David Corn
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HOW RUSSIA WON
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With Donald Trump tapping Kash Patel, the MAGA provocateur, conspiracy theory monger, and grifter, to be FBI director, it’s time to revisit the Trump-Russia scandal. I know many folks think this is old news. The matter was long ago swept under the rug. Yet the basic facts remain incontrovertible:
Vladimir Putin attacked the 2016 election with a covert hack-and-leak operation to help Trump win, and Trump aided and abetted that assault by denying it was underway—thus providing cover to a foreign adversary subverting American democracy—while seeking to exploit it. As president, Trump continued the cover-up by echoing and affirming Putin’s phony professions of innocence. Despite the clear evidence, Trump has gotten away with this act of profound betrayal. Patel is a big reason for that.
As an aide to then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Patel led an investigation after the 2016 election of the FBI’s probe of the Kremlin’s attack and contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. It’s important to remember that there were two different components of that probe.
The bureau was looking at the Russian operation—which entailed hacking Democratic officials and operatives and then publicly disseminating through WikiLeaks internal memos and private emails to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign—and it was also examining ties between the Trump crew and Russians. This inquiry was triggered when the bureau learned that a Trump foreign policy adviser named George Papadopoulos supposedly told a senior Australian diplomat he had been informed that Russia could secretly assist the Trump campaign by releasing derogatory information on Clinton.
After that, the FBI began looking at Trump associates with connections in Russia. One lead for the investigators was a campaign adviser named Carter Page, a business consultant who had mucked about in Russia for years and who made a trip to Moscow in July 2016 and met with Russian officials.
With Page of interest to the investigators, the bureau sought and received a secret surveillance warrant—in government parlance, a FISA warrant—to spy on Page. Here’s where things get tricky. The FBI used what became known as the Steele dossier in its applications for a series of FISA warrants for Page. This was the now infamous collection of private memos produced by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele that contained a host of unproven accusations about Trump-Russia links. (Remember the golden showers?)
As a Justice Department inspector general later concluded, the FBI erred in using this document to justify its request for the FISA warrant on Page and screwed up in other disturbing ways in obtaining these warrants. That is, Page’s civil rights were violated. (Interest declared: I was the first reporter to reveal the existence of the Steele dossier—with an article in Mother Jones that appeared on October 31, 2016. But I did not publish the unsubstantiated memos.)
Now pay close attention to follow Nunes and Patel’s dodgy sleight of hand. They contended (loudly) that the FBI misconduct regarding its use of the Steele dossier and the Page warrants meant that the entire Trump-Russia investigation was a witch hunt and that all talk of the Russian attack mounted to boost Trump was a hoax.
And as some Trump critics and journalists raised the notion that the Trump campaign might have colluded with Putin’s operation, Patel and other Trump defenders used the Steele dossier mess-up to counter that accusation and to contend that the entire matter was nothing but a phony Democratic dirty trick. (Steele had written his memos as a consultant to an opposition research firm paid by a law firm working for the Clinton campaign.)
In a brilliant stroke of disinformation, Trump, Nunes, Patel, and others falsely asserted that it had been the Steele memos that had prompted the FBI to launch its Trump-Russia investigation—called Crossfire Hurricane—meaning the inquiry, based on a purportedly fraudulent document that was a product of a Democratic oppo initiative, was utterly illegitimate and illegal. The realscandal, they insisted, was not Moscow clandestinely helping Trump win the White House and Trump accepting and assisting that effort, but rather the Deep State fabricating this so-called scandal.
In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, The Truth, and Our Battle for Democracy, Patel claims credit for “breaking open the biggest criminal conspiracy by government officials since Watergate — Russia Gate.” He repeatedly boasts that by exposing this supposed scandal—the Deep State concocting a bogus investigation to sabotage Trump—he helped save American democracy. He also asserts over and over that the FBI’s Russian investigation was predicated on the Steele dossier, which he alleges was purposefully manufactured as part of a conspiracy against Trump—“a political hit job”—run by Democrats, the FBI, the “fake news mafia,” and the Deep State.
What Patel did from the start was to engineer a wonderful deflection to defend and protect Trump. He created a false narrative in which the FBI’s misuse of the Steele dossier delegitimized Crossfire Hurricane and proved the whole investigation was baseless and a criminal conspiracy against Trump—and nothing else mattered. This is the cover story that Trump and his acolytes have been deploying for years.
Patel’s book makes almost no mention of the actual Russian attack on the 2016 election. Absent is any reference to the material stolen by Moscow’s hackers and leaked to hurt Clinton and aid Trump. (The worst leaking began right after the “grab-’em-by-the-pussy” video came out.)
Nor does he acknowledge that Trump and his team repeatedly issued false denials and covered for Putin. He doesn’t include the meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 between Trump’s senior aides and a Russian emissary who they were informed was part of a secret Kremlin operation to assist the Trump campaign. WikiLeaks does not appear in these pages.
Patel ignores Trump’s own secret efforts during the campaign to score a huge real estate deal in Moscow—and his company’s attempt to obtain assistance from Putin’s office. Not surprisingly, he leaves out the Justice Department IG’s finding that the FBI’s initiation of Crossfire Hurricane was not based on the Steele document and not the product of “political bias or improper motivation.”
It was legitimate. Also missing from the book is the key fact that John Durham, a special counsel handpicked by Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate and advance the Patel-promoted conspiracy theory that the Deep State illegally whipped up the Russia “hoax” to destroy Trump, flopped and found no massive criminal plot or significant and widespread wrongdoing.
No, all that counts is the Steele dossier and the Page FISA warrants. In Patel’s world, the various government reports that confirmed that Russia waged information warfare to boost Trump do not exist. Most notably, there’s not a hint in his book that in 2020, the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, released a bipartisan 966-page report that detailed the Russian assault, stating it was designed to help elect Trump and that the “Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia, and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.” That is, the Trump campaign helped the Russians.
This report disclosed that Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign chair for months during 2016, repeatedly held covert meetings with a former business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik, who was a Russian intelligence officer, and “sought to secretly share internal Campaign information” with him. The committee put it bluntly: “Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.”
Moreover, the committee reported it had “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to [Russian intelligence’s] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” And the committee said it had uncovered “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was connected “to the hack-and-leak operations.” The report’s discussion of that information, though, was redacted.
Trump’s top campaign adviser clandestinely huddling with a Russian intelligence officer who was possibly involved in Moscow’s attack—that sure smells like collusion. At the least, it’s a real, honest-to-God scandal. The committee’s conclusion: Manafort posed a “grave counterintelligence threat.” (Manafort was imprisoned in 2018 for committing fraud and money laundering. Trump pardoned him in late 2020.)
