David Corn's Blog, page 20

John Durham Just Made False Statements to Congress

John Durham—the special counsel who was appointed by then-Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the FBI’s investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal and who utterly failed to produce evidence it was a hoax—testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. In doing so, he made false statements to Congress. He might even have lied.

Durham spent four years on a crusade that Donald Trump and others hoped would back up Trump’s claim that the Russia investigation was cooked up by his enemies within the supposed Deep State. Yet Durham came up empty on this front, losing two jury trials unrelated to the origins of the FBI’s inquiry and winning a guilty plea from an FBI lawyer who had altered an email to support a surveillance warrant for a former Trump campaign adviser. He prosecuted no FBI officials or Obama administration officials for the supposedly big crime of mounting a plot (or witch hunt!) against Trump. Durham even concluded there was justification for the FBI to have initiated a preliminary investigation, just not a full investigation, of Russia’s attack on the 2016 election and contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.  

When Durham came before the committee, House Republicans eagerly picked over the scraps in his final report, which has been much criticized, and they treated him as a hero. But under questioning from Democratic and Republican members, Durham misrepresented key aspects of the Russia scandal, suggesting he was either unfamiliar with basic facts or was purposefully trying to mislead the committee and the American public. 

During his turn to question Durham, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) asked Durham about the infamous meeting held in Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, when Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort—three of Trump’s top campaign advisers—sat down with an emissary of the Russian government whom they were told had dirt on Hillary Clinton to share. An email sent to Trump Jr. from a business associate that set up this session informed the candidate’s son that this meeting was part of a secret Russian scheme to help Trump’s campaign. Durham dismissed the matter, remarking, “People get phone calls all the time from individuals who claim to have information like that.”

This meeting signaled to Moscow that the Trump camp was receptive to Russian endeavors to intervene in the election to boost Trump’s chances, and Schiff expressed surprise that Durham found it insignificant. “Are you really trying to diminish the importance of what happened here?” he asked.

Durham answered: “The more complete story is that they met, and it was a ruse, and they didn’t talk about Mrs. Clinton.”

That is not true. 

The report produced by special counsel Robert Mueller notes that the Russian emissary, a lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya, did discuss Clinton: “Participants agreed that Veselnitskaya stated that the Ziff brothers [an American family investment firm] had broken Russian laws and had donated their profits to the DNC or the Clinton Campaign. She asserted that the Ziff brothers had engaged in tax evasion and money laundering in both the United States and Russia.” (There was no evidence that Ziff Brothers Investments had engaged in wrongdoing.)

The Mueller report points out that Trump Jr. zeroed in on this: “Trump Jr. asked follow-up questions about how the alleged payments could be tied specifically to the Clinton Campaign, but Veselnitskaya indicated that she could not trace the money once it entered the United States.” The report quotes a participant in the meeting recalling “that Trump Jr. asked what they [the Russians] have on Clinton.”

Durham’s characterization of the meeting—that it had nothing to do with Clinton—lined up with what the Trump camp first claimed when the meeting was revealed a year afterward, in 2017. At that time, Trump Jr. issued a false statement dictated by his father that insisted the conversation had focused “primarily” on the adoption of Russian children by Americans. That was a phony cover story. Later on, when more information came out, even the elder Trump conceded that the point of the meeting was to gather negative information on Clinton from a foreign adversary. “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent,” Trump said. Yet years later, Durham was still pushing the original disinformation about the meeting propagated by Trump and his allies. 

In a subsequent exchange with Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), Durham misled the committee about another key element of the Trump-Russia scandal. McClintock observed that the “central charge in the Russia collusion hoax was that Trump campaign operatives were in contact with Russian intelligence sources.”

Replying to that remark, Durham said, “There was no such evidence.”

That’s not true.

While running Trump’s campaign in the summer of 2016, Manafort had regular contact with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Manafort employee in Ukraine who has been repeatedly identified by US government officials as a Russian agent. 

In a detailed, bipartisan 2020 report, the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, called Kilimnik “a Russian intelligence officer.” A year earlier, the Mueller report said, “The FBI…assesses that Kilimnik has ties to Russian intelligence.” The US Treasury in 2021 declared Kilimnik was a “known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf.” The department added, “During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.” In 2018, Mueller indicted Kilimnik on charges of obstruction of justice. 

The contacts between Manafort and Kilimnik have been well chronicled by Mueller, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and media reports. Durham should be well-versed in this. Manafort and Kilimnik met secretly in a Manhattan cigar bar. Manafort handed Kilimnik Trump campaign polling data that were to be passed to an oligarch close to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and he arranged to continue sharing sensitive campaign information through Kilimnik.

Kilimnik also wanted something from Manafort. He asked Manafort to secure Trump’s backing for a Kremlin-approved “peace plan” for Ukraine that would have entailed creating an autonomous zone in eastern Ukraine, a scheme Manafort knew would offer a “’backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine,” according to the Senate report. This sounds like an early attempt to gain Trump’s assistance in securing what Russia later invaded Ukraine to obtain.

The Senate committee also revealed that it had found information, which it did not publicly detail, “suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the [Russian] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” And it referenced “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort, too, was connected to Russia’s “hack-and-leak operations.”

