Hillary Clinton for using the phrase "boy and girl" because “it’s erasing language for non-binary people”, and it's no surprise that in 2020 she tweeted that "America is addicted to white supremacy".

So, in 2024 when Maher was named as CEO of National Public Radio, there were legitimate questions about her lack of commitment to free speech and her express agenda to privilege left-wing beliefs;  Particularly germane questions for an organization receiving significant taxpayer funding when she so publicly disdained the views of many Americans.

But according to the Times you would be mistaken if there were legitimate questions to be asked of Maher.  Let's look at how the story starts:

NPR’s C.E.O. Was a Right-Wing Target. Then the Real Trouble Started.

Katherine Maher has taken an unyielding approach to NPR’s biggest battles — which has sometimes put her at odds with her colleagues in public media.

 

A flattering photograph depicting a resolute Maher notes that she "has dealt with plenty of criticism this year.  Did she consider quitting?  "I really don't like bullies," she said. 

The third sentence of the article tells readers, "Right-wing activists dredged up her old posts on social media and tried to get her fired." 

When reading the New York Times what you need to focus on is not the substance of a story.  The key questions are why is the Times publishing this story at this particular time and what is the narrative it is trying to create?

For the narrative part look at the beginning; title and sub-title, photo, and opening sentences.  The narrative here is Katherine Maher is one of the "good guys" since she was a Right-Wing Target (which in Timespeak is equivalent of being a Nazi).  She's "unyielding", a fact reinforced by the photo and legend telling the reader those attacking her are "bullies".  And just to make sure there is no doubt, we learn "Right-wing activists dredged up her old posts".  Ah, those Nazi dredgers!  And, since they are old posts of what possible relevance could they be?

All this to set up the closing part of the narrative - that some of those who should be her allies in public media may not be as steadfast as they should be in supporting here because of that nasty right-wing intimidation. They need to strengthen their backbones to deal with those Nazis!

Here are some other excerpts with my comments.  The entire article is linked at the start of this post. 

She has become a target not just of NPR’s traditional opponents on the political right but of some within the tightknit world of public broadcasting, who wanted her to take a more pragmatic tack. At one point, the chief executive of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, one of NPR’s biggest supporters, told Ms. Maher she should quit. Her predecessors were accused of bringing a tote bag to a knife fight.  “The government targeted public funding to punish specific editorial decisions it disagreed with,” she said in a recent interview with The New York Times. “That’s not a funding dispute dressed up as a constitutional case; that’s textbook First Amendment retaliation." Ms. Maher’s stance brought support pouring in for her organization. NPR emerged from the biggest political battle in its history on firm footing, generating record donations.

This is a warning to those in public broadcasting to toughen up.  Maher is a role model. It also casts her as a champion of the First Amendment.  The First Amendment argument is absurd.  Maher would never stand up for the First Amendment rights of someone she disagreed with, and arguing that a decision by the government not to fund an organization dedicated to bias and being one-sided has anything to do with the First Amendment is simply nonsense.  It is Maher's sense of entitlement that makes her demand that I fund NPR.  She is compelling my support of her speech, while wanting to suppress mine even though I'm not seeking federal funding.

As we've seen Maher was singing a different tune before being appointed to NPR.  So was the Times.  Remember that after the 2022 midterms, when it was looking like Biden would be reelected and the Democrats could also control the House and Senate, the Times began running news stories and op-ed pieces about how "we" needed to rethink the First Amendment.  If the Democrats had achieved a trifecta and controlled Congress the crackdown on speech would have been brutal.  The Progressive view of speech and freedom is expressed in this quote from Frank Herbert's Children of Dune:

When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.

The Times then tells us about the crisis faced by Maher as her critics "seized the moment".  

In early April 2024, Ms. Maher and NPR faced an unexpected crisis. Uri Berliner, a senior editor at NPR, published an essay in The Free Press accusing the network of a liberal bias in its news coverage.

The crisis deepened a week later. Chris Rufo, the conservative activist who ran social media campaigns against figures including Claudine Gay, the former Harvard president, circulated years-old social media posts from Ms. Maher that criticized Donald J. Trump and supported liberal causes. (“Also, Donald Trump is a racist,” read one.) 

NPR’s critics seized the moment. In early May, Republicans in Congress called on Ms. Maher to testify on allegations of bias. Compounding the situation: Some at NPR were surprised by Ms. Maher’s social media posts; she told The Times that the board hadn’t asked her about them before she was hired. 

The hearing was predictably divided along partisan lines. The Republicans, who argued that NPR and PBS were outmoded, a waste of taxpayer money or liberally biased, interrogated Ms. Kerger and Ms. Maher, asking the NPR chief executive about her social media posts and the network’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

There are several things to note about this section.  The Uri Berliner piece created an uproar.  Berliner was a long time NPR employee and, by 20th century standards, a card-carrying liberal who voted against Trump.  You can read his article here.  To describe it as "accusing the network of a liberal bias" is a misleading characterization; that's not what Berliner is complaining about.  He writes;

It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding. 

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population. 

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America. 

That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model. 

There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.  

He goes into some detail using three examples, Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop, and COVID coverage, of the bias and distortion in NPR and how it failed to admit mistakes.(1)

Berliner also tells us, "I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described the controversial education bill in Florida as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it didn’t even use the word gay."  Of course it would not be corrected by NPR because, at the time, the Democratic priority was to damage Governor DeSantis, so anything that aided in that goal was fine. It is also consistent with traditional media practice in referring to Republican bills by the name Democrats give it, while referring to Democrat bills by the name preferred by Democrats. 

Finally, he writes of the madness that descended upon NPR in the wake of George Floyd and transgender mania.  He never uses the word, but what Berliner describes is a morally corrupt organization.

Berliner was suspended without pay for writing the article and resigned several days later. 

The Times article is very careful not to be too specific about the allegations made by those nasty right wingers. The author and his editors want the reader to understand who the bad guys and good guys are and not get too caught up in the details.  The piece also states that Maher was criticized for supporting "liberal causes", but Maher is not a liberal, she's a progressive authoritarian.  A liberal supports free speech, freedom of conscience, due process, equal protection under the laws, fairplay, treating people equally.  21st century progressives reject all of this.

The only two specific "right-wing" claims mentioned in the article are Maher's characterization of Donald Trump and NPR's coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop. NPR refused to cover the story at all, with its managing editor for news writing “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”  As we now know, the FBI validated the contents of the laptop in 2019 and the 51 Intelligence Community former officials who denounced it were very clever in stating that it had "all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation", allowing them to later claim that they never said it was disinformation.  The truth is that NPR refused to cover the story because of the potential damage to the Biden campaign.

Near the end of the Times story we encounter this passage: 

On a call this spring, Patricia Harrison, the chief executive of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, asked Ms. Maher whether she would be willing to say anything to members of Congress or the press to acknowledge concerns from listeners who viewed NPR’s reporting as biased, according to two people familiar with her remarks. 

