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John Bolton and the MIHOP Gambit

August 23, 2025/93 Comments/in Foreign Policy, Trump 2.0 /by Rayne

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

Let me throw a minority report opinion at you, based on this video, first released on YouTube two days before the FBI served a dawn warrant on John Bolton’s home:

I doubt former National Security Adviser John Bolton expressed any new personal opinions in the video above with regard to Putin and Russia.

Bolton’s general opinion about Trump’s transactional approach to international relations certainly isn’t new.

But Bolton spent more than 12 minutes airing out his opinions on Trump’s handling of Russia, Ukraine, India-Pakistan, and tariffs.

He also shared his opinion that Trump’s so-called “list of accomplishments” is Trump trying to accrue to obtain a Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump’s handling of the India-Pakistan conflict in May earned an ego-fluffing nomination for a Nobel from Pakistan in June.

US support of Israel’s bombing of Iran in July, supported by Bolton, makes the nomination a joke as does continuing US support of Netanyahu’s genocidal handling of Gaza.

These conflicting approaches to international relations may pose leverage for Putin to pressure Trump on Ukraine, using Trump’s narcissistic desire for a Nobel Peace Prize — a prize former president Jimmy Carter, vice president Al Gore, and the first Black American president Barack Obama have been awarded. Bolton doesn’t make this point but he does say Putin is manipulating Trump.

Bolton’s criticism of Trump isn’t limited to the video above, or his remarks in his 2020 book, In The Room Where It Happened. Bolton has been interviewed by many outlets here and abroad during which his criticisms are laid out and only growing as Trump continues to flog his erratic and transactional foreign policies. Here are a sampling of interviews with Bolton:

John Bolton, whom Trump described as “a very dumb guy”, is worried about Taiwan
60 Minutes Australia, May 4, 2025

Putin Will ‘Take Advantage’ Of Trump Meeting: Fmr. Nat’l. Security Adviser John Bolton
NewsNation via The Hill, August 8, 2025

Trump is in rush to get deal done: John Bolton on Russia-Ukraine talks
Elizabeth Vargas Reports, NewsNation, August 18, 2025

‘Sanctions Don’t Prohibit What India Did’: Ex-Trump NSA John Bolton On U.S. Tariffs On India
Hindustan Times, August 21, 2025

In this excerpt from the Hindustan Times interview above:

10:34 [MATTOO] You know Ambassador Bolton, if I could bring you back to that question of trust uh moving forward in uh the partnership with America. Lots of commentators over the years in India have been skeptical about the relationship with the United States. They’re saying that look this is a country that fundamentally has a lot more leverage than we do. That’s the question you know do you have the cards and the the sense that there is in India is that yes America is willing now to use its leverage in a way that is coercive, is extremely transactional, uh, and is in some ways brutal.

And you’ve seen President Trump speak very appre, in a very appreciatory tone about tariffs, saying that we’re willing to use it time and again for our foreign policy instruments. There’s a sense that defense technology could be something that America uses as well. And for example, our fighter jet uh something like General Electric fighter jet engines which India is co-developing with the United States to use for our fighter jets is something that India took a significant leap of trust in the United States to develop that partnership uh after years and years as you might be familiar with of suspicion about Washington.

What do you think what has happened over the last couple of weeks does to trust in the relationship? And if you’re speaking to an Indian audience as you are now, how do you pitch to them that the American relationship is one that they should still rely on, should still work on, should still continue to develop?

11:45 [BOLTON] Well, unfortunately, what Trump has done on the tariffs generally uh is destroy uh decades of effort with India, but with a lot of other countries as well uh to build up good faith and trust and reliance on the United States and uh it will take time to repair that. That’s that’s the unfortunate reality. But but here’s where I think it’s important to understand that Trump is aberrational. I don’t know anybody else uh Republican or Democrat who ran for president, let’s just say in 2024, who if elected would behave anything like this. Trump’s doing a lot of things domestically in the United States that are cause for great concern for us as well. And I don’t know any other candidate from 2024 who would do that.

12:30 [BOLTON] Uh, Trump doesn’t have a philosophy. Uh so I think ultimately there’s no legacy for him to leave to his successors, whoever they might be. Uh and I believe that the uh the uh the the force of his personality inhibits a lot of people from speaking up, but that doesn’t mean they agree with what he’s doing. That’s very unfortunate in my view.

12:52 [BOLTON] But I think the uh the the the true strategic sense here uh particularly for a country like India with its assets and capabilities and uh and threats that it faces right on its own border uh is is just to take a deep breath and remember that the world’s going to last longer than the next three and a half years. And uh it’s not pleasant to go through this. I’m not not going to try and persuade anybody of that. But uh but our objective should be to keep the damage to the relationship uh at a minimum uh and then to think about how to repair it as quickly as we can thereafter because I think that when Trump walks off the stage uh he will take almost uh the bulk of this history with him.

(emphasis mine)

Bolton calls Trump “aberrational” or an “aberration,” but this is not the only time Bolton has done so. He did so in June 2020 when interviewed by ABC News, in an interview for NPR in August 2023, in March this year in a tweet from his own Xitter account, and in the India Today video (11:52) featured above.

While criticizing Trump and his foreign policy (or lack thereof), Bolton makes a point of calling Trump an aberration so often through so many media outlets that it seems like a campaign slogan.

In the Hindustan Times Bolton also noted Trump’s repression of free speech critical of his geopolitics. Bolton had to know that he would face more aggressive tactics by the Trump administration to squelch his criticism.

But what if this was the point? To egg Trump on with repeated critical comments Bolton knew from experience would hit a nerve with Trump, to goad him into attacking Bolton?

What if Bolton made it — the investigation into him including the raid on his home yesterday — happen on purpose? In other words, a MIHOP gambit?

If so, what are the next moves by Bolton and Trump?

~ ~ ~

During the February 5, 2020 hearing before the House Committee on the Judiciary, there were a couple questions asked of then-FBI Director Chris Wray mentioning John Bolton by name. First, committee chair Rep. Jerry Nadler (D, NY-12):

Chair Nadler. Okay. Now, recent reporting suggests that the
President plans to seek payback against those individuals he
believes crossed him during the impeachment proceedings. I am
sorry to have to ask. Has the President, the Attorney General,
or any other Administration official asked the FBI to open an
investigation into Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, John Bolton, or any
Member of Congress?
Mr. Wray. Mr. Chair, I have assured the Congress and I can
assure the Congress today that the FBI will only open
investigations based on the facts, law, and proper predication.
Chair Nadler. I understand that, and I assume that it is
correct that neither the President, the Attorney General, or
any other Administration official has asked the FBI to open
improper political investigations?
Mr. Wray. No one has asked me to open an investigation
based on anything other than the facts, law, and proper
predication.

Later in the hearing, Rep. Joe Neguse (D, CO-02):

I want to give you an opportunity to clarify earlier part
of your testimony. The Chair had asked a question, and I think
there was some confusion around your answer. So, with respect
to a recent article that alleges that the Administration may be
attempting to initiate political investigations or politically
motivated investigations, rather, into their political
opponents, has the President, the Attorney General, or any
Member of the Administration asked you to initiate an
investigation into John Bolton?
I am not asking whether or not that request would be
improper or proper or whether or not if such a request was
made, if you have initiated such an investigation. I am simply
asking if they have asked you to do so.
Mr. Wray. I understand why you’re asking the question, and
I would just tell you my commitment to doing things by the book
includes not talking about whether any particular investigation
does or does not exist. You shouldn’t read anything into that.
That’s not a hint that anything is happening. It’s just I don’t
think that’s a question that I can responsibly answer if I’m
going to be faithful to my commitment to doing things by the
book.
Mr. Neguse. Well, we appreciate–
Mr. Wray. I will tell you, as I said to the Chair–I will
tell you, as I said to the Chair, that no one has asked me to
open any investigation on anything that’s not consistent with
the facts, the law, and proper predication.
Mr. Neguse. I would just say, Director Wray, with all
respect, as you could probably imagine, these questions, both
the question the Chair posed and the question that I posed, are
not academic or esoteric for us. Seven months ago, Special
Counsel Mueller sat in the same chair that you are in, and we
all know now, that the very next day, the President had his
infamous call with the President of Ukraine, in which he sought
foreign interference in our elections. Of course, as you know,
in just a few hours, the Senate will render judgment in the
impeachment trial of the President.
So, one can ask reasonable questions as we read these
reports that we just over the course of the last few days as to
potentially what other actions this Administration might take.
So, again, I appreciate your earlier answer, and I want to move
on to a different topic, which is election interference.
There was an article just a few weeks ago in the New York
Times, and I would ask for unanimous consent to enter it into
the record. “ `Chaos Is the Point’: Russian Hackers and Trolls
Grow Stealthier in 2020,” by Matthew Rosenberg, Nicole
Perlroth, and David Sanger of the New York Times.
[The information follows:]

MR. NEGUSE FOR THE RECORD

==========================================
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

Mr. Neguse. In the article, there are a couple of
references to new developments in terms of the way in which
Russian actors, the intelligence apparatus is engaging in
disinformation in attempted interference in our elections. I
wonder if you could comment about two in particular? I will
just quote.

