untitledgate
Note to readers:
Hate Inc. is completed (start from here, if you missed it). It will be out on shelves with minor alterations in October, published by OR Books. The same publisher will later be publishing hard copies of The Business Secrets of Drug-Dealing (which you can read here).
I struggled quite a bit over what to do next in this space. I started working on one narrative project in February, then another in March.
Finally, a few weeks ago, after the Substack entry, “Russiagate is this generation’s WMD,” I got called out on Fox News by former 60 Minutes reporter Lara Logan. This led to a new idea.
The gist of Logan’s comment was, it was all well and good to write about a few things the media got wrong on Russiagate, but another to do the job of fully investigating the case. The implication was a reporter from a liberal outlet like Rolling Stone would never go there.
It’s a fair point. So, game on. I’ll do that investigation.
The title of this project is a placeholder. I’ll add a real one once I do enough digging to know what we’re dealing with here.
In the last few years, Russiagate has taken a personal and psychological toll on me, and I haven’t even really covered it! A few early commentary pieces expressing skepticism in Rolling Stone and one big essay in this space a few weeks ago won the near-universal scorn of colleagues, a seeming blackout on cable and radio stations where I once was a regular guest, and spurred regular accusations (from political and media figures both) of being a Russian spy. That was for starters.
All of the above is fine. No one who wants friends should go into this job. The real concern Russiagate posed was that it caused me to worry I was losing my mind.
For nearly three years, most of my colleagues seemed certain about something that to me looked riddled with holes at first blush. They believed Donald Trump had been installed in the White House as a result of a devious, years-long Manchurian Candidate style espionage plot in which a blackmailed Trump had been sent from Moscow to ruin us from within. Conjecture-ridden stories like Here are 18 Reasons Trump Could Be a Russian Asset were suddenly commonplace in outlets like the Washington Post.
This story was so unlikely on its face that I thought reporters would need twice the usual amount of confirmation to suggest it in public. Instead, they seemed to need far less than the usual amount. I started to hear from people in the business that there was a significant amount of off-the-record whispering buttressing these tales.
One of the themes I’ve tried to emphasize is most conspiracies happen in the open. The problem with many serious forms of corruption isn’t that they’re kept secret, but they’re visible to everyone and no one cares.
For instance, before and after the 2008 crash, you could find rampant systemic financial corruption in any direction. You could also walk into almost any county courthouse across the country and find evidence of fraud.
Banks and their “foreclosure mill” law firms for years sought evictions on the basis of phony, “robo-signed” documents. All you had to do to find crime was bring to any county record office a list of the major fake “senior executives” who’d signed thousands of other foreclosure actions (“Linda Green” is an example) and you could find a bent eviction case.
For years, this caused people to be tossed out of their homes based on a form of systematic perjury. Still, foreclosure was complex and boring, so people mostly didn’t care. The companies that built this fraud system were eventually found out, and even induced to admit what they’d done in some cases, but were allowed to stay in business without criminal penalties.
In my experience this is what conspiracies look like. Powerful actors are disinclined to engage in cloak-and-dagger plots because they mostly don’t have to. They can steal and embezzle out in the open, because the public is either too disinterested or impotent to respond.
There are exceptions, one of which I ran into while living abroad. In late September of 1999 a bus driver in the Russian city of Ryazan spotted a suspicious car stopping in front of a residential building. He watched two men carry sacks into the building entrance.
He called the cops, who found about 300 pounds of a rare military explosive called hexagen in the basement. Local authorities took the explosives a mile out of town and detonated it. The new Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, launched a war against Chechnya the next day.
This all took place in the context of a series of deadly apartment bombings in and around Moscow, which Putin’s government blamed on the Chechens. For Russians, these bombings were similar in national psychological impact to the 9/11 bombing.
The hot conspiratorial rumor at the time was that in the process of defusing the Ryazan bomb, local cops uncovered evidence the explosives had been placed there by the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency. The idea was, the Putin government had tried to blow up its own citizens to justify the launch of war.
I was living in Moscow at the time and had friends in the Russian press, including some of the country’s top muckrakers, who were convinced Putin had done it. I thought they were crazy. The theory seemed outlandish even by Russian standards.