Manafort does not appear anywhere in Patel’s book. Not a single sentence. (Here’s a suggestion for members of the Senate Judiciary Committee: Should Patel make it to a confirmation hearing, ask him if he read the Senate Intelligence Committee report and if he accepts its findings. If he says he hasn’t, he’s not a serious nominee for this job.)
For eight years, Patel has been engaged in Soviet-style revisionism. Create a sham story and airbrush out the truth. He bears much credit for concocting the fraudulent tale that Trump and MAGA have used for years to hide a truth they can’t handle: Trump was elected with covert Russian assistance, and, if the campaign didn’t collude directly with the Russians, Trump and his gang winked at this attack on America and joined Putin in the cover-up. In part thanks to Patel, this has never become the dominant narrative.
Put simply, Patel has been a useful idiot for Putin.
Given that Patel, a QAnon supporter who has peddled the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and championed the ridiculous idea that the January 6 riot Trump incited was sparked by “strange agitators” and federal agents, has sued his critics for defamation, let me be explicit:
By calling him a useful idiot I’m not suggesting he has been a Russian asset or in cahoots with Russian operatives. But his effort to help Trump escape the treasonous stench of the Trump-Russia scandal by promoting a misleading account of this affair has been of tremendous value to Moscow. Patel essentially created a false alibi for Trump and a distraction that took the heat off Trump and Russia.
And he has vowed to seek revenge against those Deep State schemers who he claims illegally plotted against Trump by investigating the Russia matter. In the distorted view of reality Patel pushes, they are the wrongdoers in this episode, not Trump and not Putin. Patel hasn’t stopped selling this bunk. Yesterday, he sent out an email solicitation for the foundation he operates—under the subject heading “The Deep State can not be trusted”—that opened with this exclamation: “Remember Russia Gate? Fraud!”
One component of the FBI’s mission is to counter Russian espionage and covert actions aimed at the United States. Is this a mission Patel can take on? There are few MAGA advocates who have done more than him to help Trump and Putin dodge accountability for their devious misdeeds of 2016. Placing Patel in charge of the FBI could be akin to putting it in the hands of a mole. One can imagine the joy within the Kremlin prompted by the prospect of Patel leading this critically important agency. The Russians certainly would have reason to call him “our man in the bureau.”
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The Trump-Russia Denialists Are Back
By David Corn June 4, 2024
President Donald Trump laughing it up with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, left, and Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak at the White House on May 10, 2017. Russian Foreign Ministry Photo via AP
President Donald Trump laughing it up with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (left) and Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak at the White House on May 10, 2017. Russian Foreign Ministry Photo via AP
For years, I’ve been wondering why a handful of former lefty journalists—among them Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi—keep insisting that all talk of Russia’s attacks on the last two US presidential elections is a hoax concocted by hysterical liberals in league with the Deep State. We’ve seen evidence of Vladimir Putin’s clandestine information war with our eyes (such as Moscow’s 2016 hack-and-leak operation that boosted Donald Trump), and numerous investigations, government agencies, indictments, and bipartisan congressional reports have provided details about the Kremlin’s efforts to help Trump and damage the prospects of Hillary Clinton and, then, Joe Biden. Yet these dead-enders stick to the line that none of this happened and pooh-pooh any mention of current Russian disinformation efforts targeting US politics.
Why do they keep echoing Putin’s own dishonest denials? Do they despise Democrats or the intelligence community so much that they are reluctant to legitimize their concerns about Russian assaults on the United States? Are they blinded by their own-the-libs anti-anti-Trumpism that they refuse to give any credence to Trump’s opponents? Do they so loathe foreign policy hawks and neocons or so fear a new Cold War that they lie about Russia’s malfeasance to deny its critics any ammunition to deploy against Moscow? Do they see Vladimir Putin and Russia, the enemy of their enemy, as an ally or at least a useful check on US and Western power? Do they believe that any acknowledgement of Russian disinformation operations would undercut their own crusade against tech companies, liberals, academia, the intelligence community, and the media, which they feverishly (and, to my mind, absurdly) portray as a unified and diabolical censorship industrial complex? One could believe in this dark theory and still recognize that Putin is a bad-faith actor mounting cyber-plots against the West. Yet Greenwald, for instance, legitimizes Tucker Carlson, a documented liar and disinformationist (and Putin softie), and excoriates anyone who points to Russian information ops as a threat to the United States. Like me.
With Russian information warfare against the United States underway and perhaps intensifying as the presidential contest approaches E-Day, Putin’s intervention to boost Trump and the efforts to deny this could become a factor in a close race.
After I recently wrote a piece on Moscow’s current attempts to influence the Trump-Biden rematch, Greenwald weighed in on Twitter (a.k.a. X):
Hide your wife, hide your kids! The Russkies "are coming again" -- to get the Democrats again! So says the DNC activist masquerading as a reporter who became very wealthy by first introducing the Steele Dossier hoax into our politics.
Greenwald is very talented when it comes to dolloping out derision. Of course, he did not engage with—let alone refute—any of the facts in my article, which referenced government and journalistic sources reporting on the Kremlin’s ongoing operations aimed at the United States. Instead, he resorted to his and the Trump crowd’s go-to deflection: the Steele memos. I was indeed the first journalist to report on their existence, though I did not publish them. And whatever issues there were with their accuracy—they were never meant to be publicly released—these documents written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele have no bearing on what did transpire during the 2016 election: documented Russian interference that aided Trump. The Steele memos, which, contrary to Trump’s rants and far-right talking points, did not trigger the FBI’s Trump-Russia inquiry, are a handy target for those who cannot handle the truth. And I’m pretty sure if you ask anyone at the Democratic National Committee, no one will say they consider me a DNC activist. Greenwald hides behind insults and lies.
In my response to his online missive, I tried to stick to the substance and asked Greenwald for his help, as I tried to puzzle out his stance:
So I guess Greenwald’s still sticking with the Putin-and-Trump disinformation line that there was no Russian attack on the 2016 election. No Democratic emails hacked and leaked, right? Why does he deny reality? There must be a reason.
No surprise, Greenwald did not respond to this. But his sidekick Taibbi did:
David, he’s referring to one of the biggest hoaxes in the recent history of journalism, the Steele dossier, which you played a lead role in introducing. Glenn didn’t screw up—you did. And you still haven’t admitted it.