“One of the two Russian intelligence units that hacked
into Democrats in 2016, `Fancy Bear,’ has shifted some
of its work to servers based in the United States in an
apparent attempt to thwart the NSA, which is limited to
operating abroad. Also, the trolls at the Internet
Research Agency are trying to exploit a hole in
Facebook’s ban on foreigners buying political ads,
paying American users to hand over personal pages and
setting up offshore bank accounts to cover their
financial tracks.”

I wonder if you could expand in greater detail on both of
those two issues and how the FBI, I guess, is addressing both
of those developments.
Mr. Wray. So, certainly, I appreciate the interest. I think
I’d have to be pretty careful about how much detail I could
provide in an open hearing. I would say that we believe–we
assessed that the Russians continue to engage in malign foreign
influence efforts of the sort that I was describing before–
fake personas, trolls, bots, state-sponsored media, the whole
gamut in the bag of tricks.
We also assessed that just like any sophisticated actor,
that they continue to refine their approach. We saw that from
2016-2018. We’ve seen it from 2018 moving forward. Happily,
we’re refining our approach, too, and we’re trying to stay
ahead of it.

(emphasis mine)

In 2020, during Trump’s first administration, neither the Trump DOJ nor the Democratic Party-led House launched investigations into John Bolton as Trump’s NSA, and in the FBI’s case, did not launch an investigation based on politics into Bolton.

Trump has now overseen a massive purge of intelligence and security personnel, many of whom share one or two things in common: they were involved in investigations in which Trump was a central figure, or they were involved in investigations related to Russia.

How will the Trump administration justify investigating Bolton now when his first administration didn’t appear to have done so? What’s Team Trump’s next move? What about Bolton’s?

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Steamrolled: Vladimir Putin Shares an Existential Secret with Trump and You Just Saw the Result

August 16, 2025/128 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

I’m not going to say I told you so.

I will, however, say that if what I laid out before yesterday’s ass-handing were true, everything would go just as it did.

The meeting started with the red carpet welcome, with everything looking a bit dingy and Trump looking obeisant.

After a last minute switch, replacing the one-on-one, with a shared meeting, Trump and Putin had a short ride in Trump’s limo, with Putin grinning like the Cheshire cat. The meeting was abandoned early. Putin effectively ran the press event afterwards, in which he emphasized Russian demands that Ukraine subject itself to Russia, and Trump doubled down on his disproven claims that Hillary tried to frame him, when in fact Tulsi Gabbard recently released proof that Russia instead framed Hillary. Fully one-fifth of what Trump said was redoubling on the lie that Russia knows Trump knows to be a lie.

We were interfered with by the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. It made it a little bit tougher to deal with, but he understood it. I think he’s probably seen things like that during the course of his career. He’s seen- he’s seen it all. But we had to put up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. He knew it was a hoax, and I knew it was a hoax, but what was done was very criminal, but it made it harder for us to deal as a country, in terms of the business, and all of the things that would like to have dealt with, but we’ll have a good chance when this is over.

Trump’s commitment to that lie continued to his interview with Sean Hannity (in which Trump described a second one-on-one moment with Putin after the press appearance). Hannity’s first question was what Trump’s vibe was in the first minutes with Putin, and Trump repeated his claim that “we would have done great things” if not for the “Russia Russia Russia hoax, which stopped us from doing that,” then immediately claimed that the 2020 election was rigged. Then Trump turned to Putin’s claim that if he were President in 2022 the war would never have happened. Later in the interview, when Hannity raised Hillary’s quip that if Trump could make a just peace, she would nominate him for the Nobel Prize and invited Trump to attack Hillary for ruining three years of Trump’s life, Trump said that “she made me tougher.” Trump turned immediately from that to describe that Putin reinforced Trump’s false claims that he had won the election in 2020. And Trump explained why the war would never have happened if he were President: had he remained in office in 2021, then Putin wouldn’t have had to invade.

For Trump, this meeting was about sustaining the lies on which all his power is built: it’s not that Putin put him in charge because he would sell out America. Rather, he’s the victim. And by sustaining that lie, he renewed Russia’s great leverage over him.

Maybe that’s why he has no deal, why Trump told Hannity there’s one big issue Trump and Putin don’t agree on, why Trump’s team was all frowns yesterday, why even Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich described the presser as “very unusual.”

This continued to the Hannity presser. Hannity had to interrupt Trump babbling about tariffs to bring him back to Ukraine. Eventually (about four minutes later), Trump returned to the question of whether he could craft a deal to tell Hannity that he shouldn’t have done the interview.

Trump doesn’t want to talk about what demands Putin made of him.

He does want to cling to the lies that he can only sustain if Russia is willing.

And because of that, Trump allowed Putin to look like he owned the joint.

Which maybe he does.

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Donald Trump, Alone in the Room with His KGB Handler, Getting His Ass Served on a Picnic Platter

August 15, 2025/46 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

I was the fake news yesterday.

I taunted Kash Patel that he had yet to declassify the Crossfire Hurricane binder Trump purportedly declassified on January 19, 2021. But then I learned that Trump had declassified it.

Sort of.

Trump ordered it released in April, whereupon John Solomon posted it. And after Judicial Watch mentioned it in their FOIA lawsuit, FBI released a copy here. Which I’ve made available here.

I say sort of because, if you compare the released files with the two-part release to Judicial Watch as part of their 2022 FOIA (one, two), there are still a few of the things that were pending for DOJ release that have not been released. Plus, neither re-release includes two Carter Page FISA applications that have been substantially released.

That said, the famed Crossfire Hurricane binder is, as I wrote up in this post, one Dumbass Binder. It is really not all that interesting. It actually doesn’t tell the story of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, not even as completely as Jeffrey Jensen did in his efforts to unravel the Mike Flynn prosecution (but then, that effort involved a great deal of deception and cherry pick).

Almost half of the released pages consist of the Confidential Human Source management files of Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper. Those describe how much the men were paid and when they met with their handlers, including on topics totally unrelated to Crossfire Hurricane. That is, they’re very useful for Russian spies to reconstruct past disclosures. They’re very useful for making anyone who might inform on Trump or Russian sources think twice before cooperating with the FBI.

They’re useless for telling us what really happened with the investigation.

The release of the binder is yet another item in a very long list, seemingly done as part of Trump’s grievance that he needed Russian help to get elected, that has instead served to damage US intelligence, particularly Russian experts, a process I argued was built into Russia’s 2016 operation from the start:

Entail complicity in destroying the Deep State: I’m largely alone in this, but I believe that at least one of those quid pro quos raised the stakes of the inducements. If it is true — as I laid out here — that the Shadow Brokers operation dumping NSA exploits used the same infrastructure as the Guccifer 2.0 operation, it would mean the acceptance of the latter involved tacit participation in the former. More concretely, by the time Roger Stone started pursuing a Julian Assange pardon in October 2016, WikiLeaks was already sitting on the CIA hacking tools stolen by Joshua Schulte, tools that Schulte himself recognized would make it easy for Russia to identify CIA’s operations and assets; by the time Stone started intervening at the “highest levels of Government” for Assange, Trump’s own CIA Director had dubbed WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service. In other words, well before he was elected, Trump unwittingly entered a deal that would make him a participant in the willful destruction of the US security establishment to deliver on his side of the bargain.