But my Russian colleagues were insistent, and soon all sorts of damning facts officially confirmed/conceded by the state began rolling in. Not only did the FSB publicly confirm a role in the Ryazan incident (they said it was a “training exercise”) but a number of reporters who investigated Ryazan ended up beaten or killed, including two I knew personally.
One was former Novaya Gazeta ace reporter and eventual parliament member Yuri Schekochikin, from whom I’d frequently asked advice on other stories in the nineties. He was assassinated in 2003. He had been heading a parliamentary commission to investigate the bombings.
I still don’t know what to think about that case, but the Ryazan incident was a major lesson not to discount any story just because it sounds preposterous on its face. As one of my Russian reporter friends told me, “Even people in the FSB watch too many movies.” In other words, there is a lot of stupidity in this world, and the cloak-and-dagger variety of it does exist, among other things because many crooks imagine themselves romantic figures and are not smart enough to keep their corrupt acts boring.
In the case of this project, I’m calling it Untitledgate because information is still too lacking to give it a definitive name.
I don’t know if the Trump-Russia tale is an international conspiracy that has appropriately been tabbed Russiagate, or if it’s actually more like the surveillance scandal the Republicans call Spygate, or if it’s even something dumber, maybe a media-generated mass psychogenic illness we should call something like Reportergate.
The future title of this book comes down to one question: what the hell is this story?
No story makes sense until you know how it started, and we still don’t know that here.
Years ago, in a fit of pique, I decided to look into the sports scandal Deflategate. As a Boston native and Patriots fan, media coverage of the case was driving me crazy. I didn’t know whether to get outraged over a smear of my favorite team, or go into mourning over my hometown club being cheaters.
Mainly, this was because a basic reporting rule was being violated about a dozen times a day.
I call it the Ron Burgundy rule: The number of experts you have to interview before you can be credible on a technical topic is in inverse proportion to your level of ignorance.
So if you know a little something about a subject, you can get away with interviewing maybe three or four experts. If you know absolutely nothing, it should be more like ten or fifteen.
I went through this when I started covering Wall Street. When I had to write about credit default swaps and CDOs and other financial instruments, I knew zero.
The only way to feel safe when doing such work is if you interview a ton of people. And you only feel really confident if you start hearing the same story over and over again.
So before the Super Bowl, I surveyed a ton of experts about air pressure and the other arcane scientific questions dominating the story. I had to apologize for wasting the time of such folks. The story I wrote but never filed contained two disclaimers: that I was from Boston, and this:
This is without a doubt the dumbest story I’ve ever worked on.
For perspective, I’ve also covered a prostitute sack-race in Moscow, a clown-theater production of “Don Giovanni,” and a failed attempt (a not-even-close attempt, actually) to break the Guinness record for world’s largest bottle-cap pyramid...
I’ll be honest: deep inside, I hoped that the answers I got would exonerate the Patriots.
That didn’t happen. I ended up surveying about fifteen different professors from all over the country. Some were amusingly pissed that after many years of hard intellectual labor, this was the story that inspired a call from a reporter.
One professor sent me the following hilarious email:
“Measles is spreading because a bunch of scientifically-illiterate dumbasses won't vaccinate their kids, the fig leaf of Dodd-Frank is getting trimmed by lobbyists with congressmen in their pockets because the public is too innumerate to care or even notice, and the world's last remaining true wilderness, the open ocean, is on the climate-change chopping block while our representatives declare climate-science a hoax.
“But sure, ask me about the ideal gas law [for DeflateGate]...”
I asked him about the Ideal Gas Law.
The answers I got, from him and others, were consistent. Atmospheric conditions at a cold-weather football game could be expected to deflate balls a little, but not much. Half a pound per square inch (PSI) was about the lower end of the spectrum, and slightly over 1 PSI the high end.
One answer from a scientist in a non-New England state pretty much summed it up:
“If we assume [many sentences of dense jargon excluded here]... based on these estimates, I wouldn’t be surprised by a decrease in the ballpark of 1 PSI.”
