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John Durham’s Guccifer Gaps

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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Russia Attempts to Collect Its Winnings

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Russia has been engaged in a good deal of dick-wagging with Trump since the election.

After Trump won, Russia did not call to congratulate — at least as far as we know (though Viktor Orbán seems to be Trump’s handler and he did).

Putin did, on Thursday, butter up Trump, calling his response to being shot courageous and claiming interest in a deal.  Putin did what he always does with Trump: he played to his narcissism.

On Friday, though, one of the most popular TV shows in Russia used a different approach (as made available by Julia Davis’ Russian Media Monitor) — airing Melania’s nude photos in the guise of noting that she was years ago photographed with a US seal, as if someone knew she would be First Lady.

 

Monday morning, WaPo published an exclusive claiming that in his first call with Putin, Trump warned Putin not to escalate in Ukraine.

During the call, which Trump took from his resort in Florida, he advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe, said a person familiar with the call, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

The two men discussed the goal of peace on the European continent and Trump expressed an interest in follow-up conversations to discuss “the resolution of Ukraine’s war soon,” one of the people said.

In the aftermath of the claimed call, Russia escalated strikes.

Russia has also deployed 50,000 troops, including some from North Korea, to attempt to expel Ukraine from Kursk.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Monday Russia has deployed nearly 50,000 troops to Kursk, the southern Russian region where Kyiv launched its surprise counteroffensive in the summer.

Ukrainian troops “continue to hold back” the “nearly 50,000-strong enemy group” in Kursk, Zelensky said in a post on Telegram after receiving a briefing from General Oleksandr Syrskyi, the Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces.

Kyiv launched its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region in August, taking by surprise not just Moscow, but also its allies. It said at the time, that the operation was necessary, because Russia had been planning to launch a new attack on Ukraine from the region. It said it was aiming to create a “buffer zone” to prevent future cross-border attacks.

The Kursk offensive, the first ground invasion of Russia by a foreign power since World War II, caught Moscow completely unprepared.

Meanwhile, Russia denied WaPo’s report. There was no call, Putin’s spox said. Putin has no plan to call.

“It is completely untrue. It is pure fiction; it is simply false information,” the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said when asked about the call. “There was no conversation.

“This is the most obvious example of the quality of the information that is being published now, sometimes even in fairly reputable publications.”

Peskov added that Putin had no specific plans to speak to Trump.

Peskov is probably lying. But the US can’t debunk him because (according to WaPo) Trump is, once again, going it alone.

Trump’s initial calls with world leaders are not being conducted with the support of the State Department and U.S. government interpreters. The Trump transition team has yet to sign an agreement with the General Services Administration, a standard procedure for presidential transitions. Trump and his aides are distrustful of career government officials following the leaked transcripts of presidential calls during his first term. “They are just calling [Trump] directly,” one of the people familiar with the calls said.

Later in the day, Nicholay Patrushev implied that Trump had made commitments to get elected — commitments he was obliged to keep.

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.

Trump is going to be a tool of Russia. In one of his first personnel moves, he humiliatingly killed Mike Pompeo’s bid to be Defense Secretary; Pompeo, like Nikki Haley, supports Ukraine. Reportedly Trump made that decision with the counsel of Don Jr — Trump’s soft-underbelly — and Tucker Carlson.

My guess is their primary concern is when he will do that.

He promised to deliver peace on Day One. Seven days later, he hasn’t delivered, nor said he would. The shape of the capitulation Trump is discussing — basically a freeze of the status quo and a withdrawal of funding for Ukraine — is far less ambitious than what Russia intends, which is to conquer all of Ukraine.

While Trump has appointed white nationalists — Tom Homan and Stephen Miller — to run his mass deportation program, his national security appointments, thus far, were once normal people before they capitulated to Trump: Elise Stefanik at UN Ambassador, Mike Waltz at National Security Adviser, Marco Rubio at Secretary of State, and Kristi Noem at Homeland Security (it’s unclear who thinks will manage the House as it awaits special elections to replace two newly elected members; the GOP will win the majority but with a thinner margin than they had).