Trump’s invented grievance about the 2016 election has led him to do the following:

Fire many of FBI’s top Russian experts at the FBI.
Retaliate against experts.
Expose recent CIA recruits.
Appointment of Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and John Ratcliffe as top spies, all of them Useful Idioms for Russia.
Fire more of FBI’s top Russian experts at FBI.
Elimination or down-grading of programs used to reign in Russia, including FARA, FCPA, Foreign Influence Task Force, and KleptoCapture.
Assign an incompetent idiot, Steve Witkoff, to carry out negotiations with Russia.
Refocus of organizations fighting hacking and foreign election interference.
Fire two top officials on the National Intelligence Council.
Fire six professionals at National Security Counsel, followed by Alex Wong and eventually Mike Waltz — a number of whom were more hawkish on Russia.
Reassignment of many experts on the National Security Counsel.
Fire NSA Director Timothy Haugh and NSA General Counsel April Doss.

And more recent disclosures — notably the HPSCI Report that served as a time machine to make Trump’s contacts with Russia go away — will make it far less likely that allies (like the Dutch) will share intelligence.

You could attribute all this to Trump’s grievances about the Deep State. At some point, though, that excuse begins to ring hollow.

But the effect of it is that Trump will walk into a meeting with Vladimir Putin today having rid himself of almost any competent advisors on Russia. He has, since he started clinging to the grievance Russia built into their 2016 election operation, aggressively eliminated all the people he would need to negotiate with Russia competently.

When Trump met with Putin in 2018, he was still advised by Fiona Hill, a genuine expert.

Hill was asked about her experiences at the summit in Helsinki, when Trump caused huge controversy by meeting Putin alone then appearing deferential in public, saying he took the Russian president at his word that he did not interfere in the US election in 2016 – a conclusion not supported by US intelligence and law enforcement.

Hill has previously said she was so appalled that she considered faking a sudden illness to stop the press conference.

“I also thought about pulling the fire alarm, but I didn’t know what Finnish was for ‘fire alarm’,” Hill said, to laughter.

More seriously, Hill said, the Putin press conference “was one of the most humiliating episodes of all time.

[snip]

“The issue was really the press conference itself. We knew that it was going to be difficult. I’d actually recommended against a press conference. My word didn’t have much coinage in that environment but one of the reasons was because Trump admires Putin so much, he never wants to be humiliated. And it was all about a personal sense of humiliation.

“The instance in which he was asked the question about whether he felt that the Russians interfered in the election, he wanted to push back very quickly against it. He wanted to diminish any kind of idea of that because if … he wanted to get the message across that nobody had interfered on his behalf.”

He got his ass handed to him. It was an utter humiliation for Trump and for the United States.

But this time, having soiled himself in Helsinki, Trump will go into a solo meeting with Putin having been advised by sycophants at best, including those who proudly spout Russian Useful Idioms.

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What Price Would Trump Demand to Sell Out Ukraine?

August 13, 2025/93 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

If I hadn’t already concluded that the coverage of Trump’s sell-out to Putin on Ukraine adopts the wrong framework, I’d be pissed that Lawrence Freedman stole my intended title, “Baked Alaska,” for this column. Freedman’s is the best analysis of Trump’s “deal” using a traditional diplomatic framework. Freedman argues that Trump has accepted this deal out of wishful thinking.

Donald Trump continues to pursue a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine despite the accumulating evidence that there is no deal to be had. He has acknowledged, after many fruitless phone calls, that Putin has been stringing him along, even accusing him of peddling ‘bullshit’. In an interview with the BBC, he acknowledged

‘We’ll have a great conversation. I’ll say: “That’s good, I’ll think we’re close to getting it done,” and then he’ll knock down a building in Kyiv.’

He observed of Putin that ‘I’m disappointed in him, but I’m not done with him.’

And so like Charlie Brown, shocked each time Lucy pulls the ball away as he is about to kick it, Trump allows wishful thinking to triumph over experience. He clings to the belief that a direct conversation with the Russian leader is the key to unlocking the whole process. As he insisted two months ago, ’Look, nothing is going to happen until Putin and I get together.’

Freedman links to but doesn’t dwell on the implications of this BILD report: as the clock was ticking down on Trump’s imaginary deadline for Putin to stop fighting, Trump offered up sanctions relief and territorial concessions, but Putin refused.

“Vladimir Putin still wants full control over the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions. He only offered a partial ceasefire – a refusal to attack energy facilities and large cities in the rear. But not a comprehensive ceasefire,” a BILD source stated.

The publication emphasizes that the US, on the contrary, proposed freezing the war along the current front line in exchange for a broad lifting of sanctions and new economic agreements with Russia. According to BILD, the Kremlin was unwilling to accept this proposal.

Even after offering Russia most of what it needs to keep fighting and getting rejected, Trump claimed he might still get concessions out of Putin.

And while that does confirm Freedman’s conclusion — that Trump will be embarrassed — I think imposing a diplomatic lens on this negotiation is as ridiculous, at this point, as it would be to impose an economic lens on Trump’s tariff deals. These deals are not about outcomes — improving the economy or saving Ukrainians’ (much less Palestinians’) lives.

They’re about about Trump’s need to feel powerful, his need to coerce tribute. And he’s willing to destroy America in that pursuit.

Coverage since Freedman’s column has begun to inch closer to that, such as this tidbit in ¶6 of a WSJ article describing that a Trump Tower deal for Trump is back on the table.

Alexander Yakovenko, a former ambassador who headed Russia’s foreign-service academy until last year, wrote in an op-ed for the state RIA news agency that “settling the war in Ukraine, which has been lost by the West a long time ago, has become a secondary issue in relations between the United States and Russia—nothing more than an obstacle to normalization that we must overcome together.”

Ever since the summit was announced, Russian media has been replete with stories about special U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Dmitriev sharing fried dumplings at a restaurant in the Russian capital, and about the site of a future Moscow hotel, described as a possible Trump Tower Moscow, that the two men visited last week.

A decade ago, this impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal was going to be worth $300 million. Since then, of course, Trump has turned Trump Tower deals — in Oman, Dubai, Hanoi, Jeddah — into an expanding currency. Back in office now with a pliant Attorney General and immunity for official acts, every deal Trump makes has a side hustle: “free” flying bribery palaces that will cost taxpayers $1 billion, golden shares to destroy a healthy union, 15% to deal critical technology to China. And that’s before you consider the crypto, including the two separate hundred million dollar investments from Chinese linked businessmen, one of whom got a fraud case dismissed. (Er … perhaps the Nvidia approval, to say nothing of the neverending delays in slapping tariffs on China, are not so separate.) His $4.5 billion crypto profit since returning to office may depend on another corrupt pardon.

You cannot assess Trump’s tariff deals in terms of the economic logic because there is none. They are destroying entire US industries by giving foreign companies a competitive advantage.

Similarly, you cannot assess Trump’s upcoming capitulation to Putin in diplomatic terms, because there is none.

This is about Trump.

And I don’t think you can assess how Friday will go without reviewing where we are.

Vladimir Putin helped Trump get elected in 2016 because, according to a piece of intelligence released by Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe, he was “counting on” a Trump win. During the election, Russia floated that impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal. Shortly thereafter, the Agalarovs dangled dirt on Hillary for sanctions relief from Don Jr. And then, just over nine years ago, they had a meeting with Trump’s campaign manager (he had come from a meeting with Trump and Rudy Giuliani) where they discussed how Manafort planned to win the swing states, how to get Manafort paid millions …

And a plan to carve up Ukraine.

A plan not all that different from this plan to carve up Ukraine. Trump seemed all in and even was discussing business deals with the same guy that his latest flunkie, Steve Witkoff, is shopping Trump Tower sites with now.

Trump was gung ho to deliver that deal until his National Security Adviser, on a phone that Russians undoubtedly knew was tapped, assured Sergey Kislyak that “boss is aware” of Flynn’s own efforts to undercut sanctions punishing Russia for helping Trump get elected. And that resulted in a criminal investigation that disrupted those plans.

Trump has complained for nine years that Democrats ruined his presidential term because of that investigation, but really, it was his National Security Adviser’s shitty OpSec, even worse than Mike Waltz’ all these years later.

And as a result, Trump and the Russians have spent nine years trying to bury that past in false stories. In one of the first meetings between Trump and Putin, they crafted a cover story for the Aras Agalarov dangle together, outside the hearing of an American translator. At their Helsinki meeting, Trump famously sided with Putin’s spies over his own.