When I got those answers, I was still operating under the assumption, caused by a single erroneous early ESPN report leaked by anonymous league officials (there is an incredible number of parallels between Deflategate and Russiagate as news phenomena) that the Pats’ footballs had been deflated by two whole PSI.
So what I learned not only did not exonerate the Patriots, it strongly suggested they’d tampered with their footballs.
I was in the middle of writing up that depressing story when ProFootballTalk (whose chief writer Mike Florio was thought by Patriots Nation to be a hater) came out with a story citing a source saying the actual under-inflation was closer to 1 PSI than 2 PSI.
I was about to rewrite that (to me) cheerier story, when I stopped, realizing a key piece of information was missing. I had no idea why someone had decided to measure the footballs in the first place.
There were about five different stories sportswriters were examining. Most of these eventually appeared in print in one place or another.
Initially it was reported Colts linebacker D’Qwell Jackson, who’d intercepted a Brady pass, had felt the ball to be too soft. Jackson later shot that theory down. Another version of the story was that the Colts equipment man to whom Jackson handed the ball felt it was too soft, triggering the test.
A third version of the story was the Baltimore Ravens, eliminated by the Patriots the week before, had tipped off the Colts to check the balls.
The fourth version of the story was the one that was most bothersome. It was said the Colts had information from somewhere about alleged tampering issues by the Patriots even months before, even ahead of a regular-season game in week 11 at Indianapolis.
According to that report, which I also ended up hearing from a league source, the Colts found the Patriots’ footballs to be coated in a “tacky substance” and “spongy” when safety Mike Adams intercepted two Brady balls in that week 11 game. The Colts later cited unspecified “chatter” around the league indicating the Patriots’ tampering practices were known to other teams.
I didn’t understand why that “unspecified” chatter couldn’t be “specified” now that this had become a national scandal-mania, but it was enough to make me pause.
Under one scenario, Deflategate was a story about the Colts and Ravens randomly deciding to spring a check on the Patriots’ footballs, perhaps in the knowledge no one in the league or the press would be smart enough to realize cold footballs naturally lose air pressure.
In another version, someone actually had a legit reason to suspect the Patriots of doing something iffy prior to checking the balls.
The difference between those two versions of the story was pretty large. In the first, Deflategate was a hoax and media train wreck. The second version is at least potentially a real cheating story. I was never able to sort out what was what, although to be honest, I didn’t try very hard.
I tell this absurd story to point out that it’s impossible to know how to frame any story until you know its origin.
Deflategate, absurd as it was, ended up having a lot of the same characteristics as Russiagate, as a media phenomenon anyway. The story was similarly driven by leaks from “official” sources, some of which turned out to be true and some of which very much did not.
In part because of that, Deflategate, just like Russiagate, was plagued by regular hyperventilating over-reports and gross errors. There was even one about a Patriots employee handing an unapproved ball to a referee, a story that led to maybe a first in network history: a reporter correcting his own colleague on live TV.
There was also widespread overreaction in the press, like for instance the moment when former quarterback Mark Brunell cried on TV about the anguish of it all.
But the main similarity of that silly story to the infinitely more serious Russiagate affair is the origin issue: we just don’t know how it started, still.
I’ve been informally looking into Russiagate for almost three years now. Most of this has involved going over published news stories and re-interviewing named sources, to see if I got the same answers as the original reporters.
Some stories came up the same, but many others, like for instance the oft-cited tale about the Trump campaign intervening to create a “pro-Russian” platform at the Republican National Convention, produced different narratives upon review.
The story that produces the widest variance is the one about how the FBI investigation began. Officially, the FBI’s goofily-named “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation began on July 31, 2016, and was spurred by suspicions involving onetime Trump foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos (whom one Trump campaign source described to me as a “not-even-a-coffee-boy”).
I’ve already found a number of holes in that story. There’s evidence that some kind of investigation of Trump administration figures – including not just Papadopoulos and the likes of ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort, but also General Michael Flynn – was going on perhaps six months earlier than has been reported, and probably even earlier than that.