But Patrushev is correct: Russia did, overtly, help Trump win, and there may have been far more useful covert assistance we don’t know. Early in the year, they set up yet another attack on Hunter Biden as a way to attack his father. They released a series of videos targeting Harris and manufacturing claims about migrants voting. Those videos likely involved John Mark Dougan, a former Palm Beach sheriff who fled to Russia in 2016. While it’s not yet clear whether bomb threats to Springfield, OH and on voting locations were from Russia, they were routed via a Russian email domain.

A far bigger question is whether the decision by a bunch of tech oligarchs, most notably Elon Musk, to support Trump came with the involvement of someone either formally working for or just actin as an epic useful idiot of Russia. Did Trump install JD Vance as part of a deal for support from Elon? And what should we take from all the Russophile nutjobs that Trump plans to install in his administration?

To a great degree, Trump will be opening up his Administration to Russia, and doing so via wildly ignorant or crazy people. Russia will get what it wants under a Trump Administration. It just might take awhile.

So why the dick-wagging?

Probably, Russia is engaging in this game for two reasons. First, while the infusion of North Korean soldiers has helped its cause and it is making advances in Ukraine, it is doing so at great cost. And Ukraine still manages some attacks deeper in Russia.

An average of around 1,500 Russian soldiers were killed or injured per day in October — Russia’s worst month for casualties since the beginning of the invasion, according to Britain’s Chief of the Defense Staff Tony Radakin.

“Russia is about to suffer 700,000 people killed or wounded — the enormous pain and suffering that the Russian nation is having to bear because of [President Vladimir] Putin’s ambition,” Radakin told the BBC on November 10.

Moscow does not reveal the number of its war casualties.

Radakin claimed Moscow was spending more than 40 percent of public expenditure on defense and security, putting “an enormous strain” on the country.

Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed on November 10 that its forces had captured the town of Voltchenka in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, where Russian forces have been making advances in recent weeks.

Ukraine launched dozens of drones targeting Moscow, forcing the temporary closure of three of the capital’s airports, Russian officials said on November 10.

With Trump’s victory, Russia is in a strong position, but it faces immediate challenges. So it would prefer, I’m sure, immediate action.

More importantly, Russia has a history with Trump, where he deferred action until he was inaugurated, and then failed to deliver.

Robert Mueller never charged Trump with entering into a quid pro quo in 2016. It may have happened, but would have required the cooperation of people Trump later pardoned to prove it. But Russia had every reason to expect that Trump might end sanctions and recognize Crimea after he was elected with their help the first time. During that transition, Russia did reach out to Trump, first with a congratulatory Putin call, and then with discussions via Mike Flynn.

On December 29, 2016, Flynn reached out to Sergey Kislyak and asked Russia to do no more than match Barack Obama’s sanction, so as not to set off an escalation. At that point, Russia undoubtedly had every expectation they’d see sanctions removed. Instead, over the course of the Administration, more were imposed, with Biden adding an entire new sanctions regime in the wake of the Ukraine invasion.

That is, Trump has a history of making commitments to Russia he didn’t deliver, couldn’t deliver after installing grown-ups in his Administration.

So Russia appears to be doing what every other entity that helped Trump get elected is doing, as they try to collect on their support: exerting what levers of pressure they have to get their objectives.

It turns out they likely have more levers of pressure — some of which are more powerful now, before Trump’s win is certified — and larger demands than most of the people who helped Trump get elected.

Trump proved unreliable in 2016. Russia has good reason to want to demand better this time around.

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Public domain

The Mixed Emotions of November 9th

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h/t rocksunderwater (public domain)

In Germany, November 9th is a day of very mixed emotions.

In 1923, this was the date on which the “Beer Hall Putsch” took place, a failed violent coup led by Hitler and the Nazis to overthrown the Weimar government. The following April, Hitler was convicted of high treason and sentenced to five years in prison (the bare minimum sentence). While in prison, Hitler was given various privileges, and he wrote the first volume of Mein Kampf. By the end of the year, Hitler was released, and he pivoted the Nazi party to seek power via legitimate means. Ten years later, Hitler had become the Chancellor of Germany.