Once again, you can see the seams. Focus on the Steele memos, not the bigger and more consequential issue of Putin’s sabotage campaign against the 2016 election that helped Trump reach the White House, let alone the aiding-and-abetting role Trump played by relentlessly and falsely denying such an operation was underway.
Responding to Taibbi, I tried to be more explicit:
Answer a simple question I have asked you before: Did Russia intervene in the 2016 election to hurt Clinton and help Trump? Extra points if you answer this one: Did Trump aid & abet that operation by denying it was happening?
Crickets.
Which brings me to where I began. Greenwald, Taibbi, and their ilk cannot engage in an honest dialogue about Russia and the 2016 election, or the 2020 election, in which Russian agents tried to smear Biden, or the current presidential election. Given that they refuse to concede that Putin did help Trump win the White House and strived to keep him there, they likely will not acknowledge that Russia-linked operations are currently occurring to exacerbate political divide in the US and assist Trump and will probably ratchet up in the months ahead. This week, the New York Times reported that someone created a deepfake showing State Department spokesman Matt Miller seeming to suggest Russian targets for a Ukraine attack. Was Moscow behind this move? That seems a good bet—or a pro-Kremlin actor. Russian media outlets and websites disseminated the forgery to inflame anti-American sentiment and boost Putin’s propaganda that the United States is propelling the Ukraine war. It seems obvious this sort of operation could be trained against the US election.
Why don’t Greenwald and Taibbi care about Russian assaults on US politics? I remain flummoxed. These dead-enders certainly are free to assail the Steele memos, which were inaccurate on key points but raised the important and largely unknown matter of Russian interference, and even criticize my reporting on them (though my main point at the time was that the FBI was investigating Steele’s allegations as part of a Trump-Russia inquiry not yet made public). Yet why fixate on that and refuse to deal with the bigger picture of the Kremlin’s war on America? I’m sorry I cannot provide you an explanation. I’m sure it’s a doozy.
Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.
It Can Happen Here – Mother Jones
3 24 editor’s note:The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter,Our Land. The newsletter* comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial ofOur Land [*here
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published the novel It Can’t Happen Here, which told the story of fascism triumphing in the United States. The book was a reaction to the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe and the spread of demagogic populism in the United States by Huey Long, the strongman governor of Louisiana, and Father Charles Coughlin, the wildly popular antisemitic radio preacher. In Lewis’ alternative universe, a politician named Buzz Windrip, who champions “traditional” values and who promises to restore America to greatness, defeats FDR in the presidential election of 1936 and then through a self-coup seizes dictatorial powers. He establishes a paramilitary force to do his bidding, curtails the rights of women and minorities, and locks up dissidents and political foes in concentration camps. Eventually, his reign leads to civil war. It’s a grim tale.
The title of his book was the proper use of irony (the expression of an idea through language that normally means the opposite). While many Americans at the time looked at the failure of democracy in Europe and thought that the United States would be immune to such retrograde forces, Lewis, whose wife, journalist Dorothy Thompson, had reported on developments in Germany (and was the first American journalist to be expelled from the Nazi state), believed otherwise.
America did not succumb to the fascist wave. Long was assassinated. Coughlin was forced off the air. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into World War II led to the end of the America First movement that might have produced a demagogic alternative to Roosevelt. No Buzz Windrip emerged.
Over eight decades later, the ghost of It Can’t Happen Here haunts American politics. Donald Trump has often been compared to Windrip, and various commentators have harkened back to Lewis’ novel to explain the threat Trumpism poses to American democracy.
Looking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (a.k.a. CPAC), recently held outside Washington, DC, last week, one can wonder if it is indeed time to once again crack open the Lewis novel. At a panel led by Steve Bannon, the convicted (for contempt of Congress) and indicted (for money laundering) top strategist of the MAGA right, Jack Posobiec, a prominent conspiracy theorist of the alt-right, declared, “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here.” He apparently was referring to the Trumpian vanguard present in the room, and Bannon interjected, “Amen.” Posobiec, an early promoter of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that led to a dangerous shooting at a Washington, DC, restaurant, added, “All glory is not to government. All glory to God.”
Were they joking? It didn’t sound like it. Other speakers at CPAC demonized those outside the MAGA realm. Gov. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.), who’s angling to be Trump’s veep pick, proclaimed, “There are two kinds of people in this country right now. There are people who love America, and there are those who hate America.”
Stephen Moore, a Trump adviser, asserted that “one of the most evil left-wing organizations in America is the AARP.” For his part, Trump, at CPAC, brayed that the United States will fall apart if President Joe Biden is reelected. He painted quite the picture. Medicare, Social Security, and health care will “collapse,” along with public education and the economy. The US will be “starved of energy.” Hamas would run wild in American streets. Guns will be confiscated, and the suburbs will be “destroyed.” The stock market will implode. America will be obliterated in a world war.
Trump and his minions were engaged in an orgy of despisal akin to the “Two Minutes of Hate” Orwell imagined in 1984.And Trump was hardly breaking new ground at CPAC. Months ago, he used the fascistic term “vermin” to lambaste his political foes, and more recently he complained that migrants were “poisoning the blood” of the United States.
These latest outbursts provide even more reason to wonder if Lewis’ worries ought to be updated for the present. After all, Trump did plot to retain power illegally and incited violence to do so—and following that he remained the leader of one of the two national parties, has been supported by tens of millions of Americans, and has a good shot at winning the 2024 presidential election. And now he’s deploying classic fascistic rhetoric and fearmongering, and his fellow cultists in the GOP and conservative movement are enthusiastically cheering him on, depicting those who don’t agree with them as enemies of America, and openly threatening democracy and embracing autocracy.
With all this going on, my colleagues at Mother Jones and I picked a good time to launch a new project we’re calling “It Can Happen Here,” which is producing short video reports on the latest signs of creeping authoritarianism and the danger it poses to the American political system. These videos are designed for posting on various social media sites (Twitter, Threads, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok), where they can serve as bite-size reminders of what’s occurring. Here are the first few we’ve posted:
We’re still working out some of the bugs and tweaking the formatting. (The producer of the videos, Sam Van Pykeren, is a wizard.) As you can see, each one includes a caveat: We don’t want to hype the threat, but we don’t want to ignore the warning signs. It’s important to not go overboard and come off as a Chicken Little. But let’s not dismiss the real peril the republic faces: A man who plotted to subvert the constitutional order is in a position to regain power, and his crew has been cooking up plans to implement authoritarian policies and to inject Christian Nationalism into the US government, should Trump manage a comeback.