What I’ve already found out on that score will be the subject of the coming first chapter. The basic problem of the information is again similar to the maddening Deflategate affair. It’s a chicken-egg issue. Was there a legitimate reason to start collecting data on the Trump campaign and its “links” to Russia, or was it an investigation in search of reasons?
“Russiagate” is one of the great mysteries of modern times. Without question it developed into one of the most bizarre and inexcusable media messes ever. I’ll be getting into that in some detail. It’s already clear major news organizations were intentionally fed disinformation by current and former security officials, who improperly inserted themselves into domestic politics on an unprecedented scale.
Numerous stories I’ve looked at may even have been invented wholesale (including several stories that supposedly involved information developed by foreign intelligence services).
There may also be a story here about how certain not-quite-legal forms of surveillance are more routine in America than we have been led to imagine. Attempts to conceal this wider reality may have played a role in some of the public misinformation about this specific case.
Lastly, there may have been malfeasance or troubling behavior on the part of people in and around the Trump campaign that triggered an honest, if overzealous, response by authorities. Undoubtedly something triggered an early series of inquiries. But whatever that something is, hasn’t been fully disclosed.
I’m going to look at all of this, and I hope readers will trust what I dig up for the simple reason that I don’t particularly care whether this story ultimately cuts for against Donald Trump, for or against Democrats, for or against the security services.
I’m no fan of Trump – I wrote a book about him called Insane Clown President. I also have a deep suspicion of the American and British intelligence figures who appear to have been key sources behind many of the Russiagate news stories.
This is a news story that I suspect no one wants aired out in full. As we’ll likely find out when the Mueller report is released, any investigation of Donald Trump will likely yield reams of embarrassing information about the President. But there are also indications that aspects of this story may ultimately be embarrassing to federal law enforcement and intelligence officials of the type who for decades have been colleagues to both Attorney General Bill Barr and Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller.
For this reason, I wouldn’t expect a full, depoliticized account of this story to appear in any large mainstream news organization. Only someone who has the luxury of not caring who takes offense to the story can be expected to report this thing out in full.
I don’t care. First installment in about a week.
Hate Inc. is completed (start from here, if you missed it). It will be out on shelves with minor alterations in October, published by OR Books. The same publisher will later be publishing hard copies of The Business Secrets of Drug-Dealing (which you can read here).
I struggled quite a bit over what to do next in this space. I started working on one narrative project in February, then another in March.
Finally, a few weeks ago, after the Substack entry, “Russiagate is this generation’s WMD,” I got called out on Fox News by former 60 Minutes reporter Lara Logan. This led to a new idea.
The gist of Logan’s comment was, it was all well and good to write about a few things the media got wrong on Russiagate, but another to do the job of fully investigating the case. The implication was a reporter from a liberal outlet like Rolling Stone would never go there.
It’s a fair point. So, game on. I’ll do that investigation.
The title of this project is a placeholder. I’ll add a real one once I do enough digging to know what we’re dealing with here.
In the last few years, Russiagate has taken a personal and psychological toll on me, and I haven’t even really covered it! A few early commentary pieces expressing skepticism in Rolling Stone and one big essay in this space a few weeks ago won the near-universal scorn of colleagues, a seeming blackout on cable and radio stations where I once was a regular guest, and spurred regular accusations (from political and media figures both) of being a Russian spy. That was for starters.
All of the above is fine. No one who wants friends should go into this job. The real concern Russiagate posed was that it caused me to worry I was losing my mind.
For nearly three years, most of my colleagues seemed certain about something that to me looked riddled with holes at first blush. They believed Donald Trump had been installed in the White House as a result of a devious, years-long Manchurian Candidate style espionage plot in which a blackmailed Trump had been sent from Moscow to ruin us from within. Conjecture-ridden stories like Here are 18 Reasons Trump Could Be a Russian Asset were suddenly commonplace in outlets like the Washington Post.
This story was so unlikely on its face that I thought reporters would need twice the usual amount of confirmation to suggest it in public. Instead, they seemed to need far less than the usual amount. I started to hear from people in the business that there was a significant amount of off-the-record whispering buttressing these tales.