Fifteen years to the day after the Beer Hall Putsch, in 1938, came Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. On that night, the German authorities stood by as Hitler’s Storm Troopers and members of the Hitler Youth stormed Jewish businesses and buildings, synagogues and schools, hospitals and homes, breaking their windows and ransacking the property. While the Nazis claimed the violence was a spontaneous reaction to the murder of a Nazi official, it was instead a well-planned attack, thousands of Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps, and the Nazis demanded the Jewish community pay a huge “Atonement Tax” of 1 billion Reichsmarks, and any insurance payouts to Jews were seized by the government.

As bad as those memories are for Germany, an entirely different memory of November 9th was created in 1989, when after a tumultuous summer, the Berlin Wall came down. JD Bindenagel was the career State Department officer serving as the deputy chief of mission at the US mission in East Germany’s capital of Berlin, and he described it like this in 2019:

On Nov. 9, 1989, there was no sign of revolution. Sure, change was coming—but slowly, we thought. After all, the Solidarity movement in Poland began in the early 1980s. I spent the afternoon at an Aspen Institute reception hosted by David Anderson for his new deputy director, Hildegard Boucsein, with leaders from East and West Berlin, absorbed in our day-to-day business. In the early evening, I attended a reception along with the mayors and many political leaders of East and West Berlin, Allied military commanders and East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel. Not one of us had any inkling of the events that were about to turn the world upside down.

As the event was ending, Wolfgang Vogel asked me for a ride. I was happy to oblige and hoped to discuss changes to the GDR travel law, the target of the countrywide demonstrations for freedom. On the way, he told me that the Politburo planned to reform the travel law and that the communist leadership had met that day to adopt new rules to satisfy East Germans’ demand for more freedom of travel. I dropped Vogel off at his golden-colored Mercedes near West Berlin’s shopping boulevard, Ku’Damm. Happy about my scoop on the Politburo deliberations, I headed to the embassy. Vogel’s comments would surely make for an exciting report back to the State Department in Washington.

I arrived at the embassy at 7:30 p.m. and went directly to our political section, where I found an animated team of diplomats. At a televised press conference, government spokesman Guenter Schabowski had just announced the Politburo decision to lift travel restrictions, leaving everyone at the embassy stunned. East Germans could now get visitor visas from their local “People’s Police” station, and the East German government would open a new processing center for emigration cases. When an Italian journalist asked the spokesman when the new rules would go into effect, Schabowski fumbled with his papers, unsure—and then mumbled: “Unverzueglich” (immediately). With that, my Vogel scoop evaporated.

At this point, excitement filled the embassy. None of us had the official text of the statement or knew how East Germans planned to implement the new rules. Although Schabowski’s declaration was astounding, it was open to widely varying interpretations. Still dazed by the announcement, we anticipated the rebroadcast an hour later.

At 8 p.m., Political Counselor Jon Greenwald and I watched as West Germany’s news program “Tagesschau” led with the story. By then, political officer Imre Lipping had picked up the official statement and returned to the embassy to report to Washington. Heather Troutman, another political officer, wrote an on-the-ground report that the guards at Checkpoint Charlie were telling East Germans to get visas. Greenwald cabled the text of Schabowski’s announcement to Washington: East Germans had won the freedom to travel and emigrate.

As the cable arrived in Washington, I called the White House Situation Room and State Department Operations Center to discuss the report and alert them to the latest developments. I then called Harry Gilmore, the American minister in West Berlin.

“Harry,” I said, “it looks like you’re going to have a lot of visitors soon. We’re just not sure yet what that rush of visitors will look like.”

We assumed that, at best, East Germans would start crossing into West Berlin the next day. In those first moments, the wall remained impassable. After all, these were Germans; they were known for following the rules. Schabowski had announced the visa rules, and we believed there would be an orderly process. East Germans, however, were following West German television coverage, as well. And, as it turned out, they decided to hold their government to its word immediately.

I headed home around 10 p.m. to watch events unfold on West German television. On my way to Pankow, I was surprised by the unusual amount of traffic. The “Trabi,” with its two-cycle engine and a body made of plasticized pressed-wood, spewing gas and oil smoke, was always in short supply. Perhaps one of the most striking symbols of East Germany’s economy, those iconic cars now filled the streets despite the late hour—and they were headed to the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint. Near the checkpoint, drivers were abandoning them left and right.

