About a year ago, disgraced former CIA director John Brennan was scheduled to give a talk in Damariscotta about ‘Navigating Global Politics,’ until an expected letter in the Lincoln County News raised an objection. The letter-writer expressed concern about how Brennan’s record reflected on his moral character and fitness. Within days, the event was cancelled “for security reasons.”
Dubious hero though he was to some merely for his role in the anti-Trump “resistance” from 2016-20, reminders about Brennan’s role as an architect and enthusiastic champion of the CIA’s torture program proved too much for the gentle people of Damariscotta. The fact that he could be cancelled in so blue a venue in liberal, coastal Maine was a data point that – even in the twilight of the Biden administration – the shine was off the ‘Russiagate’ apple.
It, like Brennan himself, had already begun to smell very rotten.
A few months later, Donald Trump would once again win the U.S. presidency, not because of help from the Russians, but because enough Americans were sick and tired of the weaponization of state institutions to achieve purely partisan ends. After all, the role of the national security establishment is to keep us safe from foreign threats – not to make up stories about them or effect domestic political outcomes.
Last week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard de-classified documents that clearly showed how the Obama administration had worked with intelligence agencies to craft a false narrative that could cripple the Trump presidency. We already knew the Steele Dossier was cooked and paid for by the Clinton campaign, and the Robert Mueller’s probe found no evidence of Trump colluding with Russia. But Gabbard’s disclosures “manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.”
Russians have a saying that applies here: “the fish rots from the head.”
Even among the most TDS-handicapped among us, no one still believed in Russiagate in the months preceding Gabbard’s move. Yet the extent to which deep state actors were instructed from the very top of the executive had not yet been formally established. That is why she did America a tremendous service, as I’d hoped and anticipated she might when nominated for her current role earlier this year.
As someone whose career and reputation was obliterated by the fundamentally dishonest probe that spawned Russiagate, I should take some satisfaction in the fact that even Maine’s junior U.S. Senator Angus King has now scrubbed the internet of those speeches in which he most vehemently inveighed against Russia’s influence on the 2016 election. But I don’t. Instead, my hope is that it never happens again.
Because of my direct knowledge of some of the characters said to be involved in the alleged Russiagate “plot,” I knew early on it was contrived. In 2017, I told Maine’s senior U.S. Senator Susan Collins as much in an informal conversation, but she apparently put more stock in the national security establishment – perhaps she’s revised her thinking and reliance on deep state norms since then, but this I cannot know.
Both Maine senators Susan Collins and Angus King are members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) – more on that in a bit.
At the time, I had some faith in the system. If I did my part and “cooperated” with authorities, I figured at the time, things would work out. I was wrong. I didn’t know then how broken and corrupt the system truly is. Time and bitter experience changed that.
In the mid 1970s, Idaho Senator Frank Church led a commission to investigate abuses by America’s intelligence services – including domestic political monitoring and interference. The result of his commission’s work was the creation of intelligence oversight committees in both chambers of Congress. When Russiagate came around forty years later, one of these sort of did its job and the other failed miserably.
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) split over Russiagate. Democrat chairman Adam Schiff drove the now de-bunked narrative as far as he could, but Republican Devin Nunes fought back with substantial assistance from his staff director at the time (and now FBI director) Kash Patel. That split alerted the nation to the fact there was something very wrong with the narrative.
Playing kumbaya “bipartisan,” so they claimed, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) validated the false narrative and suppressed or downplayed evidence to the contrary. When they cross-examined me and I let my strong belief that the whole story was cooked be known to them, they referred me to Mueller for prosecution on a process charge.
SSCI (pronounced “Sissy”) also leaked confidential information to the media, twisted testimony to fit their political ends, and knifed other witnesses whose testimony they didn’t like, like Carter Page and Michael Caputo. Their former staff director under Dianne Feinstein headed a George Soros-funded effort to push the Russiagate narrative while their probe was ongoing under the chairmanship of Mark Warner. Today SSCI is led by Tom Cotton, whose wife is a former CIA official.
It is altogether likely that Frank Church rolled over in his grave at dismal performance, and partial complicity, the oversight committees he created played in the whole imbroglio. At the very least, they failed their founding intent, which was to hold America’s secretive intelligence services accountable – not to be led around by them.
Whether you choose to call it a “coup” or just a massive subversion of the democratic process, Gabbard’s de-classification of materials relating to Russia-gate’s origins will prove invaluable to historians as they finalize this accounts on this grim chapter.
The irony couldn’t be more galling. After all, the Obama administration was the weakest on Russia in modern American history. Russian officials could barely suppress laughter at the mention of its “reset” in relations (which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s team managed to mistranslate into “reload,” but that wasn’t the only reason Russians were laughing at us.) In a hot mic moment, Obama was caught telling Russia’s fake president, Dmitri Medvedev, to convey to its real one, Vladimir Putin, that he could “be more flexible in his second term.”
Putin took him at his word and annexed Crimea in 2014 while launching a proxy war in Ukraine of which the current invasion — which began under Obama’s “foreign policy guy” Joe Biden — is merely an extension. To think that a man who projected such devastatingly harmful weakness to the Russians would instruct his team to invent a scenario by which the Russians flipped the 2016 American election would be darkly comic were it not so tragic.
What is treason nowadays? Hard to say really, but there ought to be some useful consequences for what happened, the lies that were told, and the public trust that was perhaps forever eroded as a result.
It is possible to hold two truths in mind at the same time, as President Donald Trump is now learning in his second term. It is undeniable now that Russiagate was manufactured and deeply destructive. But it is also true that Vladimir Putin is a bad man, and deeply destructive. If he sees us no longer consumed by made up fairy tales, or covering for the corruption of the First Family itself, is it too late for these evolutions to have any impact? Maybe, other actions will have to follow as well.
Putting John Brennan in chains probably won’t change much. Creep that he is, he would probably even enjoy it as long as it came with a gimp mask. The challenge is in making sure that characters like Brennan and others can no longer be used by a dishonest administration to pervert justice while undermining national security. The chains belong on the intelligences services themselves.
Looking ahead, the question remains how do we keep it from happening again? The answer is not to simply defer to the national security establishment the same way policy-makers did from 2017 onwards. Maybe the signers of the Hunter Biden laptop letter have helped with that. Today we are less naive.
Still, we need to go further and ensure the leadership of oversight committees are neither politically-driven in their duties nor otherwise compromised by enduring ties to the deep state, or secrets they dearly wish kept. At least try to honor Frank Church’s legacy.
What Tulsi Gabbard has made clear is that the deep state is real, and it is not our friend. America needs more women and men like her.