One of the themes I’ve tried to emphasize is most conspiracies happen in the open. The problem with many serious forms of corruption isn’t that they’re kept secret, but they’re visible to everyone and no one cares.
For instance, before and after the 2008 crash, you could find rampant systemic financial corruption in any direction. You could also walk into almost any county courthouse across the country and find evidence of fraud.
Banks and their “foreclosure mill” law firms for years sought evictions on the basis of phony, “robo-signed” documents. All you had to do to find crime was bring to any county record office a list of the major fake “senior executives” who’d signed thousands of other foreclosure actions (“Linda Green” is an example) and you could find a bent eviction case.
For years, this caused people to be tossed out of their homes based on a form of systematic perjury. Still, foreclosure was complex and boring, so people mostly didn’t care. The companies that built this fraud system were eventually found out, and even induced to admit what they’d done in some cases, but were allowed to stay in business without criminal penalties.
In my experience this is what conspiracies look like. Powerful actors are disinclined to engage in cloak-and-dagger plots because they mostly don’t have to. They can steal and embezzle out in the open, because the public is either too disinterested or impotent to respond.
There are exceptions, one of which I ran into while living abroad. In late September of 1999 a bus driver in the Russian city of Ryazan spotted a suspicious car stopping in front of a residential building. He watched two men carry sacks into the building entrance.
He called the cops, who found about 300 pounds of a rare military explosive called hexagen in the basement. Local authorities took the explosives a mile out of town and detonated it. The new Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, launched a war against Chechnya the next day.
This all took place in the context of a series of deadly apartment bombings in and around Moscow, which Putin’s government blamed on the Chechens. For Russians, these bombings were similar in national psychological impact to the 9/11 bombing.
The hot conspiratorial rumor at the time was that in the process of defusing the Ryazan bomb, local cops uncovered evidence the explosives had been placed there by the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency. The idea was, the Putin government had tried to blow up its own citizens to justify the launch of war.
I was living in Moscow at the time and had friends in the Russian press, including some of the country’s top muckrakers, who were convinced Putin had done it. I thought they were crazy. The theory seemed outlandish even by Russian standards.
But my Russian colleagues were insistent, and soon all sorts of damning facts officially confirmed/conceded by the state began rolling in. Not only did the FSB publicly confirm a role in the Ryazan incident (they said it was a “training exercise”) but a number of reporters who investigated Ryazan ended up beaten or killed, including two I knew personally.
One was former Novaya Gazeta ace reporter and eventual parliament member Yuri Schekochikin, from whom I’d frequently asked advice on other stories in the nineties. He was assassinated in 2003. He had been heading a parliamentary commission to investigate the bombings.
I still don’t know what to think about that case, but the Ryazan incident was a major lesson not to discount any story just because it sounds preposterous on its face. As one of my Russian reporter friends told me, “Even people in the FSB watch too many movies.” In other words, there is a lot of stupidity in this world, and the cloak-and-dagger variety of it does exist, among other things because many crooks imagine themselves romantic figures and are not smart enough to keep their corrupt acts boring.
In the case of this project, I’m calling it Untitledgate because information is still too lacking to give it a definitive name.
I don’t know if the Trump-Russia tale is an international conspiracy that has appropriately been tabbed Russiagate, or if it’s actually more like the surveillance scandal the Republicans call Spygate, or if it’s even something dumber, maybe a media-generated mass psychogenic illness we should call something like Reportergate.
The future title of this book comes down to one question: what the hell is this story?
No story makes sense until you know how it started, and we still don’t know that here.
Years ago, in a fit of pique, I decided to look into the sports scandal Deflategate. As a Boston native and Patriots fan, media coverage of the case was driving me crazy. I didn’t know whether to get outraged over a smear of my favorite team, or go into mourning over my hometown club being cheaters.
Mainly, this was because a basic reporting rule was being violated about a dozen times a day.
I call it the Ron Burgundy rule: The number of experts you have to interview before you can be credible on a technical topic is in inverse proportion to your level of ignorance.
So if you know a little something about a subject, you can get away with interviewing maybe three or four experts. If you know absolutely nothing, it should be more like ten or fifteen.