My people came to me, Dan Coates, came to me and some others they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia.

I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be. But I really do want to see the server but I have, I have confidence in both parties.

[snip]

I have great confidence in my intelligence people but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today and what he did is an incredible offer.

He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators, with respect to the 12 people. I think that’s an incredible offer. Ok? Thank you.

Putin joked that, “I’d like to add something to this. After all, I was an intelligence officer myself and I do know how dossiers are made up.” It was about that time when right wingers averted their gaze from Oleg Deripaska’s likely role in the dossier, which enabled Trump to keep claiming that the dossier — which appears to be the result of Russians fucking Hillary over for her poor choice in a subcontractor her team barely interacted with — was the source of his woes and not his own actions.

Around that same time, we now know, Trump started chasing more Russian disinformation, the attempt to frame Hillary that Russian spies invented the day after the investigation into the Russian hack was publicly announced. Trump started adopting that Russian disinformation as the founding myth of his MAGAt tribe. That’s what Bill Barr used, successfully, to bury the damning results of the Mueller investigation. And Trump’s hunt for disinformation is what elicited his attempt to corrupt the newly elected President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in 2019. “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it, ” Trump started his extortion attempt, before turning, less than 30 words later, to his claim that Ukraine, not the FBI, had the server Russia hacked: “The server, they say Ukraine has it.” And Trump kept chasing that disinformation, pushing Rudy to team up with Andrii Derkach and others in search of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

At this point, every single claim on which Trump builds his own legitimacy, according to the terms he himself measures it, is built on Russian disinformation. And that means every single claim is built on degrading rule of law in the United States. Every single claim is built on ever deeper swamps of corruption.

And after he won again — with some overt Russian disinformation and who knows what kind of help from bomb threats originating in Russia — Russia made clear they plan to collect. One of Putin’s closest allies, Nikolay Patrushev stated, truthfully, that Trump had relied on certain forces to get elected, to claim legitimacy.

In his future policies, including those on the Russian track US President-elect Donald Trump will rely on the commitments to the forces that brought him to power, rather than on election pledges, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev told the daily Kommersant in an interview.

“The election campaign is over,” Patrushev noted. “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”

He agreed that Trump, when he was still a candidate, “made many statements critical of the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current administration.”

“But very often election pledges in the United States can [d]iverge from subsequent actions,” he recalled.

Republican Donald Trump outperformed the candidate from the ruling Democratic Party, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the US elections held on November 5. Trump will take office on January 20, 2025. During the election campaign Trump mentioned his peace-oriented, pragmatic intentions, including in relations with Russia.

“He will be obligated to fulfill them.”

The mistake, in analyzing the Alaska meeting is not just about Ukraine.

It’s about the United States.

It’s not just that Putin can bide his time in Ukraine.

It’s that the longer he holds out, the greater his true objective — turning Trump into his puppet and the United States into a dying kleptocracy that is child’s play to manipulate — comes into grasp.

Putin may still be fighting in Ukraine. But he has achieved far more than he probably hoped for in the US. He has all but defeated every nuisance the Main Enemy once stood for: rule of law, free trade, freedom of speech, science, human rights, reason.

It’s not just that Trump is welcoming a dictator on US soil. It’s that the dictator is coming to reclaim what Russia owns.

Update: This paywalled Telegraph piece says Trump is discussing cooperation on mineral resources in both Eastern Ukraine and Alaska, with an end to sanctions on parts and planes.

Update: OFAC has just cleared a sanction license for the meeting, meaning sanctioned people — like Oleg Deripaska — could attend.

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John Durham’s Guccifer Gaps

August 6, 2025/2 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

In this post, I reviewed the two premises of John Durham’s investigation into Hillary Clinton:

Documents stolen from Russian spies claimed Hillary Clinton had a plan to smear Donald Trump because of his ties to Russia (to which Durham added a plan that she would fabricate evidence against Trump)
The FBI should have taken that into consideration before they relied on the Steele dossier or investigated the Alfa Bank anomalies

I also showed that Durham was lying about what document he built that premise off of, which he claimed was a draft SVR report, the date of which he never disclosed (but which appears to date to July 27). In fact, the notice that CIA gave to FBI of that alleged plan was almost certainly a different one, one which made it clear that Hillary didn’t have a plan to frame Trump, but instead that SVR had a plan to frame Hillary.

As part of that argument, I showed how the referral memo — a memo CIA drafted to send to the FBI in early September 2016, but which appears never got sent — doesn’t actually match the draft SVR report (reporting that Hillary would smear Trump), but instead matches emails that show SVR would frame Hillary.

I noted that the memo refers to “an exchange,” not a draft memo.

But I also noted that there was a redaction pertaining to Guccifer 2.0 that, in 2020 — two years after Robert Mueller indicted GRU for Guccifer 2.0 — John Ratcliffe didn’t want to share publicly.

That’s where I may have misstated. I claimed that the report had nothing that could match that kind of Guccifer 2.0 reference. But it actually may. There’s a redaction in the excerpted report in the Durham annex right after a discussion of Guccifer 2.0 (the only reference to Guccifer in the declassified material), which then picks back up with questions of attribution that had been the subject of discussion of one of the only real emails found to be quoted in the report.

In other words, I could be wrong that Guccifer does not feature prominently in this report. It may be that Durham hid it, just like John Ratcliffe hid it in the referral memo.

Still, what’s clear is that the Deep State email that almost certainly launched this effort did tie Guccifer to Hillary.

Effectively, this exchange says, “fuck, they’re onto Guccifer, let’s start a conspiracy theory about Hillary! dark forces!! Deep State!!!” And then the follow-up email describes the conspiracy theory in terms of “vilifying” Putin and Trump.

And that matters because shortly after this email, Russia launched a sustained, two-fold campaign, both to undermine the attribution of Guccifer 2.0 and to frame Hillary Clinton. Indeed, just days after SVR set out to frame Hillary Clinton, the effort to debunk the Guccifer attribution expanded, not least with Roger Stone, who reversed course on the Russian attribution over a matter of days in early August 2016, as if he were reading right from the SVR script.

A few days after that, Julian Assange picked up the Seth Rich conspiracy started, a conspiracy theory that provided an alternative source for the documents stolen by GRU, one that played on dark forces involved with the Clintons.

And where did that come from?

SVR reports purporting to date back to July 13 — the very same stash of documents that fabricated a plan by Hillary Clinton to smear Donald Trump.

ISIKOFF: Exactly. She was puzzled about all the conspiracy theories swirling around the case that she was investigating. So she finally turns to the U.S. intelligence community. She had a security clearance as a assistant U.S. attorney. She asked them to help her figure out, where’s all this stuff coming from? And they come back with a bombshell. They provide Sines with copies, English translations of copies of intelligence bulletins that were circulated by the Russian SVR – that’s Russia’s version of the CIA – just three days after Seth Rich’s death, July 13, 2016. In the intel – that first intelligence bulletin, the SVR suggests – it doesn’t suggest – asserts that Seth Rich was on his way to talk to the FBI that early Sunday morning when he was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton.

And this was, as far as we can tell, the first time that a conspiracy theory about Seth Rich’s death was put out there. That very same day, July 13, it pops up on an obscure website, called whatdoesitmean.com, which, when you look at it and examine it, it’s filled with all sorts of stories attributed to Russian intelligence officials, Russian foreign ministry officials, Russian press reports. It’s effectively a vehicle for Kremlin propaganda. And they apparently took this SVR bulletin that had been intercepted by U.S. intelligence officials and used it to put out this wild conspiracy theory that played right into that far-right conspiratorial meme I mentioned before about the Clintons’ – a Clinton body count and assassins working for the Clintons who go around rubbing out inconvenient people in their political path.

The efforts to undermine the Guccifer 2.0 attribution didn’t much survive the other public attributions, including confirmation in the Intelligence Community Assessment, to say nothing of the Mueller indictment of GRU.

Except, of course, for this guy.

I actually suspect that Durham’s team aspired to include the whole muddle. After all, when interviewing Manos Antonakakis in the days after Durham should have given up his conspiracy theory, Andrew DeFilippis attacked the DNS researcher for deigning to try to attribute Guccifer 2.0.