Ms. Maher rebuffed that suggestion. She didn’t believe that NPR was biased, and she thought saying so would undermine the organization and fail to placate those who were critical of the network, according to a person familiar with her thinking.

Maher is one of those folks who talks about "her truth" and "your truth" and how we all have truths.  But, in truth, she believes her truth is the real truth and if you don't agree with it you are wrong, so she is not biased and you have no right to speech.  Katherine Maher and the New York Times are blights upon this nation.  They are at least as great a threat to our future as creatures like Tucker Carlson. 

 --------------------------------

(1) Berliner notes how on Russia, "we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.  Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports".

If you've read my Russia Collusion posts, you know that Adam Schiff lied about everything.  I've read the same testimony he heard and then lied about.  None of the "journalists" at NPR had the slightest interest in comparing documentary evidence with Schiff's claims because it would have undermined their desired narrative.

Credit..

Reassessing The Assessment

The CIA has publicly released, with some small redactions, a report, dated June 26, 2025, Tradecraft Review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Election Interference.  

I first wrote about the ICA report, released publicly on January 6, 2017, on February 10 of that year in Finding Real News.  In that post I summarized the findings of the ICA as:

The election vote was not hacked (though based on at least one poll, more than half of Democrats believe, based on media coverage, that Russia actually did hack into the vote counting).

Moscow was trying to influence the election, as Russia and its Soviet predecessor have done in the past.

In doing so, Russian cyber operations were directed against both parties.

Moscow's goal varied from undermining Clinton's credibility in light of her expected election to helping Trump win the election. 

I then posed six questions based upon my reading of the report, none of which seemed to be of interest to the press and largely remain unanswered to this day.  One of those relates to the final point in my summary:

2.  Regarding the Kremlin's goals in 2016, the phrasing of the report is puzzling.  The report states that Russia "aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible" but also that when it appeared Clinton would win the election, "the Russian influence campaign began to focus more on undermining her future presidency".  The language seems to imply that there was an early period when Russia was trying to help Trump win, followed by a switch when the Kremlin thought Clinton would win.  Is this a correct reading?  Can the agencies tell us when this switch occurred and why?  Did it occur before or after Wikileaks released the DNC and Podesta emails (disclosures which the report concludes "did not contain any evident forgeries")?  Since Trump trailed consistently in all polls from the time he clinched the Republican nomination through election day, on what basis did the Kremlin make a different assessment at some point?  When did the Kremlin not think Clinton was likely to win the election? In other words, during which periods was the Kremlin trying to help Trump win, as opposed to damaging a future Clinton presidency?

Last year I added a note to the 2017 post regarding the process by which the ICA was generated:

UPDATE (October 1, 2024) - I am adding this note regarding information I came across back in 2020 because it is directly related to the odd circumstances around the Intelligence Community Assessment released publicly in January 2017.  

The five analysts who compiled the report were personally selected by DNI Clapper, contrary to normal practice which is designed to prevent undue influence towards desired outcomes by those assigning the task.  One of those excluded from involvement with the report was the CIA's National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Russia!  NIO's are appointed by the Director of the CIA, report directly to the Director, and are responsible for all intelligence matters within their geographical area.

In testimony to the House Intelligence Committee on December 5, 2016, the NIO stated her conclusions regarding the election:

"In terms of favoring one candidate or another, you know, the evidence is a little bit unclear."

"It's unclear to us that the Kremlin had a particular - that they had a particular favorite or they wanted to see a particular outcome.  That is what the reporting shows."

Before discussing the recently released reassessment of the 2016 assessment, some context is needed. 

The question about whether Putin had a preference in the 2016 election and whether, and how, Russia interfered is separate and distinct from whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the campaign (it did not, though there is substantial suggestive evidence that the Russians were able to influence the contents of the Steele Dossier, which was funded by the Clinton campaign, a subject I've written about on several occasions, most recently in He's Not Your Bro).  However, for the reasons discussed below, these issues ended up merged in the public mind due to the collusion of the Intelligence Community, the Democratic Party, and the New York Times(1) and Washington Post.

The fact that Russia, and its predecessor the Soviet Union, had preferences and interfered in past U.S. presidential elections is not unique, and is directly acknowledged in the 2016 ICA.  It's also something I referenced in my February 2017 post:

3.  The report places the Kremlin's 2016 influence campaign in an historical context, citing prior Russian and Soviet efforts to influence American presidential elections, though it also concludes the Kremlin took this to an unprecedented level in 2016.  I would have liked to see some questions about this aspect of the report.  Did the Kremlin seek to influence the 2012 election and, if so, in whose favor?  Did the Kremlin seek to influence the 2008 election and, if so, in whose favor (we know that Kremlin spokespersons denounced John McCain, and Republicans in general, during the course of that election)?  Do the intelligence agencies have information they can release about the reported contacts in 1983 between Senator Edward Kennedy and Communist Party Secretary Andropov regarding coordinating efforts to defeat President Ronald Reagan in his re-election bid? The report contains this disclosure:

In the 1970s, the KGB recruited a Democratic Party activist who reported information about then presidential hopeful Jimmy Carter's campaign and foreign policy plans . . .  

Can the intelligence agencies shed any additional light on this incident?  Is there additional information regarding past Russian and Soviet election influencing that can be publicly shared?

In 2008 and 2012 the Kremlin openly supported Barack Obama over his opponents, John McCain and Mitt Romney.  In 2012, President Obama was caught on an open mic telling then Soviet Premier Medvedev to let "Vladimir" know he'd have more flexibility on policy after the election (a reference to his post-election reneging on commitments to send missile defense systems to Poland and Romania).

In addition, the 2016 ICA directly asserts as firm conclusions that, more recently, the Kremlin supported the 2011 Occupy Wall Street demonstrations as well as the ongoing anti-fracking efforts of U.S. environmental organizations.

This was my own assessment as of February 2017:

I think it probable that the Kremlin favored the election of Donald Trump.  I base that on:

• Trump's favorable personal comments about Putin.

• Trump's history of favorable views of authoritarian strongmen.

• His refusal to condemn Russia for aggression in Crimea and Ukraine or murdering its political opponents.

• Trump's view of Russia as a potential ally in the Middle East and the fight against ISIS. 

• The presence, in the early stages of his campaign, of senior aides known to have favorable views of current Kremlin leadership.

Factors countering that view:

• The Clinton Foundation ties to shady Kremlin associated businessmen and the deal regarding Russian control of uranium reserves important to the United States.

• The widespread assumption in the American intelligence community that the Kremlin is in possession of the Hillary Clinton emails giving them potential leverage if she were elected.

• The controversial dossier about Donald Trump's activities in Russia that was purported to come from Russian intelligence sources and which, though it did not become public until after the election, was in widespread circulation among media hostile to Trump prior to the election. 

A possible factor countering that view:

• How did the Kremlin rate the chances that a Clinton presidency would continue the policies of the Obama presidency which was ineffective in opposing Russia?

Despite these counter factors, if I were betting, I'd bet on the Kremlin favoring Trump, though I don't consider it a certainty.  