Ahead of me, the blazing lights of a West German television crew led by Der Spiegel reporter Georg Mascolo illuminated the checkpoint. The TV crew, safely ensconced in the West, was preparing for a live broadcast. Despite the bright lights, all I could make out was a steadily growing number of demonstrators gathering at the checkpoint. From the tumult, I could faintly hear yells of “Tor auf!” (Open the gate!) Anxious East Germans had started confronting the East German border guards. Inside the crossing, armed border police waited for instructions.

Amid a massive movement of people, fed by live TV, the revolution that had started so slowly was rapidly spinning out of control. The question running through my mind was whether the Soviet Army would stay in its barracks. There were 380,000 Soviet soldiers in East Germany. In diplomatic circles, we expected that the Soviet Union, the military superpower, would not give up East Germany without a fight. Our role was to worry—the constant modus operandi of a diplomat. But this time, our concern didn’t last long.

When I arrived home around 10:15 p.m., I turned on the TV, called the State Department with the latest developments, and called Ambassador Richard Barkley and then Harry Gilmore again: “Remember I told you that you’d be seeing lots of visitors?” I said. “Well, that might be tonight.”

Just minutes later, I witnessed on live television as a wave of East Berliners broke through the checkpoint at Bornholmer Strasse, where I had been just minutes earlier. My wife, Jean, joined me, and we watched a stream of people crossing the bridge while TV cameras transmitted their pictures around the world. Lights came on in the neighborhood. I was elated. East Germans had made their point clear. After 40 years of Cold War, East Berliners were determined to have freedom.

Bindenagel was elated, the German people were elated (Bindenagel gave more detail in a video interview here, and Deutsche Welle has a host of anniversary articles and interviews here), and the West (broadly speaking) was elated.

A certain KGB agent stationed in East Germany and assigned to work with the Stasi (the East German Secret Police) was most certainly not elated, and grew increasingly frustrated in the weeks that followed. The BBC described the agent’s reaction like this:

It is 5 December 1989 in Dresden, a few weeks after the Berlin Wall has fallen. East German communism is dying on its feet, people power seems irresistible.

Crowds storm the Dresden headquarters of the Stasi, the East German secret police, who suddenly seem helpless.

Then a small group of demonstrators decides to head across the road, to a large house that is the local headquarters of the Soviet secret service, the KGB.

“The guard on the gate immediately rushed back into the house,” recalls one of the group, Siegfried Dannath. But shortly afterwards “an officer emerged – quite small, agitated”.

“He said to our group, ‘Don’t try to force your way into this property. My comrades are armed, and they’re authorised to use their weapons in an emergency.'”

That persuaded the group to withdraw.

But the KGB officer knew how dangerous the situation remained. He described later how he rang the headquarters of a Red Army tank unit to ask for protection.

The answer he received was a devastating, life-changing shock.

“We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow,” the voice at the other end replied. “And Moscow is silent.”

That phrase, “Moscow is silent” has haunted this man ever since. Defiant yet helpless as the 1989 revolution swept over him, he has now himself become “Moscow” – the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin.

For Putin, this was the beginning of the fall of the great Russian empire, and everything Putin has done since was been an effort to restore the greatness of Great Mother Russia, with himself as her leader and savior.

On this November 9th, it is the Germans and West who are worried and Putin who is elated, as Donald Trump prepares to take office. Putin dreams of an end to US military support for Ukraine, a diminished US role in NATO (if not a complete withdrawal from the alliance), and a weakening of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing agreement between the US and the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

On this November 9th, Putin’s dreams are looking closer to becoming a reality.

On this November 9th, Moscow is no longer silent.

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Donald J. Trump wearing an apron while dispensing french fries at a McDonald's fast food restaurant in Pennsylvania as part of a campaign stunt on Sunday, October 20, 2024. Photo by Doug Mills/AP.

Batting Down Election-Day Conspiracy Theories

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Donald J. Trump wearing an apron while dispensing french fries at a McDonald's fast food restaurant in Pennsylvania as part of a campaign stunt on Sunday, October 20, 2024. Photo by Doug Mills/AP.