Finally, I will leave you with an anecdote and a thought. During one of my interviews with the Special Counsel prosecutor, I was asked point blank by Mr. DeFilippis, “Do you believe that DARPA should be instructing you to investigate the origins of a hacker (Guccifer_2.0) that hacked a political entity (DNC)?” Let that sync for a moment, folks. Someone hacked a political party (DNC, in this case), in the middle of an election year (2016), and the lead investigator of DoJ’s special council would question whether US researchers working for DARPA should conduct investigations in this matter is “acceptable”! While I was tempted to say back to him “What if this hacker hacked GOP? Would you want me to investigate him then?”, I kept my cool and I told him that this is a question for DARPA’s director, and not for me to answer.

So the effort to frame Hillary Clinton had to be spun free of the effort to muddle attribution of Guccifer 2.0.

But not when SVR first launched this campaign.

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How Chuck Grassley’s Politicized Redactions Gave Putin Leverage over Trump

August 6, 2025/13 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

After making Canada, Japan, Vietnam, and Switzerland go to the US and making the EU go to Trump’s golf course in Scotland to negotiate tariffs, Trump sent his real estate developer buddy, Steve Witkoff, to Moscow to negotiate tariffs with Vladimir Putin.

I would have low expectations that Witkoff, who has gotten his ass handed to him at every turn, would negotiate a reasonable deal with Russia in any case.

All the more so given the politicized release of old documents on Russia that Tulsi Gabbard has orchestrated in recent weeks.

Consider just this redaction in the classified Durham appendix that Chuck Grassley released last week.

As I laid out here, the redaction is designed to fool readers in several ways.

First, it helps to sustain a fiction that the draft SVR memo purporting to report Hillary Clinton approving a plan to smear Donald Trump is the first document in a series, and not the last. That, in turn, serves to suggest that what I call the Deep State memo, laying out a plan by SVR to frame Hillary came after the draft memo, rather than laid out a plan to fabricate the memo, complete with fabricated emails including Russian idioms attributed to Leonard Benardo.

But that’s not right. The Deep State email was, Durham described, sent on July 26. The draft SVR email incorporates an email fabricated on July 27.

Indeed, after this Deep State email, Russian spies talked about “mak[ing] [something]” — that is, fabricating emails — to “illuminate” how Clinton wanted to “vilif[y]” Trump and Putin, proposing an initial fabricated July 25 email promising to, “put more oil into the fire,” but not yet adding reference to the doping scandal that was contemporaneously a very sore subject for Russia. The email with the reference to the Olympics, dated July 25 but almost certainly fabricated on July 27, is the one that was incorporated into the draft SVR memo.

In response, those Russian spies said … we don’t know what, but we do know that they attached the fabricated July 27 email purporting to reflect Hillary approving that plan on July 26.

I’d love to know what that email says; it may make it more clear that this was all a great plan to frame Hillary Clinton, or it may reveal other parts of the plan, possibly pertaining to Guccifer 2.0. But I don’t need to know what it says to know that the email gives Putin great leverage over Donald Trump at the moment that Trump finally tries to assert a strong hand with the Russian dictator.

By hiding that email in an attempt to hide that what Trump has claimed for eight years was an effort by Hillary to frame Trump was — is, still — a wildly successful attempt by SVR to frame Hillary, Trump’s top spies — Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director and Useful Idiom John Ratcliffe, and FBI Director Kash Patel — have all sustained a secret with Russia’s spies, a secret Kash has been chasing all that time, a secret that could legally implicate at least Ratcliffe and Kash (not least because they sustained this campaign during the time they were private citizens) in a crime.

Trump’s top spies are keeping a secret: the secret that for the last eight years Trump has carried out precisely the plan to frame Hillary Clinton that those SVR spies first ginned up on July 26, 2016.

And here’s the thing. Putin’s spies know much of what is behind that redaction. They can reverse engineer it because the footnote to it shows that the email in question is the one to which those Russian spies attached that fake July 27 email, nine years ago. They still have that email. Hell, it’s probably hanging in a gilt-edged frame somewhere, Putin’s trophy from a wildly successful attempt to compromise the Main Enemy.

So that redaction is not, as a classification redaction should, keeping any secrets from our adversaries. The Russian spies know what is too embarrassing for Grassley and Tulsi and Kash and Ratcliffe to release.

But we don’t.

And that’s why this entire frenzy to release more secrets just in advance of this meeting with Putin has made Trump far, far weaker.

Donald Trump cares more about his claims of grievance, a fake grievance that has always gotten him out of jams, than he does about America, to say nothing of Ukraine.

And Chuck Grassley’s willful protection of this secret between Putin’s spies and Trump’s has only served to give Putin leverage over Trump and over the United States.

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Donald Trump’s Parallel Ghislaine Maxwell and Vladimir Putin Problems

August 4, 2025/25 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

There was a fake story circulating the Intertoobz that in some kind of Turkish broadcast, Dmitry Medvedev said:

“Trump should not think that the video archive of his past immoralities is only in the hands of Mossad.”

The fake, as good fakes do, plays on something real about the moment, even while confirming what people want to be true.

After, earlier in the summer, giving Putin the time he wanted to finish whatever he wants in Ukraine, Trump has reversed course, sort of. He has been trying to stop Putin from doing what Putin was going to do anyway, wagging but not imposing sanctions. Five days ago, Trump declared he was imposing a ten day deadline on Putin or else he will stop the car (just like Dad used to threaten on long roadtrips).

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that Russia must agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine by Aug. 8 or risk sanctions, accelerating a deadline that was previously up in the air.

Trump in July set a 50-day deadline for the agreement with Ukraine, threatening tariffs if a deal was not made. On Monday, during his meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, he said he was shortening this deadline to “10 or 12 days.”

Aboard Air Force One on Tuesday, on his way back to the United States, Trump said the clock was ticking and it was “10 days from today.”

“And then we’re going to put on tariffs,” Trump added, “and I don’t know if it’s going to affect Russia, because he wants to, obviously, probably keep the war going.”

The president has flipped on his views on the war in Ukraine throughout his second administration, recently expressing he is “disappointed” with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

He said Tuesday he has not yet heard from Russia about the new timeline.

In response, Real Medvedev trolled Trump on Xitter, likening him to Joe Biden.

Then Trump — still targeting Medvedev — claimed he was sending out his nukes.

Based on the highly provocative statements of the Former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that. Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Trump got the reaction his tweets alway get from Pavlov’s press corps, a slew of headlines treating this as true and meaningful.

Russian experts, however, mostly noted Russia yawning.

Could this be the first time in history a social media spat triggers nuclear escalation?

President Donald Trump, offended by posts by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, says he’s ordered two nuclear submarines to move closer to Russia.

So, how will Moscow respond? Are we on a path to a nuclear standoff between America and Russia? An internet-age version of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis?

I doubt it, judging by initial reaction in Russia.

Russian news outlets have been rather dismissive of Trump’s announcement.

Speaking to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, a military commentator concluded that Trump was “throwing a temper tantrum”.

A retired lieutenant-general told Kommersant that the US president’s talk of submarines was “meaningless blather. It’s how he gets his kicks”.

Then Putin — not Medvedev — made it known that Trump has misunderstood the scope of Putin’s ambition.

“All disappointments arise from inflated expectations,” Putin said, in an apparent reference to Trump’s “disappointment” with the Russian leader for not bringing an end to the war.

[snip]

Speaking on Friday at the Valaam Monastery on an island in north-western Russia, Putin said he expected negotiations with Ukraine to continue, adding that he viewed “negotiations positively”.

But in a veiled reference to growing pressure from Ukraine and its Western allies to agree to a long-term ceasefire, he said: “As for any disappointments on the part of anyone, all disappointments arise from inflated expectations.

Both Putin and Medvedev are making Trump look weak — or rather exposing that he is weak. My guess is they have good reason to know Trump’s is scared of exercising any real leverage over Putin, and for reasons that go well beyond any similarity to “Sleepy Joe.”

This fake Medvedev interview plays into that, suggesting that Russia has leverage because they have the Epstein files.