Would Trump go as far as Windrip? He vows to deport millions of people, which would require massive detention camps. He has consistently pledged he would prosecute and imprison his critics and rivals. He has said (jokingly or not) he would act as a dictator only on his first day in office. He has threatened to use the power of government to crush media outlets he doesn’t favor. This is all Windripish. Moreover, throughout MAGA-land, it’s easy to find Trumpists who denigrate democracy and scheme work-arounds to direct elections. And the Alabama Supreme Court justice who last week handed down an opinion stating that fertilized embryos are people—a ruling that imperils in vitro fertilization treatments—has stated that the Bible dictates that conservative Christians ought to rule over government, as well as business, media, and education.
Those who believe in a demographically diverse, socially and culturally tolerant, and democratic America would be fools to turn a blind eye to this tide. For some, warning of fascism might seem hyperbolic. But it appears that Trump and his team do worry about being portrayed as endangering democracy, for they have resorted to assailing Biden as the real threat to democracy. This projection/rubber-and-glue tactic is as good an indication as any that concerns about the wellbeing of American democracy in a Trump 2.0 era are well-founded.
“When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” This quote is often attributed to Lewis, but there’s no proof that he ever said or wrote that. But the line sounds like it came from Lewis, and it certainly does apply to the present moment. Consequently, I expect we will be busy with our “It Can Happen Here” videos. You’ll be able to see them, if you follow me on Twitter/X (@davidcorndc), Threads (@davidcorn1), Instagram (@davidcorn1), or Facebook. As we say in each video, if we don’t pay close attention to this, it can happen here.
David Corn’sAmerican Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times *bestseller, has been released in a new and expanded paperback edition.
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During his 2020 campaign, former President Donald Trump made a point of being vague when discussing the far-right QAnon movement. Trump refrained from overtly promoting QAnon and its conspiracy theories, but he wouldn’t say anything critical of them either and claimed that he “didn’t know much about” their movement.
Times have changed. Trump is now openly promoting QAnon and is using exact phrases associated with the group, including “the storm” and their slogan “where we go one, we go all.” And Trump is hardly the only MAGA Republican who is embracing QAnon.
Mother Jones’ David Corn describes the intersection of QAnon, MAGA and “Christian nationalism” as “QMaga,” attacking it as an authoritarian threat to U.S. democracy in an article that was originally published in his Our Land newsletter and was republished by Mother Jones on September 23. Extremism in the GOP is a subject that Corn also tackles in his new book, “American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy.”
“For years, Trump had played footsie with QAnon, claiming he didn’t know much about it but praising its adherents’ supposed patriotism, their opposition to pedophilia and, naturally, their cultish love of him,” Corn explains in his Mother Jones/Our Land article. “Offered the chance to denounce this perverse craziness, he bobbed and weaved…. No more. He went full QAnon the other day when he posted online a photoshopped image of him wearing a Q pin. To make the message clear, this picture proclaimed, ‘The Storm Is Coming’ — a QAnon catchphrase referring to that ultimate showdown between Trump and the evildoers. And it contained the abbreviation for the QAnon slogan, ‘where we go one, we go all.’”
The fictional “evildoers” that Corn is referring to are, according to QAnon’s outlandish conspiracy theory, an international cabal of child sex traffickers, pedophiles, Satanists and cannibals who have hijacked the United States’ federal government. Trump, as QAnon sees it, was elected president in 2016 to fight the cabal — and QAnon believes that Trump’s battle against the forces of darkness didn’t end when he lost the 2020 election. Members of QAnon were among the far-right Trump supporters who violently attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021.
“The insanity of a former, and possibly future, president bear-hugging QAnon cannot be overstated,” Corn warns. “And this was no one-off, late-in-the-night s****posting from the former guy. He zapped out other posts with QAnon references. Then four days later, at a rally in Ohio, he delivered an apocalyptic speech against the backdrop of music resembling the QAnon theme song. It was here that Trump supporters raised their hands and pointed a finger — possibly signaling ‘one,’ in an allusion to that QAnon slogan.”
Corn continues, “The supposed purpose of the event was to whip up support for GOP Senate candidate J.D. Vance. But the gathering demonstrated the fusion of MAGA extremism with QAnon and Christian nationalism. The crowd cheered as Trump proclaimed the country had become a hellhole with a crumbling economy, rampant crime, and no freedom of speech. It was all lies, but the fervor of the crowd and the arm waving were reminiscent of a religious revival meeting.”
READ MORE:**QAnon believers, far-right influencers are reigniting fears of 'satanic panic'**
According to Corn, the MAGA movement “has morphed into QMaga.”
“The irrationality has spread from the evidence-free belief that sinister players — China, Venezuela, the CIA, the media, Democrats, voting machine companies — conspired to steal the election from Trump to the conviction that American politics has become a clash between patriotic Christians and cannibalistic Satan-worshipping pedophiles,” Corn explains. “The Ohio arena was not full, and the empty seats indicated that Trump’s mix of conspiracism, cult of personality, end-times ravings, and fundamentalism may not be a bestseller. But many of the GOP election denialists running in state elections this year — including gubernatorial candidates Doug Mastriano, Pennsylvania, and Kari Lake, Arizona — have ties to QAnon.”
Corn continues, “Both Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert were QAnoners before they were elected to Congress in the last election. But perhaps of greater concern is that the entire GOP, which has supported Trump’s authoritarian Big Lie crusade, is now willing to follow Trump further into the depths of fearmongering and madness.”
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mojo https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/03/why-you-should-care-that-ginni-thomas-is-bonkers/
...last week, the Washington Post and CBS News published text messages exchanged between Ginni Thomas and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the wake of the November 2020 election, in which Thomas fervently urged Meadows to overturn the results to keep Donald Trump in power. The disclosure of these texts has revived a long-running debate over Justice Thomas’ potential conflicts of interest related to his wife’s political work and his steadfast refusal to recuse himself from cases to which she might possess a connection. One recent example: in January Clarence Thomas was the only justice to dissent in a case in which the Supreme Court declined to support Donald Trump’s effort to block the House committee investigating the January 6 assault from obtaining White House documents related to his attempt to undermine the election. Given his wife’s role in the so-called Stop the Steal movement and her communications with the Trump White House about this matter, Justice Thomas might not have been an impartial arbiter in this dispute. Legal ethics experts have plenty to dissect here. But as serious as that topic is, the texts raise another troubling prospect: Ginni Thomas is absolutely bonkers.