I am less certain of that judgement in light of what I've learned reading thousands of pages of source documents since that time, though if I had to make a bet it would still be on favoring Trump at least at some point in the campaign. 

Another factor in tempering my earlier judgement is that in February 2017 I did not know that the Clinton campaign had paid for the production of the Steele Dossier, that the contractor (FusionGPS), Steele himself, and the sources for most of the allegations (none of which were ever corroborated) were either actively employed at the time by Putin-connected oligarchs or had close associations with Russian intelligence, and that an internal FBI review in 2018 "showed that the Russians had access to sensitive U.S. government information years earlier that would have allowed them to identify Steele's subsources . . . Steele's subsources could have been compromised by the Russians at a point in time prior to the date of the first Steele dossier report" (of course the FBI then instructed its analysts to remain silent about this), raising the possibility that Putin was willing to put into the hands of the Clinton campaign wild stories designed to damage Donald Trump.

What I remain confident of is that Putin's overriding strategy has been to disrupt and weaken American institutions and public confidence in those institutions, regardless of who was president.  He has largely achieved that goal with the help of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party, the Intelligence Community, Adam Schiff(1), and the leading prestige legacy media outlets(2).  

The 2025 Reassessment

The eight page reassessment addresses the process by which the ICA was hastily put together.  The document begins by discussing the origin and context of the ICA.  During the 2016 campaign there were "conflicting public and private statements" by IC officials about Russia's activities.  This prompted President Obama on December 6, 2016 to direct DNI James Clapper to conduct an assessment.(3)  The reassessment goes on to state:

However, before work on the assessment even began, media leaks suggesting that the IC had already reached definitive conclusions risked creating an anchoring bias.

On 9 December, both the Washington Post and New York Times reported the IC had concluded with high confidence that Russia had intervened specifically to help Trump win the election. The Post cited an unnamed US official describing this as the IC’s “consensus view". 

The new review "identified multiple procedural anomalies in the preparation of the ICA. These
included a highly compressed production timeline, stringent compartmentation, and excessive
involvement of agency heads" leading to "departures from standard practices in the drafting, coordination, and reviewing of the ICA. These departures impeded efforts to apply rigorous tradecraft, particularly to the assessment's most contentious judgment" [that Putin "aspired" to help Trump win election]. 

You can read the report to get the details of these anomalies, so I will focus on just a few. 

Generating a final ICA usually take months, not two weeks as this one did.  To do so, there were unusual restrictions on the normal process of participation as well as abnormal involvement by agency heads.

While agency heads sometimes review controversial analytic assessments before publication, their direct engagement in the ICA's development was highly unusual in both scope and intensity. This exceptional level of senior involvement likely influenced participants, altered normal review processes, and ultimately compromised analytic rigor.  

From the outset, agency heads chose to marginalize the National Intelligence Council (NIC), departing significantly from standard procedures for formal IC assessments. Typically, the NIC maintains control over drafting assignments, coordination, and review processes.

These departures from standard procedure not only limited opportunities for coordination and thorough tradecraft review, but also resulted in the complete exclusion of key intelligence agencies from the process. While sensitive counterintelligence information in community assessments often requires restricted access, the decision to entirely shut out the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research from any participation in such a high-profile assessment about an adversary’s plans and intentions was a significant deviation from typical IC practices.

The exclusion was not just of other agencies; as noted above, Clapper and CIA Director Brennan shut the CIA's own National Intelligence Officer for Russia out of the process.  Indeed the reassessment notes:

The two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia argued jointly against including the “aspire” judgment. In an email to Brennan on 30 December, they stated the judgment should be removed because it was both weakly supported and unnecessary, given the strength and logic of the paper’s other findings on intent. They warned that including it would only “open up a line of very politicized inquiry.” 

The other important aspect was the decision to include a summary of the Steele Dossier in the appendix of the ICA.  Even by that date, the CIA knew that the dossier allegations were unsubstantiated and initially resisted including it in the ICA.  However, according to the reassessment:

FBI leadership made it clear that their participation in the ICA hinged on the Dossier’s inclusion and, over the next few days, repeatedly pushed to weave references to it throughout the main body of the ICA.

The ICA authors and multiple senior CIA managers—including the two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia— strongly opposed including the Dossier, asserting that it did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards.  

However, CIA Director Brennan overruled his subordinates:

Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness. When confronted with specific flaws in the Dossier by the two mission center leaders—one with extensive operational experience and the other with a strong analytic background—he appeared more swayed by the Dossier's general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns. Brennan ultimately formalized his position in writing, stating that “my bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”

The reassessment concludes:

. . . by placing a reference to the annex material in the main body of the ICA as the fourth supporting bullet for the judgment that Putin “aspired” to help Trump win, the ICA implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment. 

It was important for Brennan and the IC leadership to have a reference to the Steele Dossier somewhere in the report.  At that point, many publications had the dossier, but while stories based on individual allegations contained therein had been published, the actual dossier was not yet publicly available.  Reference to it helped bolster its credibility with media outlets and because its focus was on the alleged active collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin it allowed the issue of influence to be merged with collaboration.

Bottom line - the 2016 ICA was intended to be a political, not analytical, document. 

---------------------------------------------------------------

(1) The new California senator continues to lie about this, stating on CNN in January 2025 that  "the fact that we didn't find proof beyond reasonable doubt doesn't mean there wasn't evidence of conspiracy."  I've read the same testimony he heard as ranking member of the House Intelligence Community.  He knew then, and knows now, that not only was there not proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but that there was NO evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, though we now know there is evidence of a possible conspiracy between the Clinton campaign and Russia.  Part of the disgrace of the Russia Collusion Hoax was that those who promoted it have never paid any price for the damage they've done to this country.  In fact, Schiff leveraged his role to advance from Representative to Senator.  For more on Schiff and the testimony he heard read Right Move and the 53 Transcripts series.

(2) The New York Times continues its mendacious role in the collusion hoax.  Its headline on the new report reads, 

C.I.A. Says Its Leaders Rushed Report on Russia Interference in 2016 Vote

But the new review of the earlier assessment does not dispute the conclusion that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump.

The subheading is not supported by the text of the report.

I've been unable to find any coverage of the CIA report by the Washington Post. 

(3) The language here is directly from the reassessment.  However, my own take is a bit different.  What prompted the 2016 ICA was the unexpected election of Donald Trump and the alarm it raised in the White House and the IC.  The information contained in the IC was already known prior to the election and had been the subject of ongoing discussions between the IC and the White House during the campaign.  I think the White House and IC were genuinely concerned about the prospect of a Trump presidency and the purpose of the ICA was to prepare a document that could be quickly released publicly and be used to undermine the incoming administration.  I believe that is the best explanation for the deficiencies noted by the 2025 reassessment.   

Revenge Or Justice?

Over at National Review Online, Andrew McCarthy argues that President Trump's Executive Order suspending security clearances, contracting, and access to federal buildings to the law firm of Perkins Coie is an unconstitutional and deeply wrong act.  I agree, though with a partial dissent as discussed below.