The claim is not remotely outlandish. Craig Unger has been focusing on the Russian aspects of Epstein’s past, including Svetlana Pozhidaeva, the woman trained as Russia trains its spies, who opened a modeling agency and then got a bunch of funding from Epstein to fund other things, as well as Masha Drokova, the pro-Russian activist who first served as Epstein’s publicist and then infiltrated Silicon Valley. More important, perhaps (since this is a fake Medvedev speech), is John Dougan, who was a West Palm Beach cop before he became — and still is — a Russian disinformation operative, one who overtly crafted anti-Harris disinformation in last year’s election.

His story begins in 2005 when Palm Beach authorities began investigating Epstein’s sex crimes. That meant the Epstein case had entered the court system, which in turn meant that his computers and videos became evidence, and new people—detectives, police, lawyers, and the like— suddenly had access to his secrets.

Enter John Mark Dougan, who had served as a deputy in the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office (PBSO) from 2002 to late 2008. With his shaved head and the sturdy build of a former Marine, Dougan is the sort of macho antihero of highly questionable reliability one encounters in the comic Florida crime fiction of Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard. His patchy job history has taken him laterally from police work to horse transportation to database design to piloting. In interviews with me in 2020, he presented himself as a hapless and Quixotic underdog who has been taking on the powers that be in Palm Beach County since he resigned in 2009.

But now he is an operative for Russian intelligence.

[snip]

In October, just before the election, Catherine Belton reported in The Washington Post that Dougan was directly working with the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, that he was being mentored by Alexander Dugin, a far-right ideologue sometimes known as “Putin’s brain,” and that his posts smearing Tim Walz and Kamala Harris had reached at least 64 million people.

I know separately that, as recently as June, Dougan was trying to resuscitate the ghost of Seth Rich.

As Unger explains, Dougan has told both him and Julie Brown that the real investigator behind the Epstein case left files with Dougan for safekeeping.

So, Dougan said, Recarey came over to his office in Palm Beach with a cartful of boxes. “One of the boxes was a bunch of DVDs— the blank kind that you record your own media on,” Dougan recalled. “They were labeled by date and spanned from 1994 to 2005 or so.”

Recarey didn’t elaborate about the contents of the boxes, but he said they were related to the Epstein case. In addition, Dougan told me, Recarey explained that his investigation was being sabotaged by both Epstein and his powerful allies, and he wanted to make sure he had copies in case they tried to make the originals disappear.

Dougan also told me that he later found out that Recarey’s disk contained 478 sex tapes of Epstein’s friends having sex with young girls, many of whom were underage.

But both Unger and Brown found the claim lacked merit.

The thing is, even if Dougan’s claims to have had Epstein tapes back in 2020 were false, it’s certainly possible that Russia has obtained copies now. That’s because Pam Bondi is an incompetent dipshit, and had 1,000 people do a rushed review of the Epstein materials on a SharePoint server.

Among other tasks, the lawyers were instructed to flag any mentions of Mr. Trump and other celebrities, including former President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, in the documents, according to one of the former officials familiar with the process. The references were recorded in a Microsoft SharePoint online collaborative file.

At the very least, those files would likely have been easy for any of several Elon DOGE boys to steal. And it’s possible the SharePoint server itself would have been vulnerable to the recently identified zero day that made certain kinds of SharePoint servers easily accessible.

Now, it’s certainly possible that Russia believes Trump won’t push too hard because they have precisely the same incriminating information that Todd Blanche is busy covering up.

But as has been the case for years, it was never the pee tapes that would most worry Trump. It’s the proof that Trump owes his presidency — now, both of them — to Russia. Remember how, days after Trump won, Nicolay Patrushev warned Trump that, this time, he better deliver on the promises , on precisely this issue, Ukraine.

In his future policies, including those on the Russian track US President-elect Donald Trump will rely on the commitments to the forces that brought him to power, rather than on election pledges, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev told the daily Kommersant in an interview.

“The election campaign is over,” Patrushev noted. “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”

He agreed that Trump, when he was still a candidate, “made many statements critical of the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current administration.”

“But very often election pledges in the United States can [d]iverge from subsequent actions,” he recalled.

Republican Donald Trump outperformed the candidate from the ruling Democratic Party, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the US elections held on November 5. Trump will take office on January 20, 2025. During the election campaign Trump mentioned his peace-oriented, pragmatic intentions, including in relations with Russia.

And while it is absolutely the case that Trump has been releasing Russia Russia Russia documents in the last several weeks in a desperate — and only partially successful — bid to get his mob refocused away from his sex trafficking scandal, I have been wondering all that time whether Trump wasn’t also trying to lay the groundwork for capitulation to Putin by preempting any claim that he’s a Russian agent by reminding his mob that their foundational belief is that Trump was wronged by the Russian investigation that showed that his Coffee Boy, National Security Advisor, Campaign Manager, personal lawyer, and rat-fucker were all adjudged to have lied to cover up his Russian ties.

Mind you, even that effort is having only limited success. Kash Patel and John Ratcliffe are so fucking incompetent they have instead disclosed proof that they’ve been carrying water for Russian spies for at least the last five years, and in Kash’s case, almost as soon as some Russian spooks thought it’d be fun to, “put more oil into the fire.”

Still, Trump is rousing the muscle memory of his base to view each and every capitulation Trump makes to Russia as proof of Democratic corruption. And he’s been doing so at the moment when he would have to prove his strength in front of the man who has played him so well for a decade.

Update: Fixed spelling of Unger’s last name.

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Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

July 25, 2025/21 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

It’s funny, reading the two rehashes of the 2017 ICA that John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard released in the last weeks.

There are parallels and common judgments between them (probably in part because the CIA one was limited to “CIA materials provided to congressional oversight investigations”). Both say the confidence level for the judgment that Putin “aspired” to help then-candidate Donald Trump win the election was too high. Both say John Brennan big-footed the process in a problematic way. Both complain about the short timeline. Both complain that “the highest classified version of the ICA had been shared with more than 200 US officials;” neither acknowledge that that was neither anticipated nor, presumably, the fault of Obama appointees, who were long-gone by the time Trump’s appointees disseminated it that broadly (and in fact other documents Tulsi released suggest that ICA drafters intentionally planned a less-classified version to be disseminated at that level, to avoid the problem Trump’s appointees complain about). Both complain about how the Steele dossier was added as an appendix, though (as I’ll show in a follow-up) they’re inconsistent about how they claim it was.

But there are differences. the document from Ratcliffe — who released the first of the SRV documents contemporaneously with the HPSCI report that obsessed about them — doesn’t appear to mention them at all.

The two reports treat three pieces of intelligence on which the “aspired” judgment was based differently (the CIA one may not treat one of the HPSCI complaints at all). As I’ll note in my main post on the HPSCI report, CIA treats one document that HPSCI considers problematic as reliable but compartmented in a way that made inclusion problematic.

Perhaps the most interesting detail you get from reading both in tandem pertains to one phrase in a document about which “a senior CIA operations officer observed, ‘We don’t know what was meant by that’ and ‘five people read it five ways,'” basically, about whether that phrase hade been read the correct way. As of a few weeks ago, in Ratcliffe’s report, the CIA was still trying to protect this intelligence, but not Tulsi. She declassified most of four pages of discussion about the phrase, with information about the access — the source was well-established, had authoritative access to something but second-hand access to this information, but for some reason the CIA was not able to clarify what the source meant by the phrase. The HPSCI Report complains that the ICA didn’t note that this person had an “anti-Trump bias” (emphasis original).

And Tulsi declassified what the intelligence said (even though she hadn’t in the less classified version of the ICA she had released a day earlier).

Putin had made this decision [to leak DNC emails in July] after he had come to believe that the Democratic nominee had better odds of winning the U.S. presidential election, and that [Trump], whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.

The HPSCI memo goes on to complain that Brennan included this. It invents a number of other readings this could have meant, besides that Putin wanted to help Trump win. Maybe Putin expected Trump to win, in July 2016 when no one else did? Maybe Putin counted on a Trump win at the RNC? They even tried to undermine the intelligence by claiming that all the things Putin did to tamper in the election could have served the other goals he also had.

None of the confirmed activities — leaks, public statements, social media messaging, and traditional propaganda — corroborate the ICA interpretation of the fragment, because these activities were all consistent with Putin’s objectives to undermine faith in US democracy, without regard for candidate Trump’s fate.

Putin approved the DNC leak because he was counting on Trump to win, the fragment said, and HPSCI Republicans want to believe that maybe Putin just wanted to undermine faith in democracy.