The texts show that she was a true-blue believer in Trump’s Big Lie conspiracy theory about the election. “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” she texted Meadows a few days after the election, when there was no proof of any such theft (as there would never be) and when no opinion polls showed most Americans concluding the election had been rigged against Trump. In another text, she claimed the dispute over the election (which Trump and his cult had ginned up) was a “a fight of good versus evil.” Her texts indicated she believed the nonsense grifter-attorney Sidney Powell was peddling about foreign states (China! Venezuela!) manipulating voting machines to change the vote count.
One Thomas text to Meadows shared a video promoting a QAnonish conspiracy theory claiming watermarks on ballots would show that Biden received millions of fraudulently cast votes. This baseless assertion was being pushed on InfoWars, the conspiracy theory site of blowhard nutter Alex Jones, by a fellow named Steve Pieczenik, a longtime disinformation purveyor who claimed the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, was a staged “false flag” operation. Related to this particular BS, Thomas texted Meadows a quote she had pulled off a right-wing website: “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.” Uh, no.
Ginni Thomas has long been one of the leaders of the right, and it turns out she’s a loon. This is not entirely a newsflash. Nine years ago, I revealed the existence of a new and secretive conservative outfit that Thomas had helped pull together. Called Groundswell, it assembled a collection of right-wingers in Washington, DC, for weekly meetings to concoct talking points, coordinate messaging, and hatch plans for “a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation,” according to a trove of its documents I obtained. The group included a host of far-right extremists, including Frank Gaffney (who had claimed Barack Obama was a secret Muslim); Ken Blackwell and Jerry Boykin of the Family Research Council; Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch; tea party fanatic Allen West, a former member of Congress; Steve Bannon, then the executive chairman of Breitbart News Network; Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who would become a Fox News presence; Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the influential Federalist Society; a handful of conservative journalists; and others. A top aide to Sen. Ted Cruz was a Groundsweller.
Groundswell appeared to be set up as competition to the well-known Wednesday morning gatherings of conservative advocates hosted by Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform. That collective included a broad spectrum of Republicans, including conservatives opposed to gay rights and abortion rights and those who favor them, as well as GOPers on different sides of the immigration reform debate. Groundswell, which met at the same time as Norquist’s group, was a more ideologically pure and extreme version of the Norquist confab.
The group devised strategies for killing immigration reform, hyping the Benghazi controversy, and countering the impression that the GOP exploits racism. On a Google group page, Groundswellers often griped that the GOP’s inside-the-Beltway crowd was trying to marginalize the conservative die-hards and recruit, promote, and support political candidates deemed less strident and more electable. Their Number One enemy in this regard was Republican strategist Karl Rove, and Groundswell mounted an effort to discredit him.
:{:{The documents indicated that Ginni Thomas was a guiding force for Groundswell, setting agendas for its meetings and actively coordinating messaging among its participants, and that the group had a dark, paranoid, and Manichean view of American politics. One Groundswell memo stated that an “active radical left is dedicated to destroy [sic] those who oppose them” with “vicious and unprecedented tactics. We are in a real war; most conservatives are not prepared to fight.” At one meeting a participant claimed that many government agencies (theState Department, the CIA, the Pentagon, the EPA, and others) were conspiring with “far left wing groups” to undermine conservatives in the media. [THE DREADED DEEP GREEN STATE!]}:
}:
In a post on a Google group page, Ginni Thomas encouraged Groundswell members to watch Agenda: Grinding America Down,a purported documentary that claims progressives (including Obama) seek “a brave new world” based on the “failed policies and ideologies of communism” and that an evil left is purposefully “destroying the greatest country in all of world history.” This film could have been produced by the John Birch Society. Dredging up the Alger Hiss and Rosenberg atomic spying cases, it compares liberalism to communism and Hitler’s Nazism. The film alleges that the left is deliberately seeking to impose communism on the United States and to eradicate the “American family.” It’s that old bugaboo of the subversive foe within: “America has an enemy that is getting very close to accomplishing its plan of destroying the greatest country in all world history.” The website for the film features a wire diagram of the leftist conspiracy to exterminate the United States that is worthy of a tinfoil hat award.
Ginni Thomas was endorsing this claptrap. To see this film as an accurate depiction of reality, one would have to be a paranoid nutcase incapable of effectively and somberly evaluating the world. And there’s this: a person who believes that such a sinister plot is afoot could likely justify almost anything. As that one Groundswell memo suggests, this is a war, yet only Groundswellers are prepared for this battle. In such circumstances—if you were combatting an evil force bent on annihilating the land you love—would you really care about such niceties as avoiding judicial conflicts of interest?
in one of her texts to Meadows, Thomas sent a dire message: “the most important thing you can realize right now is that there are no rules in war.” That text also said, “This war is psychological. PSYOP.” That means that the fight is over defining reality—something to which Ginni Thomas is not strongly tethered—and that in this clash she feels no need to abide by rules or, perhaps, even laws.
There’s much to the Ginni Thomas story. The House 1/6 committee has requested she come by for a chat. And for so many years now, she and her husband have created the appearance of a serious conflict of interest. (A decade ago she was lobbying against Obamacare when her spouse was clearly going to have to rule on the constitutionality of the healthcare law.)
But she has now certainly demonstrated she’s a conspiratorial crackpot. What does it say about the tea party and the far right that they have been steered by a zealous lunatic? No doubt, many Stop-the-Stealers do not drink Trump’s Kool-Aid. They use the false claims of a fraudulent election as a cudgel against Joe Biden and the libs. Or perhaps they suspect there was some chicanery, but they do not buy the full My Pillow Guy nuttiness. (The CIA used Italian military satellites to swipe votes from Tump!) Ginni Thomas, though, is all in. She is unhinged. Though it may be unfair to judge a judge by his or her spouse, it is hardly reassuring that a Supreme Court justice is literally in bed with a quasi-QAnon conspiracist—and ruling on cases related to her passions.
“We are living through what feels like the end of America,” Thomas texted Meadows. In the Thomas household, it’s more like the end of rationality.
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no lnx
How John Durham’s Probe Has Exposed Trump’s Russia Con
His three-year investigation has so far shown the only hoax was orchestrated by the former president.
DAVID CORN
Washington, DC, Bureau Chief
Special counsel John Durham leaves federal court in Washington last month.Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
Donald Trump has bad timing. On Friday, he sent a letter to the Pulitzer Prize Board reiterating his demand that it rescind the awards given to the New York Times and the Washington Post in 2018 for their coverage of the Trump-Russia scandal. (That’s not what he called it.) He based this request on the prosecution of Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann, who was indicted by special counsel John Durham for allegedly lying to the FBI during a September 2016 meeting when he shared with the bureau computer data research that suggested there might be a connection between a Trump-related business and Alfa Bank, a large Russian financial entity. Trump claimed the Sussmann case showed the “Russia hoax was a dirty campaign trick promulgated by Crooked Hillary Clinton and her associates.” Five days later, the jury, after only several hours of deliberation, acquitted Sussmann. Oops.