Two senior Perkins Coie lawyers, Marc Elias and Michael Sussman, are deeply implicated in the Clinton campaign conspiracy regarding Russia Collusion, a conspiracy designed to improperly influence a presidential election.  Both Elias and Sussman are long gone from the firm, which employs 3,700 people.

It was through Elias and Sussman that the Clinton Campaign and the DNC hired FusionGPS to fabricate the phony Steele Dossier, and Sussmann used his direct influence to move its allegations through the Federal bureaucracy.  They then prepared the false submissions to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) by both entities, claiming the more than $1 million paid to FusionGPS was for legal services.  The FEC found this statement to be in violation of Federal law, fining the campaign and the DNC a total of $135,000.  You may recollect that it was the alleged violation of the same FEC rules by the Trump campaign regarding the $250,000 payment to Stormy Daniels, that led Manhattan District Attorney Bragg, with the assistance of the Biden Justice Department and a bizarre legal theory converting a federal misdemeanor matter into 34 felony counts under New York law, to bring criminal charges against Donald Trump.  It's fair to say that Elias and Sussmann are scumbags whose activities undermined American democracy.  The question is what is to be done about the partnership of Perkins Coie?

McCarthy's point, apart from the constitutional argument is:

Trump is stubbornly wrong, however, in refusing to accept that the payback he gets — extraordinary payback, but the only legitimate payback — is his stunning political comeback. The Democrats suffered thunderous defeat, in large part because the public saw these and other lawfare abuses as scandalous. That has to be enough. Trump’s retribution is that he won the presidency; it is not turning the presidency into lawfare on steroids.

I agree with McCarthy in so far as this argument applies to Perkins Coie.  However, I part ways with him on his next assertion:

Participants in the Russiagate farce have been disciplined. The government officials, particularly at the FBI, were the subject of scathing inspector general reports and either fired or pushed out of office. Hillary Clinton is irrevocably damaged political goods.

Whether it is petty or prudent to do so, Trump has all the authority the Constitution gives a president to remove government officials he blames for the lawfare tactics, and he has done that.

Here, McCarthy is wrong.  There has not been personal responsibility and accountability for the greatest political scandal of my lifetime, and arguably in American history.  I support any efforts by DOJ to investigate and, if appropriate, bring criminal charges against those involved in the conspiracy.  Unfortunately, with the passage of time, the statute of limitations may have expired regarding many potential offenses. 

McCarthy admits "I’d prefer to ignore the EO because the Democrats and their base supporters now expressing outrage over it are hypocrites", pointing out the efforts to disbar any attorney who worked on supporting Trump's claim that the 2020 election was stolen, adding:

So it’s hard to take sides with these people: progressive ideologues who can’t spew enough bile about pardons for participants in a three-hour riot at the Capitol, including hundreds who viciously assaulted police officers (and they’re right about that)(1), but who turned a blind eye to — or even marched in lockstep with — left-wing radicals who engaged in months of lethal rioting, looting, and arson triggered by the death in police custody of a black man with a substantial criminal record, who had started the fateful confrontation by assaulting the cops. This includes progressive ideologues now trying to turn a Hamas-supporting activist into a free-speech martyr, but who have not a word to say about Hamas’s brutal killing, maiming, and raping of hundreds of people on October 7, or about Edan Alexander, the American citizen who is among the two dozen living hostages the jihadists are still holding in their dungeons after 17 months.

And, I'll add the same progressives who reveled when the Trump White House was under assault on May 31-June 1, 2020, gleefully pointing out that the president was in the basement below for security purposes, while sixty law enforcement personnel were injured, eleven seriously enough to go to the hospital. 

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(1) I disagreed with President Trump's pardon of those convicted of violent offenses on January 6, while agreeing with his decision to pardon non-violent offenders.  There was clearly a two-tier legal system created by the Biden Justice Department in which red-coded defendants were treated much more harshly than those blue-coded.  The deluded non-violent protestors (the bulk of those convicted of J6 offenses) drawn to DC by Trump's ridiculous Stop the Steal claims, deserved pardons, particularly after Trump went on to raise more than $100 million for his personal kitty, while leaving his arrested supporters bereft of legal counsel and, in some cases, to rot in jail awaiting trial.

All Is Phony

 Propaganda, all is phony (1)

- It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), Bob Dylan, 1965 

 Sometimes it is the framing and messaging that is the tip-off.

On March 7, NBC News online ran an article with the alarming title (alarming, that is, for their target audience);

"Trump allies launch a bid to take control of a powerful Washington legal group" 

The group is the D.C. Bar, the lawyer association for the District of Columbia, which oversees the licensing of its 120,000 members and recommends members to be on the D.C. Board of Professional Responsibility, the disciplinary arms of the D.C. Court of Appeals.

The article centers on the efforts of two Republican lawyers attempting to win election as President and Treasurer of the Bar's Board of Governors.  There are 23 members on the Board and having two Republicans join it would be an threat to its integrity according to the NBC article, an article obviously planted by members of that Board.  

NBC goes on to implicitly portray the current Board as non-partisan and every negative mention of lawyers is of Republicans.

Of the 23 current Board members, four are government attorneys, five from NGOs, and five from DC mega firms.  Anyone who knows the mega firms, as I do, know that with one exception they are Democrat strongholds.  The one exception does not have a member on the Board.  The current president is the former CEO of the American Psychiatric Association and former COO of the DC Department of Health.

Allow me to explain how the DC Bar really works.

In the fall of 2016, the FBI obtained a warrant to surveil Carter Page, who was alleged in the Steele Dossier to be serving as a tool of the Kremlin within the Trump campaign.  Meanwhile, Page's name had surfaced in the press in connection with these allegations, which were planted by Christopher Steele.  This prompted Page to reach out to FBI Director Comey at the end of September, volunteering to speak to anyone in the FBI "in the interest of helping them put these outrageous allegations [about him] to rest".  Comey never responded to Page then, or to later requests, instead investigators were "prohibited by FBI senior executives from approaching Page" until authorization was received in March 2017.  Once authorized, Page sat for five voluntary interviews (without having a lawyer present!) and "fully cooperated with the FBI, even going so far as to bring his own PowerPoint presentation to one of the interviews".

Comey had avoided having Page interviewed for as long as possible, because he wanted to avoid learning anything that might interfere with the warrant application or renewal.  In the meantime, Comey and other FBI and DOJ officials certified in the warrant application to the FISA Court that they were confident in the reliability of the information contained therein.

However, in the March interviews, Page claimed that he agreed to be debriefed by the CIA after every visit to Russia and after any contacts with Russians.  In April 2017, the FBI would be seeking a second extension to the FISA warrant, and Kevin Clinesmith, a DOJ lawyer assigned to the FBI, was asked to contact the CIA regarding Page's claim.  Clinesmith was a committed Democrat and strong anti-Trumper, who had, on November 22, 2016 sent an email to friends stating "viva la resistance!".  The CIA informed Clinesmith that indeed, Carter Page was an "approved operational contact" and had been cooperating with the agency.  Clinesmith altered the communication so that it read that Page, was NOT ever a source, and sent it on to his superiors. If Clinesmith had included the real CIA response, the FISA warrant application would not have been renewed. (2)

Clinesmith's alteration of the communication was discovered by DOJ Inspector General Horowitz and referred for criminal investigation.  This was one of 17 material errors and omissions found by Horowitz in the warrant application process, all of which helped support the granting of the application.