Well, anyway, as I said, Ratcliffe didn’t declassify any of that. He did send analysts back to review the underlying intelligence, and here’s what they said.

The DA Review examined the underlying raw intelligence and confirmed that the clause was accurately represented in the serialized report, and that the ICA authors’ interpretation of its meaning was most consistent with the raw intelligence.

And Ratcliffe also backs the quality of the source behind this claim.

The DA Review does not dispute the quality and credibility of the highly classified CIA serialized report that the ICA authors relied on to drive the “aspired” judgment.

So between them, Tulsi and Ratcliffe provided us something genuinely new. According to a reliable but ambiguous intelligence fragment, CIA got intelligence that said Putin approved the DNC leak “because he was counting on” Trump’s victory.

Update: I’ve fixed the quotation mark in the title: just the “counting on” is a direct quote.

Links

A Dossier Steal: HPSCI Expertly Discloses Their Own Shoddy Cover-Up

Think of the HPSCI Report as a Time Machine to Launder Donald Trump’s Russia Russia Russia Claims

Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

The Secrets about Russia’s Influence Operation that Tulsi Gabbard Is Still Keeping from Us

Tulsi Gabbard Accuses Kash Patel of Covering Up for the Obama Deep State

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JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference: A Speech by Gaslight

February 18, 2025/39 Comments/in Russo-Ukrainian War, Trump 2.0 /by Quinn Norton

How Vance unsettled the Europeans

While Musk was ripping through the US government like a 10 tonne toddler on cocaine, Vice President JD Vance was dispatched to the Munich Security Conference last week to tell Europeans how to run their democracies. His 19 minute speech, coupled with Trumps’ announcement that peace in Ukraine would be decided in a meeting between the US and Russia only, has swept the legs out from under Europe, NATO, and the post-war transatlantic consensus.

The speech itself was deeply weird, and breathtakingly hypocritical. Who was it for? It’s inscrutable. It wasn’t the people in the room, Vance even joked that the room would hate it. Much of it, like talk of abortion clinic perimeters, Christians burning Qurans, and weird inaccurate anecdotes about prayers didn’t make sense for a Defense crowd. The talk couldn’t have been for the base back home; they’ll never see it, and wouldn’t get the references if they did.

Could the Europeans be the audience? Unlikely. It misunderstood European coalition politics to the point of embarrassment. I doubt it was for his boss, who isn’t particularly interested in European details, and anyway is busy destroying the state back home with Elon Musk and Elon’s emotional support human. Perhaps it was for the Heritage-Leonard Leo-Peter Thiel crowd, but then it doesn’t accomplish much more than meeting up with them and complaining about the unmanliness of Europeans over scotch.

Vance opened with talking about an Afghan man who had driven his car into a market and killed two people recently in Munich. He segued smoothly from a convincing show of human sympathy to unconvincing and suddenly icky attempt to link migration and violence. Mass violence in Europe is an issue, but it isn’t anywhere close to how prevalent it is in America. And the common factor of mass violence events isn’t migration status, it’s men.

For me, as an American who has made the EU my home, the most disturbing aspect was the pure hit by hit gaslighting Vance delivered to his audience. Based on the faces of the mostly silent crowd, they were disturbed too. He took what could have been a strong list of America’s political flaws, and scolded the Europeans for them. It was manipulative and shameless, but at least is was also transparently manipulative. No one in the room was buying it.

A group of EU mukities being annoyed with their Vance scolding session

Not particularly into this nonsense.

Vance’s speech was a scold, talking about a number of fairly niche European issues that wouldn’t read to the regime’s American supporters back home. But he also spoke as if Germany, and indeed all of Europe, was failing to meet some obligation to the US Constitution. He seemed unable to distinguish between the legal systems of the many nations of Europe, and our Constitution. He criticized the German firewall policy to keep Nazi-adjacent parties out of the German government. But he seemed to mistake it for some formal legal mechanism, rather than just rejecting associating with someone during negotiations. Coming from the American winner-take-all system, he didn’t seem to understand the many methods of how governments are formed and fall in Europe.

It was like the geopolitical version of Americans traveling abroad who are shocked to find that local laws do apply to them, and that you can’t pay in dollars.

Perhaps the most embarrassing moment in the speech was one of his most fervent, about the Romanian election. He was outraged that the Romanian supreme court ordered a re-run of an election because of credible allegations of Russian interference. But, of course, this was a constitutional choice made by the empowered body in Romania, which importantly here, is not subject to the US Constitution.

Vance doesn’t have a lower division polysci major’s understanding of European political realities. About Romania’s troubles, he said “But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.” Here I have to give a long, deep sigh. That is correct, Mr. Vance.

Part of the project of the European Union is to help politically weakened former eastern bloc European democracies strengthen their institutions with the goal of becoming robust democracies, one day. After decades of Soviet oppression and exploitation, institutions are weak and corruption is endemic in many of these countries. They are not strong democracies right now, and we all know that over here. It’s part of the grand conversation of the European Union. Even the former Soviet block countries’ institutions generally countenance that fact. That’s why you might want to have a method of re-running an election in an unstable situation.

Honestly though, the US could take a hint or two from some of these “not strong to begin with” democracies. Having a mechanism to re-run the 2000 election would have done this country a good turn and saved a lot of trouble, however the re-run went.

It’s hard to overemphasize how much Vance didn’t understand, or even care to understand, the nations he was speaking to and about. He misunderstood perimeter laws in the UK, coalitions in Germany, speech law everywhere, and what the European Union exists for.

But Also, Rank Hypocrisy

He pounded out the words “If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you,” this, from a country that purges its own voter rolls along ethnic and political lines regularly. Politically motivated voter purges are uncommon in the EU, whereas they are an expected piece of electioneering in America. We even have to tell people to check and recheck they have’t been caught up in partisan voter purges every election. That’s so uncommon in Europe as to be a sign of political crisis, rather than business as usual.

Vance bellowed out at the crowd that “Thin mandates produce unstable results…” without the slightest sign of self-awareness. I have to agree with him in principle, but coalitions and alternatives to FPTP voting means that unclear and close results are rarer in Europe than America. He also conveniently omitted that his ticket won by 1.5% of the vote, but everyone in that room knew it.

One of the points he seemed very confident of was that “…there’s no more urgent issue than mass migration.” Migration is a complex issue in Europe, but most urgent? No, the data simply doesn’t support that. In fact Europeans largely agree on the need for migration, but the details are devilish. Many of us in Europe put inflation, inequality, and even climate change above migration. EU wide, the relevance of migration has been dropping steadily since the crisis a decade ago. Migration is there, but it doesn’t approach the rolling crises of consumer prices, inequality, and energy costs the truly plague Europe.

Americans don’t really worry about energy and resources the same way Europe does. Most of America’s inflation problems are more or less self-inflicted, but Europe has to rely on trade with the rest of the world to meet many of its existential needs. If Vance only talked to the AfD, Le Pen, and maybe Orban, he can definitely construct an ersatz man-child Europe, terrified of brown families crossing the Mediterranean looking for a better life. But that’s not all of Europe, and not even most of it these days.

But being an American talking about mass violence events in Europe is a tricky proposition. Being from a country where the most common cause of death in child is a bullet, Vance’s sentiment of “tak(ing) our shared civilization in a new direction” misses that a lot of Europeans don’t consider America very civilized, largely because of peculiar cultural norms like gun violence.

At one point, out of nowhere, Vance said “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunburg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.” I have no clue what this means. I think it was meant to be a laugh line. Maybe it just sounded good in his head.

Vance mainly spoke of an America that doesn’t exist. There is no broad consensus in America, no easy confidence about a bright future. The nation is checked out, divided, and struggling to survive. He wouldn’t dare try to give a ‘Morning in America’ speech any further west than Munich. He couldn’t even do it in Munich. No one was buying what he was selling.

The Europeans saw Vance as meddling, interfering in the ways that he was accusing them of doing, because he doesn’t understand European decorum around speech. Decorum is taken seriously in a way that American’s don’t understand, and a serious person is expected to watch their words in a way that Trump’s people don’t get, or care to get.

Vance often seems like the smart grownup in an administration of weirdos and troglodytes, but he’s not. He just cleans up ok. Give him some runway, and he shows he’s just as regressive and weird as the rest of the bunch. Vance is just another one of the idiot wrecking crew tearing their way through America, and now the world.