The quick not-guilty verdict was a sharp slap at Durham’s three-year-long investigation, which was launched by William Barr, when he was Trump’s loyalist attorney general, and which has come across as a political crusade mounted to undermine the various Trump-Russia investigations. Durham was tasked by Barr to investigate the origins of the FBI’s probe of the Russian attack on the 2016 election (which, according to multiple investigations, was waged to help Trump win) and the interactions between Trump associates and Russian operatives. Put simply, Durham’s job was to find that Trump had been set up by the bureau. When the Justice Department inspector general in late 2019 issued a report concluding the FBI had legitimate cause to investigate the Russian assault and the Trump campaign, Durham, in an unusual move, released a statement declaring, “we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.” A-ha, Trumpists exclaimed. Durham was on track to reveal that the FBI investigation was bogus from the get-go and Trump was right: It was all a hoax and a witch hunt.
Yet after years of toil, Durham has produced nothing to suggest the Russia investigation was a Deep State hit-job against Trump. He has brought three cases that have nothing to do with the origins of the investigation. One involved an FBI lawyer who altered an email used to obtain a search warrant after the investigation was started. (The attorney pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year of probation.)
Another led to the indictment of Igor Danchenko, a source for the so-called Steele dossier, for allegedly lying to the FBI about his sources. His trial is scheduled to begin in October. This prosecution, too, has nothing to do with the origin or legitimacy of the FBI’s investigation, which was not triggered by the Steele reports. The third was the Sussmann case that just exploded in Durham’s face. It, too, was essentially unconnected to the FBI’s core investigation, given that the meeting in question happened months after the bureau began examining the Russian assault and that the FBI quickly dismissed the Trump-Alfa Bank tie.
Despite declaring over two years ago that he had reason to question the FBI’s opening of the Russia investigation, Durham has failed to make good on his assertion. His investigation has yielded zilch in this regard. His prosecutions are all sideshows.
But Durham has done Trump and his cultists a great favor by providing material they can exploit for one of their favorite pastimes: deflection.
For over five years, Trump and his minions have endeavored to beat back the Trump-Russia scandal with denial and distraction. They have done all they could to change the subject from the basics of the affair: the Kremlin attacked the 2016 election to help Trump; while this assault was underway, the Trump camp had troubling interactions with Russian operatives and was told the Kremlin intended to covertly assist Trump; Trump hid from the public his effort to land a major development deal in Moscow (for which he sought help from Vladimir Putin); the Trump campaign aided and abetted the Russian attack by denying and/or downplaying it; and, as president, Trump tried to impede the investigation. All of these are confirmed facts that make a damning case that Trump committed a grand act of betrayal to become president. Trump and his defenders, though, have tried to change the subject: the problematic Steele dossier, an improperly obtained search warrant, baseless conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party’s computer servers being whisked away to Ukraine, and, most recently, the Sussmann meeting.
Look at Trump’s letter to the Pulitzer board. It dwells on details that came out during the Sussmann trial about the Clinton campaign promoting the Alfa Bank allegation. This case, Trump claims, shows that Clintonites were trying to spread opposition research about him, particularly iffy data about a purported computer server tie between his business and Alfa Bank. He declares he was the victim of “shameful smears” from the Clinton campaign—and these covert attacks were the basis for the FBI investigation. The Clinton crew, of course, was trying to disseminate negative information about Trump—especially worrisome material about a possible Trump-Russia connection. But this had nothing to do with the investigation already begun by the FBI, which was launched independently of the Clinton effort.
Trump writes, “I again call on you to rescind the Prize you awarded based on blatantly fake, derogatory and defamatory news. If you choose not to do so, we will see you in court.” Putting aside whether Trump can sue a journalism awards committee for content it honors, he is yet again engaging in deflection. Nothing in the Sussmann case undercuts the investigations or the reporting related to the central elements of the scandal. Trump is trying to turn the thin gruel Durham has served up into a feast.
In the reality-based world, Durham actually has undermined Trump and his bogus narrative. He has failed to demonstrate that the Russia investigation was a witch hunt or hoax cooked up by Trump’s enemies. His small-beer cases do not challenge any of the main findings of the investigations, which justifiably taint Trump’s 2016 victory and presidency. Durham’s work (so far) shows that Trump’s attempts to distract from the scandal have been nothing but a big con. Trump shrieks about Sussmann, the Steele dossier, and other matters so the public doesn’t see what’s clearly there: a record of misdeeds, lies, and treachery. In a way, Durham has provided a valuable service. His inability to uncover evidence of a hoax confirms that Trump’s denials and diversions have been the real hoax all along.
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https://www.thenation.com/article/our-gang-venezuela/
david corn
In the weeks before the April 12-13 coup in Venezuela, Asociacion Civil Consorcio Justicia, a legal rights outfit, was planning an April 10 conference to promote democracy in that country. At the time, Venezuela was undergoing severe political strife. Business groups and labor unions were bitterly squaring off against President Hugo Chavez, a democratically elected strongman/populist. Using an $84,000 grant from the Washington-basedNational Endowment for Democracy,a quasi-governmental foundation funded by Congress, Consorcio Justicia was supposed to bring together political parties, unions, business associations, religious groups and academicians to discuss “protecting fundamental political rights,” as an NED document put it. In a proposed agenda Consorcio Justicia listed as one of the main speakers Pedro Carmona, president of Fedecamaras, a leading Venezuelan business group. But when the coup came, Carmona was handpicked by the plotters to head a government established in violation of the Constitution. Then he signed a decree suspending the National Assembly and the Supreme Court. Carmona, it turns out, was hardly interested in safeguarding “fundamental political rights.”
Fortunately for NED, the conference was part of a series that never happened. The program was canceled as Venezuela was hit by national strikes that would lead to the massive business-and-labor demonstration against Chavez on April 11, in which at least eighteen people were killed by unidentified gunmen. The murders provided Chavez’s military foes cause, or cover, to move against him early the next morning. (A recent Human Rights Watch report concluded, “Both sides bear responsibility for the shootings.”) But imagine if the NED-backed conference had occurred and Carmona had appeared there–days before becoming a front man for the coup-makers. That was a close call for NED. Instead, the episode may be no more than a mild what-if embarrassment for NED, which is supposed to finance pro-democracy activism around the world. It shows, though, how democracy-promotion can slip, perhaps unintentionally, toward supporting the opposite–especially in a highly polarized political environment like the one in Venezuela.