On January 29, 2021, nine days into the Biden administration, Clinesmith pled guilty to one felony charge and was sentenced to twelve months probation.  Clinesmith was a member of the DC Bar.  The standard procedure for the DC Bar was to immediately suspend membership for anyone convicted of a felony and, only after their sentence expired could then apply for readmission to the Bar, which was at the discretion of the organization.  It was two months after the conviction that the Bar finally suspended Clinesmith, and then only after an inquiry from a conservation DC publication.  And then, immediately upon the expiration of the probationary sentence, Clinesmith was readmitted to the DC Bar, without having to make an application and go through the normal long review process.  That's because the DC Bar saw Clinesmith as one of the "good guys".  And that is how the DC Bar operates.  And that's why they are terrified of having two Republicans out of 23 Board members.  It poses a risk to their friendly club.  

Naturally, NBC drags the American Bar Association into this as a paragon of integrity and virtue which as anyone who know about the ABA recognizes is a joke.  I was briefly a member before realizing it was a, back then, overwhelmingly liberal organization, and now is completely run by progressive left-wingers.  The leaders are either from government, NGOs, or from large law firms that tilt D.  The bulk of lawyers don't have the time to spend on the association.  We're busy doing stuff.  Like most other American institutions, the ABA has destroyed its credibility in the 21st century.

Since 1952, the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar (the Council) of the American Bar Association (the ABA) has been approved by the Congress as the recognized national agency for the accreditation of programs leading to the J.D. degree.  It is that accreditation that allows federal funds to flow to approved law schools.  Over recent decades the ABA has transformed the accreditation process from one focused on instructional capabilities for training lawyers into forcing a morass of left wing, mostly recently DEI, programs into the curriculum.  The Trump administration should seek to remove this accreditation authority from the ABA, and review every one of the many similar delegations to other organizations to determine if, like the ABA, they have perverted the process to promote preferred ideologies.

A last word on Carter Page.  The DOJ Inspector General and Special Counsel Durham found no evidence supporting the allegations made against Page.  As mentioned, Page voluntarily sat for numerous interviews with the FBI, and later with Special Counsel Mueller's team, all without having legal counsel present, and came through it all unscathed.  I regard him as the most innocent man in America. 

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(1) The song also contains this lyric: But even the president of the United States/
Sometimes must have to stand naked

There's also a variant with the Soviet term agitprop, which is literature and the arts harnessed in the service of propaganda.  Are Showtime and The History Channel art and therefore producing agitprop?  I explored that topic back in 2012.

(2) Clinesmith was not just a low-level functionary.  On August 30, 2016, he and high level FBI official Peter Strzok approved a summary of FBI official Joe Pientka's August 17 counterintelligence and security briefing to candidate Donald Trump, Chris Christie, and Michael Flynn.  While supposedly a briefing of candidate Trump, it was actually part of the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation opened by the FBI on July 31, 2016 regarding allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.  In other words, an excuse to investigate Trump.  Pientka highlighted that during the briefings he "actively listened for topics or questions regarding the Russian Federation."  This briefing took place five months before Director Comey's January 27, 2017 meeting with President Trump at which he told the president in response to Trump's statement he was thinking of ordering the FBI to investigate the Steele Dossier, that the FBI was not investigating the president.  Clinesmith was not just a lawyer who deliberately altered a national security email; he was an active participant in the Russia collusion conspiracy.  The FBI managed to hide this document for four years before it was released in 2020.

He's Not Your Bro

Looking further at the debacle of the Zelensky-Trump-Vance White House meeting, something that originally escaped my notice needs some attention, as it gets to the heart of President Trump's views of Vladimir Putin.

Trump has always been susceptible to flattery, particularly from those he considers his equals.  In his 2017 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen stated the only discussion he ever had with Trump about Russia was when Trump said to him one day in the office prior to the 2016 campaign, "Did you see that President Putin said some really nice things about me?"  After his disastrous 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, I wrote that Trump seemed like a star-struck teenage girl in his presence.  At the same time, when acting at a distance, during his first administration Trump was much more aggressive with Russia than either Obama or Biden.

Nonetheless, it seems Trump feels some type of special bond with Putin and that bond was created by the Russia Collusion Hoax.  During the recent White House meeting, Trump said to Zelensky: 

“Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia, ever hear of that deal?”

A very revealing comment as the President makes clear he thinks the Russia Collusion matter was something that both he and Putin were put through together, making them "bros" of a sort, a kind of bonding experience.  He thinks they have a common enemy in the Democrats and their sycophants in the media who put them through this ordeal.  It explains why Putin was his first call to an international leader after the Mueller Report was released.

Having thoroughly investigated the Russia Collusion allegations, I know it is, by far, the biggest American political scandal of my lifetime.  But Vladimir Putin is not one of the victims, he is one of the perpetrators, and he has played American politicians, including Trump, and media across the political spectrum for fools.

Putin's goal for years has been to weaken America by creating division.  Prior to 2016, the Kremlin supported Occupy Wall Street and the American environmental groups seeking to block energy development, particularly fracking.  Through social media, his minions have supported Black Lives Matter and those opposed to the organization.  A Facebook executive testified that after the 2016 election, the Russian bots immediately switched to agitation against the incoming Trump administration. Disruption, chaos, and distrust is Putin's goal.  In this effort he has been successful and Russia Collusion was his crowning achievement.  In perpetrating this hoax, Hillary Clinton, James Comey and the Intelligence Community, Adam Schiff, and the New York Times could not have done more damage to trust in our institutions if they'd been paid agents of the Kremlin.

While we've had many other scandals since, including the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, Trump's Stop the Steal garbage, and four years of pretending Joe Biden was at the top of his game, so full of energy he was running rings around younger staffers (the NY Times actually wrote a story promoting this nonsense), along with a swarm of fake narratives on other matters, Russia Collusion was the big poison injected into our system; the starting point. 

Putin was playing all sides against each other.

It astonished me that those who took the Steele Dossier allegations that Trump and his campaign were collaborating with the Russians on face value, never stopped to ask themselves why that information was coming from what the dossier itself described as Russian sources, including intelligence sources.

Let's look at the players involved in those allegations:

FusionGPS, the company hired in April 2016 to investigate Trump's Russia ties, by a Clinton Campaign desperate to divert attention from Hillary's email fiasco, was at the same time working for Denis Katys, a Russian oligarch, helping him to lobby the Federal government to lift the Magnitsky sanctions, sanctions imposed by the US, after Magnitsky, a Russia journalist exposing Putin's corruption, was jailed and beaten to death by Putin's thugs. Glenn Simpson, head of Fusion, was working closely on this project with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who arranged the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 with Fredo Trump Jr.  Simpson met with her the day before and the day after the Trump Tower event.