The Response

The consequences of this political clown show were immediate.

The one-two punch of Vance in Munich and Trump cutting everyone but Putin out of negotiating the Ukraine war has shocked Europe, possibly into action. Macron has hosted a meeting of leaders in Paris, including the largest states in the EU and the UK’s Keir Starmer, who is something of a self-appointed American whisperer.

It doesn’t mean the EU is springing into action. Springing is not a thing the EU does, but meetings are. It does point to the EU waking up to how dangerous the Americans really are right now, and also how delusional. Settling the Ukraine war without Ukraine at the table is insane, and both Zelensky and European leaders have pointed that out. If the Ukrainians don’t stop fighting, and they won’t, the war doesn’t end. It just turns into Russia’s Vietnam, or Algeria, or Afghanistan, again. And Ukraine becomes a field of bones and blood and hate.

There’s talk in Europe of peace keepers in Ukraine. Not serious talk, and peacekeepers are a terrible idea, but at least they’ve started throwing spaghetti at the wall.

NATO head Mark Rutte is out pounding the pavement with leaders and press about the need to get military spending in Europe up to 5% of Everyone’s GDP. It’s a transparent call to be able to cut the Americans out and take on threats like Russia and Iran on their own. But it’s also a hard lift, at a time when economics and climate change are pressing Europe. The countries most at risk — Poland, Finland, and the Baltics, are already ramping up to resist Russian invasion. This isn’t paranoia, Russian political elites have promised to come get them after Ukraine for years.

The US, and its power to bind things together geopolitically is gone, possibly for good. But the old European terrors, mainly Russia and in-fighting, persist.

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The Whole World is Watching, Trump Edition

January 21, 2025/68 Comments/in Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Israel, State Department, Trump Administration /by Peterr

A Pile of Doozies, waiting to be signed

There are some real doozies among the executive orders that were signed yesterday. As Marcy noted, the pardons were certainly among them. There is also the irony of opening up ANWR for drilling once more and exploiting Alaska’s environmental resources, while at the same time stopping the offshore continental shelf leases to wind farms,

with due consideration for a variety of relevant factors, including the need to foster an energy economy capable of meeting the country’s growing demand for reliable energy, the importance of marine life, impacts on ocean currents and wind patterns, effects on energy costs for Americans –- especially those who can least afford it –- and to ensure that the United States is able to maintain a robust fishing industry for future generations and provide low cost energy to its citizens.

I guess Alaskan fish and the Arctic Ocean are on their own.

There is also an EO giving now-Secretary of State his marching orders:

Section 1. Purpose. From this day forward, the foreign policy of the United States shall champion core American interests and always put America and American citizens first.

Sec. 2. Policy. As soon as practicable, the Secretary of State shall issue guidance bringing the Department of State’s policies, programs, personnel, and operations in line with an America First foreign policy, which puts America and its interests first.

“And don’t you forget it, Little Marco!” was apparently deleted from the final version that was signed.

It’s not just Americans watching all this play out on Day One. Around the world, the heads of intelligence services of friends and foes alike were no doubt watching as well, to see what was just campaign rhetoric and what Trump actually followed through on with action. The EO that really made me sit up and take notice and most certainly caught their attention was this one:

The Executive Office of the President requires qualified and trusted personnel to execute its mandate on behalf of the American people. There is a backlog created by the Biden Administration in the processing of security clearances of individuals hired to work in the Executive Office of the President. Because of this backlog and the bureaucratic process and broken security clearance process, individuals who have not timely received the appropriate clearances are ineligible for access to the White House complex, infrastructure, and technology and are therefore unable to perform the duties for which they were hired. This is unacceptable.

Therefore, by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby order:

1. The White House Counsel to provide the White House Security Office and Acting Chief Security Officer with a list of personnel that are hereby immediately granted interim Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) security clearances for a period not to exceed six months; and

2. That these individuals shall be immediately granted access to the facilities and technology necessary to perform the duties of the office to which they have been hired; and

3. The White House Counsel, as my designee, may supplement this list as necessary; and

4. The White House Counsel, as my designee, shall have the authority to revoke the interim clearance of any individual as necessary.

The introduction blaming the Biden administration for screwing up the process for getting security clearances is a red herring. This EO is straight up slamming the FBI for not immediately giving clearances to his favored people back in 2017. But beyond that . . . wow.

Do you remember how things began for Trump in 2017? As I wrote in 2022, when the FBI executed a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago seeking (and finding) missing very sensitive national security documents, Trump had a history of shoddy security practices dating back to the very beginning of his first administration.

On May 15, 2017, a disturbing story hit the news:

President Donald Trump disclosed highly classified information to Russia’s foreign minister about a planned Islamic State operation, two U.S. officials said on Monday, plunging the White House into another controversy just months into Trump’s short tenure in office.

The intelligence . . . was supplied by a U.S. ally in the fight against the militant group, both officials with knowledge of the situation said.

H.R. McMaster categorically denied it, and as the story unfolded over time, McMaster was lying through his teeth. The unnamed ally was later revealed to be Israel, who had a mole inside an ISIS cell. And Trump blithely blew the cover of that Israeli asset by bragging to Lavrov.

Shortly after this meeting (at which Trump also bragged about just having fired James Comey), US intelligence officials made a bold move. From CNN:

In a previously undisclosed secret mission in 2017, the United States successfully extracted from Russia one of its highest-level covert sources inside the Russian government, multiple Trump administration officials with direct knowledge told CNN.

A person directly involved in the discussions said that the removal of the Russian was driven, in part, by concerns that President Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence and could contribute to exposing the covert source as a spy.

The decision to carry out the extraction occurred soon after a May 2017 meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump discussed highly classified intelligence with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. The intelligence, concerning ISIS in Syria, had been provided by Israel.

This was the opening act of the Trump presidency. From the very beginning, intelligence officers worried about how Trump handled classified information. Our intelligence officers worried, and so did the intelligence officers of our allies, as they asked themselves some version of the question “Will Trump say something or do something that will get us killed?” In a completely different way, so did the intelligence officers of our adversaries. If Trump were to rashly reveal something he learned about the capabilities of our adversaries, it could have disastrous consequences for those countries and their leaders, as the reaction to the revelation could easily spiral out of control in unforeseeable ways.

And the damage was done.

Fast forward to today, and imagine you are the head of the German Bundesnachrichendienst, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, the Israeli Mossad, or any of the intelligence agencies with whom we regularly share intelligence. This EO says that Trump is giving a six-month waiver to the background check requirement. What could possibly go wrong?

Now imagine you are the head of the intelligence service of an unfriendly country. How large is your smile?

Just as they watched Biden’s new team in 2021, all the foreign intelligence services are watching Trump today. Yes, they are taking note of Trump indicating the US is withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, and also the World Health Organization. But screwing with security clearances in the White House is on another level.

Little Secretary of State Marco is going to have a lot of work to do, trying to clean up this mess. This kind of thing will turn “America First” into “America Alone,” at least when it comes to sharing intelligence among allies.

And finally, imagine you are a senior person in the CIA, NSA, or another US intelligence agency. Imagine you are an agent in the field, passing sensitive information through your handler back to Langley. How many agents are going to ask to be pulled out? How many agents are going to “go dark” for a time, cutting off the flow of information they had been sending? And how many potential sources are going to rethink any idea of cooperating with US intelligence services, and decide to go to the Germans, the British, or others instead of the US — or decide it’s not worth cooperating with any western country?

The whole world is watching, and it’s not a pretty picture. Unless, of course, you are a certain former KBG agent, who is even more elated today than he was on November 9th.

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Posts

John Bolton and the MIHOP Gambit

Steamrolled: Vladimir Putin Shares an Existential Secret with Trump and You Just Saw the Result

Donald Trump, Alone in the Room with His KGB Handler, Getting His Ass Served on a Picnic Platter

What Price Would Trump Demand to Sell Out Ukraine?

John Durham’s Guccifer Gaps

How Chuck Grassley’s Politicized Redactions Gave Putin Leverage over Trump

Donald Trump’s Parallel Ghislaine Maxwell and Vladimir Putin Problems

Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

Links

JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference: A Speech by Gaslight

How Vance unsettled the Europeans

But Also, Rank Hypocrisy

The Response

Interesting links

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