Created by President Ronald Reagan and Congress in 1983, NED was designed to run a parallel foreign policy for the United States, backing and assisting entities that Washington might not be able to officially endorse–say, an opposition party challenging a government with which the United States maintained diplomatic relations. In a way, NED took public some of the covert political activity the CIA had previously mounted. The endowment–which devotes much of its budget to funding the foreign policy arms of the Democratic and Republican parties, the Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO (its core grantees)–has been involved in both questionable and praiseworthy projects. It awarded a large grant to a student group linked to an outlawed extreme-right paramilitary outfit in France, helped finance the development of conservative parties in countries where democracy was doing just fine and played a heavy-handed role in Nicaragua’s 1990 elections. In the late 1980s it aided the pro-democracy opposition in Chile and antiapartheid organizations in South Africa. But even if its programs have indeed enhanced democracy on occasion, NED overall has long been problematic, as it has handed taxpayer dollars to private groups (such as the two major parties) to finance their overseas initiatives and has conducted controversial programs that could be viewed abroad as actions of the US government. What might the reaction be here, if the British government funded an effort to improve the Democratic Party’s get-out-the-vote operation in Florida?
Which brings us back to Venezuela–where the US Embassy was compelled after the coup to declare as a “myth” the notion that “the US government, through organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy, financed coup efforts.” For months before the coup, Americans–including US government officials and officials of NED and its core grantees–were in contact with Venezuelans and political parties that became involved or possibly involved with the coup. This has provided Latin Americans cause to wonder if the United States is continuing its tradition of underhandedly meddling in the affairs of its neighbors to the south. And these contacts have prompted some, though not much, official probing in Washington. The issue is not only whether the United States in advance OK’d this particular coup (of which there is little evidence) or tried to help it once it occurred (of which there is more evidence). But did discussions between Americans and Chavez foes–such as those involving NED–encourage or embolden the coup-makers and their supporters? Give them reason to believe the United States would not protest should they move against Chavez in an unconstitutional manner? Much of the two-day coup remains shrouded in confusion. (It came and went so quickly: Carmona fled office the day after he seized power, once several military units announced they opposed the military coup, whereupon Chavez was returned to his office.) But enough questions linger about US actions in Venezuela to warrant a good look.
Consider some NED activities there. When Consorcio Justicia began to assemble the pro-democracy conferences, it approached the two main opponents of Chavez–Carmona and his Fedecamaras, as well as the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV), the leading anti-Chavez labor union–according to documents obtained from NED under a Freedom of Information Act request. Christopher Sabatini, NED’s senior program officer for Latin America, says, “The idea was that the conferences (which were to include Chavistas) would be able to define a consensus-based policy agenda” for the entire country. But certainly NED’s core grantees were trying to beef up Venezuelan organizations challenging Chavez. The AFL-CIO, for example, was working (seemingly laudably) to bolster and democratize the CTV, which Chavez had been trying to intimidate and infiltrate. The International Republican Institute was training several parties that opposed Chavez. At one session, Mike Collins, a former GOP press secretary, taught party leaders how to mount photo-ops; at another he suggested to Caracas Mayor Alfredo Peña, a prominent Chavez foe, how he “could soften his aggressive image in order to appeal to a wider range of voters,” according to an IRI report. (Human Rights Watch found that at least two members of the police force controlled by Peña–now Chavez’s primary rival–fired weapons during the April 11 melee.) The question, then, is, since it was not explicit US policy to call for Chavez’s ouster–though his departure from office was desired by the Bush Administration, which detested his oil sales to Cuba and close ties to Iraq, Iran and Libya–should US taxpayer dollars have gone to groups working to unseat Chavez, even through legitimate means?
Moreover, NED and its grantees helped organizations that may have been represented in the coup government. When Carmona unveiled his Cabinet on the morning of April 12–hours after he was placed in power by the military at 5 am–his junta included a leading official from COPEI, the Christian Democrat party, and one from Primero Justicia, a new party. IRI had provided assistance to both. Carmona also named a member of the CTV board as minister of planning, even though he was not a recognized leader of the union. And when Carmona assumed power in the presidential palace, a leading CTV figure was supposedly nearby–though his whereabouts and his role have been subjects of debate. The CTV did denounce Carmona–but not until Carmona, on the afternoon of April 12, announced his decree to shutter the National Assembly and the Supreme Court. It’s not easy to determine whether Carmona’s Cabinet appointees were acting on behalf of their parties or freelancing. And as one current Venezuelan official says, “The appointees were never sworn in as ministers, so they can claim they did not approve of Carmona’s decree.”
On April 12 Carmona also said he was establishing an advisory council for his government. But he did not name the several dozen members of this group. After the coup, the Chavez government maintained that it found a list of council members. The roster supposedly included leading officials of COPEI, Primero Justicia and the CTV, including CTV head Carlos Ortega–all of whom had been in touch with and/or received assistance from NED or its core grantees. This document, if accurate, raises the prospect that recipients of NED assistance, when the crunch arrived, were more interested in overthrowing Chavez than adhering to the democratic process.
Asked whether it might be troubling if political figures who worked with NED and its grantees had agreed to assist the coup, NED’s Sabatini said, “It’s important to remember that these are independent groups, reacting–on their own–to their very difficult political environment. The NED’s programs with the groups…were very specific programs of technical assistance and training…. It’s also important to remember that these groups (when they were named to the Cabinet or to the advisory council) were acting under the belief that Chavez had resigned–as had been announced on TV.” But according to postcoup news reports, Chavez actually refused to submit his resignation. And, as Venezuelan human rights outfits argued while the coup was in progress, Carmona’s military-installed government was unconstitutional, whether or not Chavez had resigned.
At least two key NED partners did cheer the coup (as did the Bush Administration initially). On April 12 George Folsom, the IRI president, issued a statement supporting the action: “Last night, led by every sector of civil society, the Venezuelan people rose up to defend democracy in their country.” Three days later, after the coup was reversed, NED president Carl Gershman sent Folsom a letter of rebuke, noting that by welcoming Chavez’s “removal through unconstitutional means,” Folsom had “unnecessarily interjected IRI into the sensitive politics of Venezuela.” Folsom’s statement, Gershman added, “will only make it more difficult for the IRI to work in Venezuela and the region as a whole.” Gershman, though, didn’t threaten to withdraw support from IRI. And on the night of April 12–after Carmona suspended the assembly–Mercedes de Freitas, a director of the Fundacion Momento de la Gente, a legislative monitoring project subsidized by NED, e-mailed the endowment defending the military and Carmona, claiming the takeover was not a military coup.