I went through this when I started covering Wall Street. When I had to write about credit default swaps and CDOs and other financial instruments, I knew zero.
The only way to feel safe when doing such work is if you interview a ton of people. And you only feel really confident if you start hearing the same story over and over again.
So before the Super Bowl, I surveyed a ton of experts about air pressure and the other arcane scientific questions dominating the story. I had to apologize for wasting the time of such folks. The story I wrote but never filed contained two disclaimers: that I was from Boston, and this:
This is without a doubt the dumbest story I’ve ever worked on.
For perspective, I’ve also covered a prostitute sack-race in Moscow, a clown-theater production of “Don Giovanni,” and a failed attempt (a not-even-close attempt, actually) to break the Guinness record for world’s largest bottle-cap pyramid...
I’ll be honest: deep inside, I hoped that the answers I got would exonerate the Patriots.
That didn’t happen. I ended up surveying about fifteen different professors from all over the country. Some were amusingly pissed that after many years of hard intellectual labor, this was the story that inspired a call from a reporter.
One professor sent me the following hilarious email:
“Measles is spreading because a bunch of scientifically-illiterate dumbasses won't vaccinate their kids, the fig leaf of Dodd-Frank is getting trimmed by lobbyists with congressmen in their pockets because the public is too innumerate to care or even notice, and the world's last remaining true wilderness, the open ocean, is on the climate-change chopping block while our representatives declare climate-science a hoax.
“But sure, ask me about the ideal gas law [for DeflateGate]...”
I asked him about the Ideal Gas Law.
The answers I got, from him and others, were consistent. Atmospheric conditions at a cold-weather football game could be expected to deflate balls a little, but not much. Half a pound per square inch (PSI) was about the lower end of the spectrum, and slightly over 1 PSI the high end.
One answer from a scientist in a non-New England state pretty much summed it up:
“If we assume [many sentences of dense jargon excluded here]... based on these estimates, I wouldn’t be surprised by a decrease in the ballpark of 1 PSI.”
When I got those answers, I was still operating under the assumption, caused by a single erroneous early ESPN report leaked by anonymous league officials (there is an incredible number of parallels between Deflategate and Russiagate as news phenomena) that the Pats’ footballs had been deflated by two whole PSI.
So what I learned not only did not exonerate the Patriots, it strongly suggested they’d tampered with their footballs.
I was in the middle of writing up that depressing story when ProFootballTalk (whose chief writer Mike Florio was thought by Patriots Nation to be a hater) came out with a story citing a source saying the actual under-inflation was closer to 1 PSI than 2 PSI.
I was about to rewrite that (to me) cheerier story, when I stopped, realizing a key piece of information was missing. I had no idea why someone had decided to measure the footballs in the first place.
There were about five different stories sportswriters were examining. Most of these eventually appeared in print in one place or another.
Initially it was reported Colts linebacker D’Qwell Jackson, who’d intercepted a Brady pass, had felt the ball to be too soft. Jackson later shot that theory down. Another version of the story was that the Colts equipment man to whom Jackson handed the ball felt it was too soft, triggering the test.
A third version of the story was the Baltimore Ravens, eliminated by the Patriots the week before, had tipped off the Colts to check the balls.
The fourth version of the story was the one that was most bothersome. It was said the Colts had information from somewhere about alleged tampering issues by the Patriots even months before, even ahead of a regular-season game in week 11 at Indianapolis.
According to that report, which I also ended up hearing from a league source, the Colts found the Patriots’ footballs to be coated in a “tacky substance” and “spongy” when safety Mike Adams intercepted two Brady balls in that week 11 game. The Colts later cited unspecified “chatter” around the league indicating the Patriots’ tampering practices were known to other teams.
I didn’t understand why that “unspecified” chatter couldn’t be “specified” now that this had become a national scandal-mania, but it was enough to make me pause.
Under one scenario, Deflategate was a story about the Colts and Ravens randomly deciding to spring a check on the Patriots’ footballs, perhaps in the knowledge no one in the league or the press would be smart enough to realize cold footballs naturally lose air pressure.