Fusion hired Christopher Steele to conduct the investigation.  Steele had worked on the Russia desk for MI6 in the UK, before retiring a decade earlier.  At the time he was hired by Fusion, Steele was also working for Oleg Deripaska, another Russia oligarch, currently under indictment by the U.S.  Deripaska was cast by the media as a "bad guy" because of his connection with Paul Manafort, but the same people, including the Clinton Mob Lawyers working for Mueller, stayed mum about his connection with Steele.

Steele hired as his "major sub-source" Igor Danchenko, a Russian national, who had illegally remained in the U.S. and was being paid, through a cut-out, a monthly retainer by Steele.  Danchenko was the subject of a FBI counter-intelligence investigation after allegations made by fellow employees at the Brookings Institute, a liberal think tank, that he told them if they got jobs in the Obama administration he would pay them for information.  Upon investigation, the FBI determined that Danchenko had been in contact with known FSB (Russian intelligence) officers in the U.S. (1)

Given this background, in his final report, Special Counsel John Durham wrote:

"It appears the FBI never gave appropriate consideration to the possibility that the intelligence Danchenko was providing to Steele - which, again, according to Danchenko himself, made up a significant majority of the information in the Steele Dossier reports - was, in whole or in part, Russian disinformation."

He goes on:

"The failure of the FBI to assess properly the prior counterespionage investigation of Danchenko is incomprehensible."

Another of Steele's sources for the allegations in the dossier, in particular, the most scandalous and one that got much of the initial press attention when the dossier became public, that on a visit to Moscow in 2013, Trump insisted on having the same suite at the Ritz-Carlton used by President Obama and then had prostitutes come to that room and piss on the bed, turned out not to be a Russian, but an American.  Charles Dolan was a DC lobbyist and public relations guy who was representing Russia in the United States.  Dolan was in close contact with Putin's press secretary and Russia's ambassador to the U.S.  He was also an advisor to the Valdai Club, a Moscow organization which organized events for Westerners and seen as a propaganda outlet for Putin.  Along with his Russia connections, Dolan was also the former executive director for the Democratic Governor's Association, had chaired the Virginia campaigns for Clinton-Gore in both 1992 and 1996, been appointed by President Clinton to two four-year terms on the State Department's U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, was a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, and a supporter in her 2016 presidential bid.  And, in January 2017, Dolan emailed an acquaintance describing Igor Danchenko as a "Russian agent". (2)

One of the bombshells contained in the Durham Report is that an FBI review conducted in 2018 "showed that the Russians had access to sensitive U.S. government information years earlier that would have allowed them to identify Steele's subsources . . . Steele's subsources could have been compromised by the Russians at a point in time prior to the date of the first Steele dossier report".  The Review team was then told "no more memorandum were to be written" and a further meeting held in which "the review team was told to be careful about what they were writing down because issues relating to Steele were under intense scrutiny". 

Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Dina Corsi then directed the Review team not to document any recommendations, context, or analysis in the memorandum.  Team members described this as "highly unusual" because analysis is what analysts do.  An Office of General Counsel Attorney at the briefing "remembered being shocked" by Corsi, stating "it was the most inappropriate operational or professional statement he had ever heard at the FBI".  As of last year, Corsi was still at the FBI.

As a reminder, the Durham Report concluded:

"Notably, not one of the damning allegations contained in the Steele reporting was ever corroborated"

So who was playing who? 

Trump's failure to recognize Putin's long-term goals is potentially a disaster.  Because Trump personalizes everything he cannot see the bigger picture.  What happens next in the Ukraine-Russia war will be a test of whether Trump can drop his illusions about Putin. (3)

Trump's second administration is shaping up much differently than his first.  The first time around he was surprised to win and unprepared for the office, floundering around for quite a while, not being astute enough to know much about his own appointees and willing to take advice from DC Republicans.

Russia Collusion took a gullible and conspiratorial Trump and constructed an actual conspiracy against him, leading to a daily media beating for years and reducing his ability to run his administration.  They actually were all plotting against him!  Including Putin.  

The hoax also contributed to the destruction of his relationship with DC Republicans.  His Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, was a good senator and a decent man, but his naivete led him to recuse himself on flimsy grounds from Russia collusion matters, leaving Trump unprotected.  Eric Holder and Merrick Garland never would have recused themselves in the same situation, because they viewed themselves, as Holder once described it, as the "wingman" for their presidents.

That left the Justice Department on Russia matters under the weak reed of Rod Rosenstein, who Trump was assured would be just fine by DC Republicans.  Rosenstein quickly crumbled under the pressure and appointed Mueller as Special Counsel and then stood aside.  Rosenstein would later testify that if he'd known the truth about the Steele Dossier he never would have appointed Special Counsel, and that Mueller knew by September 2017 there was nothing to the allegations, yet the investigation went on for another year and a half.

Finally, when Mueller was appointed, Trump had to retain his own lawyers, who were good litigators, but traditional DC Republicans.  They assured Trump that Mueller would be a "straight-shooter" and once he saw the evidence he'd quickly close up shop, so they advised full cooperation with the Special Counsel.  Trump agreed, and over one million documents were provided with no claims of Executive Privilege made and he allowed, in an unprecedented move, his own White House Counsel to be interviewed about his discussions with President.  All to no avail, as Mueller and his Clinton Mob Lawyers kept going, though they knew they had nothing, it was essential for political purposes and continuing media coverage to keep the pretense up as long as possible.  If Bob Barr hadn't come in as AG and forced Mueller to close shop, the farce would have continued until Trump was out of office.

Trump had enough of "honorable" men who played by the rules of DC. That's why he now only wants those whose top priority is personal loyalty to The Boss; their competency and real agendas are of less concern.  It's also why, as I predicted three years ago, this is his Revenge Tour.  Will the tour bus be driven off the cliff, like he did in 2020?  I did not vote on the presidential line in 2024 because of that prospect on the one hand, and the insane and divisive policies and growing authoritarian streak of the Democrats on the other.

The bottom line is that however we got here, and however unfair it was to Trump, at the end of the day Donald Trump is fully responsible for his own actions and decisions.  He's the President of the United States, after all.