There is no truth to the rumor that Donald J. Trump wearing an apron while dispensing french fries at a McDonald’s fast food restaurant in Pennsylvania was part of his preparation for a new career move should he lose tonight [Sunday, October 20, 2024. Photo by Doug Mills/AP.]

As the voters stream to the polls today, as workers at precincts around the country welcome voters to cast their ballots, as state and county election officials prepare for the counting that will take place, and as lawyers prepare for the inevitable fights in the days to come, it is incumbent on us at EW to shoot down rumors of conspiracies flying around on this momentous day.

So let’s get right to it.

There is no truth to the rumor that the staff at Mar-a-Lago has put plastic sheeting over the walls, to make cleaning up any thrown pasta easier. If anyone tells you that the custodial staff is worried about Trump throwing his dinner around once results start coming in, do not believe them.

There is no truth to the rumor that JD Vance has prepared a concession speech filled with remorse for the things he said about Kamala Harris during the campaign, and there is absolutely no truth whatsoever that Peter Thiel is preparing to have JD Vance disappeared for his failure to win.

There is no truth to the rumor that Lara Trump is planning to move to Saudi Arabia should Harris/Walz win.

There is no truth to the rumor that Fox News has a contingency plan to have an intern shut down the power to the FOX studios and take them off the air on election night if the results come in putting Harris over the top.

There is no truth to the rumor that Ivanka and Jared are giving the Saudi’s back the money they were given to “invest” back in 2020.

There is no truth to the rumor that Elon Musk is shorting DJT stock.

There is no truth to the rumor that Mike Pence has a bottle of champagne on ice for he and Mother to share this evening, should Trump/Vance lose.

There is no truth to the rumor that Alito and Thomas are so despondent at the mere thought of Trump losing that their doctors are worried about them succumbing to heart attacks in the next 72 hours.

There is no truth to the rumor that Bill Barr is preparing a memo for Kamala Harris, laying out the rationale for her naming him as her new AG should Trump lose.

There is no truth to the rumor that Liz Cheney has practicing her sincerity in anticipation of making a call later this evening to Donald Trump, offering her solemn condolences at Trump’s loss, and absolutely no truth whatsoever that her practice sessions are not going well because she can’t get through two sentences without laughing.

There is no truth to the rumor that Gavin Newsom is planning a call to Donald Trump Junior and Kimberly Guilfoyle, offering condolences on the occasion of the loss of Trump/Vance.

There is no truth to the rumor that Ted Cruz already has purchased a new home in Cancun, and absolutely no truth whatsoever that in a gesture of bipartisanship, Colin Allred has already generously agreed to bring pizza and empty boxes to help him pack.

There is no truth to the rumor that Mitt Romney has laid in numerous kegs of beer for his watch party tonight at the Romney family home, and absolutely no truth whatsoever that Mitt’s sister niece Ronna McDaniel is planning to resume using “Romney” in her name again.

There is no truth to the rumor that Trump’s staffers are secretly preparing to call in sick this evening, rather than attend any watch parties or “victory” rallies, so that they can prepare to enter witness protection programs.

THERE IS NO TRUTH TO ANY OF THESE THINGS.

There is also a rumor that the members of Putin’s election interference unit are reeling in terror at the mere thought that Harris/Walz may win, resulting in an all-expenses paid one way trip to Ukraine for the entire group. This rumor we have been unable to debunk or verify.

If you have heard other rumors that need to be shut down, please add them in the comments.

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As Russia Overtly Helps Trump Get Elected, Trump Continues to Check in with Vladimir Putin

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According to CNN, Bob Woodward’s latest book reveals that Trump has spoken to Vladimir Putin as many as seven times since leaving the Presidency.

In one scene, Woodward recounts a moment at Mar-a-Lago where Trump tells a senior aide to leave the room so “he could have what he said was a private phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

“According to Trump’s aide, there have been multiple phone calls between Trump and Putin, maybe as many as seven in the period since Trump left the White House in 2021,” Woodward writes.