In another version, someone actually had a legit reason to suspect the Patriots of doing something iffy prior to checking the balls.
The difference between those two versions of the story was pretty large. In the first, Deflategate was a hoax and media train wreck. The second version is at least potentially a real cheating story. I was never able to sort out what was what, although to be honest, I didn’t try very hard.
I tell this absurd story to point out that it’s impossible to know how to frame any story until you know its origin.
Deflategate, absurd as it was, ended up having a lot of the same characteristics as Russiagate, as a media phenomenon anyway. The story was similarly driven by leaks from “official” sources, some of which turned out to be true and some of which very much did not.
In part because of that, Deflategate, just like Russiagate, was plagued by regular hyperventilating over-reports and gross errors. There was even one about a Patriots employee handing an unapproved ball to a referee, a story that led to maybe a first in network history: a reporter correcting his own colleague on live TV.
There was also widespread overreaction in the press, like for instance the moment when former quarterback Mark Brunell cried on TV about the anguish of it all.
But the main similarity of that silly story to the infinitely more serious Russiagate affair is the origin issue: we just don’t know how it started, still.
I’ve been informally looking into Russiagate for almost three years now. Most of this has involved going over published news stories and re-interviewing named sources, to see if I got the same answers as the original reporters.
Some stories came up the same, but many others, like for instance the oft-cited tale about the Trump campaign intervening to create a “pro-Russian” platform at the Republican National Convention, produced different narratives upon review.
The story that produces the widest variance is the one about how the FBI investigation began. Officially, the FBI’s goofily-named “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation began on July 31, 2016, and was spurred by suspicions involving onetime Trump foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos (whom one Trump campaign source described to me as a “not-even-a-coffee-boy”).
I’ve already found a number of holes in that story. There’s evidence that some kind of investigation of Trump administration figures – including not just Papadopoulos and the likes of ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort, but also General Michael Flynn – was going on perhaps six months earlier than has been reported, and probably even earlier than that.
What I’ve already found out on that score will be the subject of the coming first chapter. The basic problem of the information is again similar to the maddening Deflategate affair. It’s a chicken-egg issue. Was there a legitimate reason to start collecting data on the Trump campaign and its “links” to Russia, or was it an investigation in search of reasons?
“Russiagate” is one of the great mysteries of modern times. Without question it developed into one of the most bizarre and inexcusable media messes ever. I’ll be getting into that in some detail. It’s already clear major news organizations were intentionally fed disinformation by current and former security officials, who improperly inserted themselves into domestic politics on an unprecedented scale.
Numerous stories I’ve looked at may even have been invented wholesale (including several stories that supposedly involved information developed by foreign intelligence services).
There may also be a story here about how certain not-quite-legal forms of surveillance are more routine in America than we have been led to imagine. Attempts to conceal this wider reality may have played a role in some of the public misinformation about this specific case.
Lastly, there may have been malfeasance or troubling behavior on the part of people in and around the Trump campaign that triggered an honest, if overzealous, response by authorities. Undoubtedly something triggered an early series of inquiries. But whatever that something is, hasn’t been fully disclosed.
I’m going to look at all of this, and I hope readers will trust what I dig up for the simple reason that I don’t particularly care whether this story ultimately cuts for against Donald Trump, for or against Democrats, for or against the security services.
I’m no fan of Trump – I wrote a book about him called Insane Clown President. I also have a deep suspicion of the American and British intelligence figures who appear to have been key sources behind many of the Russiagate news stories.
This is a news story that I suspect no one wants aired out in full. As we’ll likely find out when the Mueller report is released, any investigation of Donald Trump will likely yield reams of embarrassing information about the President. But there are also indications that aspects of this story may ultimately be embarrassing to federal law enforcement and intelligence officials of the type who for decades have been colleagues to both Attorney General Bill Barr and Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller.
For this reason, I wouldn’t expect a full, depoliticized account of this story to appear in any large mainstream news organization. Only someone who has the luxury of not caring who takes offense to the story can be expected to report this thing out in full.
I don’t care. First installment in about a week.
Comments
Post a Comment