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(1) The full Danchenko story is even more damning.  The allegations against him arose in the first Obama administration.  When the FBI learned that Danchenko had returned to Russia in 2011 it suspended the investigation.  In December 2016, FBI analysts identified Danchenko as Steele's major sub-source and then learned that while his wife boarded the flight to Moscow five years earlier, Danchenko had not, remaining in the U.S.  Durham discovered the rest of the story.  Danchenko was desperate to find employment after losing his Brookings job because if he failed his visa would no longer be valid.  An arrangement was made that he would be hired by a Russian operating an IT company in Virginia, but he would actually be paid by Christopher Steele who would funnel the funds through the IT company.  In other words, breaking American immigration law by committing a fraud.  According to Durham, "Danchenko Employer was merely a front to allow Danchenko to continue his work on behalf of Orbis [Steele's firm], while at the same time allowing him to secure a work visa through alleged employment with a U.S. based company".  His employer, an ethnic Russian, described Danchenko as "boastful . . . having low credibility, and a person who liked to embellish his purported contacts with the Kremlin". In January 2017 Danchenko was interviewed by the FBI and explained he was just passing on gossip and bar talk regarding the allegations and was not aware how Steele would use it.  Danchenko said he could not corroborate any of the allegations.  That interview concluded the day before FBI Director Comey led President Trump to believe the FBI was not investigating the credibility of the Steele Dossier; Comey was responding to the President telling him that he was thinking of ordering the FBI to investigate the dossier.

Realizing it had a problem on its hands with Danchenko, the FBI and later the Mueller investigation, decided to try to make it difficult for anyone to identify him as the major source for the dossier, making the Russian a Confidential Human Source (CHS) and paying him $220,000 over the next two years. 

Interestingly, Danchenko was hired at Brookings at the instigation of Fiona Hill, later to be an opponent of Trump's and involved in the attempted impeachment of the President over Hunter Biden's corrupt dealings in Ukraine.  In a September 2017 FBI debriefing, Christopher Steele stated he was introduced to Danchenko by Fiona Hill in 2011.  Steele described Hill as a "close friend" and told the FBI she "has a very high opinion" of Danchenko.

(2)  In March 2017 FBI analysts identified Dolan as the source of the Ritz Carlton and other allegations in the Steele Dossier.  Two months later those same analysts were transferred to Mueller's team and assigned to the unit working on corroborating the allegations in the Steele Dossier.  But wait, you might think, didn't Robert Mueller repeatedly state in his Congressional testimony that the dossier was "outside my purview" with his report omitting any mention of the dossier in the discussion of possible collusion?  Yes, he did state that, but he lied to Congress, which is criminal conduct.  The FBI agents not only told Special Counsel Durham about the dossier team under Mueller, they testified to it in open court during the trial of Igor Danchenko.  

The analysts continued to work on Dolan and in August 2017 briefed several senior people on the Mueller team on their work, and drafted a case opening document on Dolan, including a request he be interviewed.  However, on September 7 they were instructed "to cease all research and analysis related to Dolan",   According to Dolan the analysts' contemporaneous notes "explicitly state that Mueller investigation leadership directed [them] to dedicate no resources" to Dolan.  Their request to open a case on Dolan was denied with them being told it was a "higher level decision" and the document was to be deleted from the Special Counsel's computer system.

The shocked analysts "discussed whether the decision not to open on Dolan was politically motivated, given Dolan's extensive connections to the Democratic party", with one of the analysts speculating that "the information on Dolan ran counter to the narrative that the Mueller Special Counsel investigators were cultivating".  The analyst believed the decision would eventually be reviewed by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) and, after deleting the report from the Mueller system, uploaded memorandum to three other separate case files on the FBI system to make sure OIG would have access.  That is where the Durham team located it several years later.

Later that month, the analysts were instructed to "cease [all] work on attempting to corroborate the Steele reports" and the unit was disbanded, with members transferred to other teams in the Special Counsel's office.

Durham notes that while the Special Counsel interviewed hundreds of witnesses during his investigation, Charles Dolan was never interviewed.

It is obvious that Dolan was never interviewed, and the investigation halted, because Mueller's Clinton Mob Lawyers did not want to document what he knew because his connections would expose the relationship between the Clinton Campaign and the Kremlin, destroying the narrative they had so carefully constructed.

Though Mueller knew by September 2017 that nothing in the dossier could be collaborated, he never said anything at the time or in the final report, even denying that his office ever investigated it.  You can read more about the Mueller team's obstruction of justice here.

(3)  The expiration of the Tik Tok ban extension in early April will be another test for the president's ability to see the bigger picture.  His extension in January was actually illegal, but no one has the legal standing to challenge it.  However, the president has an independent obligation to ensure the legality of his actions.

What's Next?

While many in Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and elsewhere around the world celebrate the death of Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, the New York Times mourns his demise, describing the murderous fanatic as a gentle and tolerant religious sage "who maintained that there should be one Palestine with equality for Muslims, Jews, and Christians".  The Times assures us that as a Shiite, he represented a "historically marginalized group", so he was a Good Guy since he was Oppressed.  It's all about the narrative among those who hate the West. You will never see a non-Progressive coded American treated so reverently in a Times obituary.

What next for Israel, for Hezbollah, for Iran?  Hezbollah had always been Iran's ace in the hole against Israel.  The potential Israeli threat against Iran's nuclear program - a reasonable threat given Iran's policy goals of Death to Israel! and Death to the Jews! - was checked by possible retaliation from Hezbollah's huge rocket arsenal.

In 2000, Israel ended its occupation of south Lebanon without any preconditions, abruptly withdrawing its forces.  Hezbollah filled the vacuum, building its power base in the region, right on Israel's northern border.  In response to Hezbollah attacks, Israel reentered Lebanon in 2006, fighting a tough war in which it won a tactical victory but proved a strategic loss, because it was fought as a conventional war on Hezbollah's terms.  A UN Resolution promised that the area of Lebanon south of the Litani River would be demilitarized but, in reality, it was never enforced with the UN Peacekeeping Force serving as a shield while Hezbollah rebuilt its military capabilities.  After October 7, Hezbollah banked on being able to demonstrate solidarity with Hamas, launching several thousand rockets, forcing the evacuation of almost 100,000 Israelis from their home, believing itself at minimal risk of massive Israeli retaliation.

This time around Israel pursued a different strategy, focused on dismantling key Hezbollah capabilities and taking out the organization's leadership and middle management, as well as creating an atmosphere of mental insecurity for the survivors, rather than taking on its opponents in a ground war.  It's been impressive watching that strategy implemented.  Earlier this summer, the Israelis took out a good percentage of Hezbollah's rocket launching capabilities.  More recently we have the pager and cellphone exploits, and an increased pace of assassination of leadership, culminating in Nasrallah's death. 

What has also become evident is the extent of Israeli intelligence assets in Lebanon, compared to Gaza.  A lot of people in Lebanon, while they may not be pro-Israel, really hate Hezbollah, because that group has reduced the nation and its people to puppets.

In the past couple of days, it has been reported that Israel has turned back flights from Iran to Beirut carrying replacement equipment for Hezbollah, a demonstration of Israeli intent not to allow Hezbollah to rebuild.  The next question is whether Israel will take advantage of Hezbollah's current state to temporarily reoccupy south Lebanon and use the time to systematically destroy Hezbollah's complex infrastructure in the region.  If Hezbollah cannot rebuild, and other forces in Lebanon reassert themselves, it means Iran's shield is gone.