Woodward asked Trump aide Jason Miller whether Trump and Putin had spoken since he left the White House. “Um, ah, not that, ah, not that I’m aware of,” Miller told Woodward.

“I have not heard that they’re talking, so I’d push back on that,” Miller added.

Woodward writes that Biden’s Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines “carefully hedged” when asked about whether there were any post-presidency Trump-Putin calls.

“I would not purport to be aware of all contacts with Putin. I wouldn’t purport to speak to what President Trump may or may not have done,” Haines said, according to Woodward.

According to WaPo’s version of the Woodward story the incident where Trump asked an aide to leave the room happened in early 2024.

This is unsurprising. After all, Trump has repeatedly described speaking to Putin in advance of the Ukraine invasion, including fairly explicitly during the debate with Joe Biden.

When Putin saw that, he said, you know what? I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my – this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream. The difference is he never would have invaded Ukraine. Never.

But the confirmation that Trump keeps speaking to Putin is important for several other reasons.

We still don’t know where all the stolen documents are

If Trump was speaking to Putin before the Ukraine investigation and at least as recently as earlier this year, he was speaking to him during the investigation into his stolen documents, during the period when Trump was hiding boxes from his attorney to make sure he could steal documents.

Trump was going back and referring to some of these documents during the period he worked with Putin.

And perhaps most importantly, there were presumably classified documents loaded onto his plane on June 3, 2022 that got flown back to Bedminster, and probably some remained hidden at Mar-a-Lago (the FBI failed to search a room off Trump’s suite).

The FBI has never found the missing classified documents.

Trump was charged with hoarding some of America’s most secret documents in his basement. And during that entire period, he was checking in regularly with the leader of a hostile foreign country, the one who keeps helping him get elected.

Russian staged another operation to help defeat Joe Biden

Last month, Guardian revealed details of an information operation involving George Papadopoulos and Simona Mangiante, one for which she published an interview she did with sanctioned Russian agent Andrii Derkach. Relatedly, they rolled out yet more propaganda about Hunter Biden.

Working alongside contributors for Kremlin state media, the former Donald Trump policy aide George Papadopoulos, his wife, Simona Mangiante, and others have become editorial board members of the website Intelligencer, which is increasingly becoming a source of news for those in the rightwing ecosystem.

The growth of the website, which has not been reported on before, comes at a time when the US is seeking to crack down on Russian influence ahead of the 2024 election. Recently, the justice department charged two members of RT (formerly known as Russia Today) with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and money laundering for payments they allegedly made to “recruit unwitting American influencers”. It also placed sanctions on RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, and nine other employees.

[snip]

Mangiante, his wife, has written several posts for the site about debunked conspiracy theories involving the Bidens and Ukraine. In January, she posted an interview with a former Ukrainian lawmaker, Andrii Derkach, who repeated false claims of bribery about the Biden family in Ukraine. In 2020, the US placed sanctions on Derkach, calling him an active Russian agent; Derkach, who now is running for political office in Russia, previously met with Rudy Giuliani and purported to offer evidence of corruption against the Bidens.

“Intelligencer appears to be one of several [Russia-friendly] operations targeting the upcoming US elections, leveraging a network of far-right figures and disinformation tactics,” Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, said.

Mangiante, along with fellow board member Igor Lopatonok, appears to have parlayed this work into a new documentary about the Hunter Biden laptop saga called Hunter’s Laptop: Requiem for Ukraine. According to social media posts, the documentary premiered on 5 September at the Trump International hotel in Chicago. Eliason wrote the script, which was filmed by Lopatonok, who has frequently collaborated with Oliver Stone on prior anti-Ukrainian documentaries and fawning films of dictators.

Since Biden dropped out, I haven’t really dug into this as much as I might. It can wait. But suffice it to say these links are interesting beyond the most obvious ones. I believe that this ongoing effort targeting Hunter Biden is among the reasons Trump was so sad that Joe Biden dropped out: because Russia had already reloaded the ongoing information operation to work against Joe Biden.

But that’s not the only ongoing Russian operation. As part of the RT operation, for example, Russia was allegedly paying money to Lauren Chen, who also had a role at Turning Point America, the group that was supposed to lead Trump’s turnout operation.