Not all NED allies were rooting for Carmona. On April 13Carlos Ponce, executive director of Consorcio Justicia, e-mailed NED that the coup was illegal and that the decision to eliminate the legislature was “terrible.” Yet several weeks earlier Ponce had almost jumped into bed with coup supporters. While developing NED’s pro-democracy conferences, he solicited the participation of the Frente Institucional Militar de Venezuela, an organization of former military officials. That prompted a swift reply from Washington. “This is a group that has proposed a military coup!” Sabatini exclaimed in an e-mail. He noted that NED “will NOT–I repeat–will NOT support anything that involves the FIM.” Ponce subsequently said that he was unaware of FIM’s position (noting that its participation had been suggested by Carmona), and he quickly booted the organization from the conference. Another potential embarrassment was averted.
But NED was only a part of the picture. For months before the coup, according to several US media reports, US officials in Venezuela had assorted conversations with Chavez foes, and these interactions, purposefully or not, may have led the plotters to believe the Bush Administration would look favorably on anyone who made Chavez go away. Newsday noted that long before the coup, business, union and civic leaders were meeting to plan opposition to Chavez, and at one such meeting–attended by Carmona and held at the US Embassy–a coup was proposed. US officials, according to the newspaper, say they immediately killed the idea. But the officials continued to interact with these Chavez opponents. The newspaper quoted one Venezuelan source familiar with these discussions as saying, “All the United States really cared about was that it was done neatly, with a resignation letter or something to show for it.” And the Los Angeles Times reported that a “Venezuelan leader who visited Washington for an official meeting said he concluded after talks with US officials that the Americans would not necessarily punish the leaders of a government that overthrew Chavez.” A Western diplomat told the Washington Post, “I don’t think the US provided any active or material support for [the coup]. But the people involved may have seen all of these meetings and visits, added them all up, and come up with an idea that they were on the same team.” Last November then-US ambassador Donna Hrinak instructed the US military attaché in Venezuela to cut off contacts with dissident military officers. But Vice Adm. Carlos Molina, one of the leading military opponents of Chavez, said he had met with a US official several weeks before the coup.
After the coup failed, Chavez officials found inside the presidential palace documents left behind by the coup-makers. One was a note apparently written by Luis Herrera Marcano, chargé d’affaires in the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington. He was reporting on a conversation he had had with State Department official Phillip Chicola while the coup was under way. According to a copy published by Proceso, a Mexican newsmagazine, Chicola said, “Given that the United States signed and fully supports the Inter-American Democratic Charter, which condemns any violation of constitutional rule, it is necessary that the transition currently under way in Venezuela, which [the United States] understands and sympathizes with, conserve constitutional structures.”
On the morning of April 12, according to the New York Times, Otto Reich, the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, told a gathering of Latin American and Caribbean ambassadors that they had to support the new government. The next day Reich spoke twice to Venezuelan media magnate Gustavo Cisneros, according to a Cisneros spokeswoman. Cisneros’s role in the coup–if he had one–has been a topic of speculation in Venezuela, for on the night of April 11 Carmona met with other opposition leaders at a TV station owned by Cisneros. (Cisneros denies he was a force behind the coup.) Cisneros’s spokeswoman maintains that Reich called on April 13 “as a friend” because Chavez supporters were protesting at media outlets in Caracas. And on the morning of April 13, US ambassador to Venezuela Charles Shapiro met with Carmona. According to Carmona, Shapiro expressed concern regarding Carmona’s dissolution of the legislature and urged Carmona to be less antidemocratic. If Carmona is to be believed, Shapiro did not oppose the unconstitutional means by which Carmona seized power.
The Bush Administration claims that all the contacts before and during the coup were kosher. The US Embassy in Venezuela released a statement maintaining that “of course” US officials met with opposition figures, for “that is an Embassy’s job.” But it insisted that “officials in Washington and in Caracas consistently and repeatedly emphasized the United States’ opposition to any extra-constitutional alteration of power.” The embassy denied that US military officials were involved in coup activities. It noted that Secretary of State Colin Powell declared, “We condemn the blows to constitutional order.” But Powell said that on April 19–six days after the coup collapsed.
There has been no thorough public exploration in Washington of the precoup contacts or the efforts of Bush officials to nudge the coup in a direction that would permit the Administration to openly support the takeover. At the request of Senator Christopher Dodd, who chairs the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Latin America, the Inspector General of the State Department has been examining Bush Administration actions before and during the coup. Dodd asked the IG to review cables, e-mails and other records to determine what US officials told Chavez’s foes and to examine NED programs. The report is due at the end of July, and Dodd expects to hold hearings afterward. On April 23 the New York Times reported that the Pentagon was reviewing its actions during the coup to insure that no military officials had encouraged the plotters. But Lieut. Comdr. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, says no formal review was initiated: “It was just a matter of getting the facts together. There were questions why people from the US defense attaché were on a Venezuelan military base while this thing was going on. It was nothing out of the ordinary.”
One matter that warrants scrutiny is a Washington Post report that two military officials who publicly challenged Chavez in the weeks before the coup–Vice Admiral Molina and Col. Pedro Soto–each received $100,000 from a Miami bank. The newspaper cited an unnamed diplomat in Venezuela as its source for this curious allegation. Who in the United States might have been secretly subsidizing Chavez’s foes? Any official body that wants to investigate could start by subpoenaing Soto. In April he fled Venezuela for the United States, and in June he asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Miami for political asylum, claiming that he feared for his life.
Postcoup Venezuela is a jittery place of deepening division, marked by rising gun sales, political violence, constant rumors of another coup and talk of assassination. Former President Jimmy Carter failed to broker talks between Chavez and his foes; on July 11 an estimated 600,000 people demonstrated against Chavez. For the time being, Consorcio Justicia has given up on holding a large pro-democracy conference. “It’s a nasty environment,” executive director Ponce says. “We have a radical opposition and a radical government. We are unable to find ways to negotiate.” So his group is now using NED money for smaller projects. The failed coup has changed his perspective. Has it affected the policies and plans of the Bush Administration, NED or NED’s grantees? If a Congressional hearing regarding Venezuela’s cloudy coup ever convenes, that is one of many questions that ought to be asked.
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