The recent events also highlight the impotence of Biden administration policy and the amateur hour performance of National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.(1)  President Biden delusionally believed freeing up tens of billions to fund Iran woud somehow have a positive impact from our perspective, instead of enabling its support of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Putin regime.  Blinken is the quintessential model-UN kid, living in a dream world, with the shallow credentials of expertise so common to those in the foreign policy "establishment".  His negotiations strategy regarding Hamas and Gaza is embarrassing.

Hamas:  We want 100.

Blinken:  We'll give you 95.

Hamas:  No, and now we want 105.

Blinken: We'll give you 100.

Hamas:  No, and now we want 110.

Blinken:  We'll give you 105.

When you sell your house, Blinken is the guy you want negotiating on behalf of the buyer. 

Sullivan appears to think that the Israelis are the bad guys because of Netanyahu.  I don't like Netanyahu and wish he were not in office, but after all these years it should be clear that no matter who headed Israel's government, Hamas and Hezbollah would be pursuing the same course.  Maybe we shouldn't be surprised that Sullivan appointed as National Security Council lead on intelligence matters a guy who headed the antisemitic Students for Justice in Palestine group at Georgetown.

And, don't forget, this is the team that gave a wink-wink to Putin if he was restrained enough to just "wet his beak" by taking the rest of the Donbas, giving a thumbs-up to Nordstream 2 and the INF treaty to show their good faith, and, when that didn't work, put restraints on Ukraine's response, allowing Putin an asymmetrical advantage in the use of weapons. Don't try to make sense of their policy, since they can't.

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 (1) Sullivan and Blinken also played important roles in the Russia collusion hoax.  In 2016, Sullivan, then with the Clinton campaign, was one of the lead promoters of the Alfa Bank allegation, the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign had a secret server connected with Alfa Bank that supposedly allowed the Kremlin to communicate with the campaign.  Like the rest of the allegations it was misinformation.

In 2020, Blinken, working for the Biden campaign, organized the infamous letter by 51 former intelligence officials denouncing the Hunter Biden laptop story as a Russian disinformation operation.  It wasn't, and they knew it.

Sullivan and Blinken's roles in spreading misinformation in an effort to influence presidential elections contributed significantly to the erosion of trust in our institutions, leading to the current instability in our public processes, and posing a danger to the continuation of our democracy.  They have no business being in leadership roles in our country.  They should be outcasts, shamed for their behavior.

Justice

Of the many legal proceedings that Donald Trump is being subjected to there is only one, or rather a portion of one, that I find has some surface plausibility - the obstruction of justice charges in the Mar-a-Largo documents case (whether he is actually guilty of the charges is another matter).  I noted in Here We Go Again that the Mar-a-Lago case is another self-inflicted wound by Trump. The rest are politically motivated, with the New York cases the most egregious.

This article by Andrew McCarthy, no friend of Trump, explains how crazy the proceedings are in the current trial regarding the payments to Stormy Daniels, due to the deliberate malfeasance of the prosecutor and judge.

Understand, most criminal cases in the United States do not take two weeks to try. There are lots of long trials, too, but to get to this stage of the proceedings and still have the subject matter of the case unaddressed is . . . highly unusual.

That’s because the case is not about what the case is about. That’s why I’m not sure how effective Bove’s shrewd point was. Judge Merchan has helped prosecutors frame the trial as a “conspiracy” case – specifically, a conspiracy to steal the 2016 election by suppressing politically damaging information (allegations of extramarital affairs), supposedly in violation of federal campaign-finance law.

I don’t want to further belabor the record regarding how there is no conspiracy charge in the indictment, how there is no such conspiracy statute in New York law, how Bragg has no authority to enforce federal campaign law, how the statute actually charged in the indictment gives him no such authority under New York constitutional law, and how – even if Bragg arguably had jurisdiction to enforce federal campaign law – the so-called hush-money payments charged (based on lawful non-disclosure agreements (NDAs)) were not campaign expenditures for which that law mandated disclosure. These points may end up being more germane on appeal – which, if Trump gets convicted, could take a year or more to process.

Merchan is letting Bragg’s prosecutors present the case as if the charge were conspiracy to suppress politically damaging information, and he slaps down Trump’s lawyers when they try to object.

As McCarthy notes, any Trump conviction will be vulnerable on appeal due to the many procedural irregularities in this case.  But since this is a political prosecution it doesn't matter, since the goal is to achieve a conviction which can be used in the presidential campaign.  Whether it is overturned after the election is irrelevant.

The New York case is the clearest example of the political double standard at play in the various Trump prosecutions.

In 2016, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee hired FusionGPS, paying it more than $1 million to concoct the Steele Dossier, a fictitious set of allegations regarding a conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin.(1)  The conspiracy to steal the 2016 election was an effort to divert attention from Hillary's email woes and to damage Trump during the campaign.  In inventing this allegation, the Clinton campaign utilized a series of agents who had contact with Russian intelligence and Kremlin-connected oligarchs.(2)  After the election, the FEC found that the campaign and DNC attempted to hide the purpose for which the expenditures were made and fined both a total of about $140,000.  There were no criminal charges filed regarding the conspiracy which after it failed to bring about Hillary's election was transformed into an effort to undermine the new administration of the duly elected president of the United States.

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(1)  The DOJ Inspector General report on the dossier and the FISA warrants on Carter Page implicitly found no basis for the allegations.  The Durham Report, issued in May 2023, explicitly found no support for the allegations.

 "Notably, not one of the damning allegations contained in the Steele reporting was ever corroborated: not the salacious allegations of events at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow, not the allegation of there being a 'well-developed conspiracy of co-operation' between Trump and the Russians, not the allegations of a secret meeting involving Page and certain sanctioned Russians (namely, Igor Sechin and Igor Divyekin), and not the allegation of Page serving as Manafort's conduit for information between the Russians and the Trump campaign.  This is true even after the FBI offered Steele $1 million or more for such corroboration and after Danchenko was signed up as an FBI CHS [Confidential Human Source] and paid more than $220,000 for information on other matters." (pages 236-7)

It was all a cleverly invented fiction. 

(2)  FusionGPS was, at the same time, working for a Kremlin oligarch, trying to get Congress to rescind sanctions.  Christopher Steele, hired by FusionGPS, was working for Oleg Deripaska, another Kremlin oligarch, currently under indictment in the U.S.  Steele's "major-sub-source" was Igor Danchenko, who had been subject to an unresolved U.S. counterintelligence investigation due to his connections with Russian intelligence, and one of Steele's other sources (and the source for the scandalous Moscow Ritz Carlton allegations), was Charles Dolan, a DC public relations guy who was working for the Russian Federation to improve its image in the U.S. in association with Putin's press secretary and the Kremlin's ambassador to the U.S.  Dolan had also been the Virginia Chairman for the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1992 and 1996, executive director of the Democratic Governor's Association, a senior advisor to Hillary in  the 2008 campaign and was supporting Clinton in 2016.  Dolan also authored emails asserting Danchenko was an FSB agent (the Russian successor to the Soviet KGB).  When FBI analysts identified Dolan as a source and recommended the Mueller team interview him, their request was denied and they were instructed to cease their investigation.