In a warning about Russia’s plan to interfere issued in July, ODNI described that Russia was using “influential US voices” to push Russian support for Trump (and according to a new warning today, also for members of Congress who’ll abandon Ukraine).

“We are beginning to see Russia target specific voter demographics, promote divisive narratives and denigrate specific politicians. Moscow seeks to shape electoral outcomes, undermine electoral integrity and amplify domestic divisions,” the ODNI official said.

“To accomplish this, Moscow is using a variety of approaches to bolster its messaging and lend an air of authenticity to its efforts. This includes outsourcing its efforts to commercial firms to hide its hand and laundering narratives through influential U.S. voices,” the official said.

An influential US voice also mentioned in the RT indictment is Tucker Carlson, fresh off his visit to Vladimir Putin.

American media critics have made themselves tools of Russian disinformation

As it happens, just yesterday, the publisher of the Steele dossier that gave Republicans a way to claim the Russian story was something other than it was, Ben Smith, claimed that the Trump-Russia story is nothing more than “an embarrassment.”

The Trump-Russia story is at this point an embarrassment to everyone. Democrats couldn’t prove the most extensive allegations of plotting or that Russian Facebook ads swung the election. Republicans couldn’t deny that Russia was trying to help Trump, or prove their own more conspiratorial claims that the whole thing was a Hillary Clinton-made “Russia hoax.” At some point, American politics mostly moved on.

What the Russian investigation found is that Trump’s coffee boy, his campaign manager, his National Security Adviser, his personal lawyer, and his rat-fucker all lied to cover up the truth of what happened with Russia in 2016.

And yet because Trump successfully pardoned himself out of legal trouble, people like Ben yawn and say it’s over. And Trump’s successful pushback on the Russian story — assisted by the self-imagined savvy of people like Ben — means that no one has investigated the follow-on in 2020 and this year.

Vladimir Putin’s puppet makes house calls

And that has led the mainstream press to give just passing coverage of critical stories about Trump’s negotiations with Russia and its proxies.

Days before Biden dropped out of the race, I included Viktor Orbán’s trip to Mar-a-Lago among the stories getting ignored as everyone chased Joe Biden old stories.

Now, however, Trump no longer hides that he’s willing to let Putin dismember Ukraine. He welcomed Viktor Orbán’s pitch of a plan to do just that — but there has been no readout from Trump’s side of what happened. Orbán, however, has told other EU nations that Trump will moved for “peace” immediately after being elected — a replay of what Flynn lied to cover up in 2017 — largely by withdrawing US support for Ukraine.

In the past, Trump has gone even further than this, suggesting he’ll do nothing as Putin invades NATO states.

Meanwhile, JD Vance is, if anything, even more pro-Russian than Trump, as are some of the Silicon Valley oligarchs who now back Trump’s campaign since the Vance pick.

Trump’s plan of capitulation to Russia will go a long way to ending the Western rules-based order, the greatest wish of Putin and Xi Jinpeng.

And thus far we know just one of the things that Russia seems to be doing to help Trump’s campaign: detaining WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich until Trump gets elected, just as Iran held onto hostages to help Reagan get elected. Avril Haines recently made clear Russia is planning on helping in other ways as well.

That’s how “Russia Russia Russia” has worked. It’s a shameless lie that Mueller found nothing, a lie built off years of propaganda. Indeed, Trump’s willing acceptance — or, in Rudy’s case, outright solicitation — of Russia’s help to get elected has only gotten more brazen. Yet rather than call Don Jr on his “Russia Russia Russia” lie, reporters simply let the pressing question of whether Trump will end the alliance of democracies in a second term go unasked.

Viktor Orbán is an absolutely central player in Republican plans, especially those — like Project 2025 — boosted by the Heritage Foundation. But there has been almost no curiosity about what’s behind that.

Another thing that got largely buried was Paul Manafort’s return to Trump’s campaign, even though since he last worked for Trump, it has been confirmed that his efforts resulted in Russian spies obtaining polling and the campaign’s strategy.

Because Trump has so successfully led journalists to be cowed by his “Russia Russia Russia” bullying, none of this has been a central story.

It needs to become one.

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