The Manafort-Kilimnik connection—which the Senate Intelligence Committee report characterized as a “grave counterintelligence threat“—is one of the most serious and still not fully explained components of the Trump-Russia scandal. It belies all the claims of Trump and his crowd that the Russia investigation was nothing but a hoax orchestrated by a nefarious den of anti-Trump vipers within the law enforcement and national security communities. It is inconceivable that Durham is unaware of this troubling link. But by ignoring the well-documented contacts between Manafort and an identified Russian agent and asserting that there was no evidence of interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence, Durham was supporting Trump’s never-ending coverup.

Durham’s investigation and report raised several questions about his aims. Was he running a fair and balanced probe or weaponizing a government inquiry to buttress Trump’s self-serving lies about the Russia scandal? Durham’s false statements to Congress about essential facts provide more reason for suspicion, and they further undermine his credibility. They might even merit their own investigation. 

Kevin McCarthy Is Fundraising Off Trump’s Indictment Lies

There is no better representative of the moral slide of the Republican Party in the Trump years than House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

This congressman from California, as the ranking House Republican, excoriated Donald Trump after the January 6 insurrectionist assault on the Capitol, declaring that Trump “bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters.” He also declared at that time that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election, challenging Trump’s false and dangerous claim that victory had been stolen from him by an evil cabal of Democrats, the media, and Deep State schemers. Yet soon after—when it became obvious that the GOP base was sticking with Trump despite (or because of) his lies and incitement of violence—McCarthy scurried to Mar-a-Lago and made nice with Trump. Ever since he has been another GOP Trump zombie, offering excuses for and defending the now twice-indicted former president who leads the polls in the 2024 GOP presidential race. 

One reason—perhaps the paramount reason—that McCarthy bent the knee was that he realized a tussle with Trump would harm GOP fundraising efforts. With Trump maintaining a magnetic hold on many GOP voters and low-dollar donors, disavowal of Trump from the Republican establishment would likely prompt a Trump retaliation that would cause a sharp decline in contributions to various Republican organs. So McCarthy cowardly dropped all talk of Trump and January 6 and kept the spigot open. His pursuit of the speaker’s gavel led to greater groveling, as he looked to win the support of MAGA Republicans, most of all, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), the promoter of assorted bonkers conspiracy theories who once amplified a call to assassinate Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and who last year spoke at a white nationalist conference led by an admitted fan of Hitler.

So it should come as no surprise that this week McCarthy is fundraising off Trump’s 37-count felony indictment on federal charges of retaining classified material, obstructing justice, and lying to investigators.

In an email soliciting donations for his own campaign fund, McCarthy proclaimed Tuesday a “dark day in the United States” and repeated Trump’s lies about the case. He huffed, “It was unconscionable of President Joe Biden to INDICT the leading candidate opposing him as he himself kept classified documents for DECADES.”

This was Trumpish BS. It was not Biden who indicted Trump; it was a grand jury of Florida citizens. And as countless legal experts have pointed out, there is no comparison between Biden’s retention of documents and the Trump case. Biden, for instance, turned over a handful of classified documents once they were found in his vice presidential papers and did not try to block government efforts to retrieve them, as Trump did. 

McCarthy was particularly wrong to suggest that Biden held on to secret documents for decades. Biden left the vice presidency only six years ago. McCarthy was apparently referencing one of Trump’s main lies these days about Biden. Trump has repeatedly stated that Biden is hiding 1850 boxes of his papers. These are records from his 36-year-long career as a US senator. But they are not hidden. They are archived at the University of Delaware, and the FBI has conducted at least two searches of the material looking for classified records. So far, according to public reports, no classified documents have been found. Moreover, congressional records are not part of the system of classified records maintained by the executive branch. Senators and representatives own the papers from their stints in Congress and can do whatever they want with them after they leave office. Yet in the right-wing echo chamber, a favorite talking point is that Biden has been sitting on nearly 2000 boxes of classified material for decades.

McCarthy knows that is not true. Just as he knows it was absurd for him to defend Trump’s storage of boxes with classified documents in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago: “A bathroom door locks.” Yes, the second-in-line to the commander-in-chief said this. 

In his fundraising email, McCarthy lays it on thick: “Every American who believes in the rule of law should stand with President Trump against this grave injustice. You may be sitting at home wishing that you could do something. I understand the feeling—but I am also here to tell you that there IS something that you can do.”

So what is it that you folks at home can do? You can send McCarthy money.

That’s not exactly how he puts in the note. Instead, he tells recipients: “We need every patriot reading this message to GO ON THE RECORD to defend the ideals that make this country great. Take 2 minutes to add your name to stand with House Republicans to END the witch hunts against President Trump.” This makes it seem as if McCarthy is asking Trump supporters to sign a petition declaring their disgust. And there’s a big button: “ADD YOUR NAME.”

Yet if someone clicks on that, he or she is transported to a page requesting a contribution to McCarthy’s campaign committee. You have to read the fine print to know this money is going to McCarthy. There is no way to “add your name” without making a donation. 

On Wednesday, Trump’s campaign announced that it had raised $6.6 million since news of his federal indictment broke. As always, Trump has been able to profit off his perfidy (or alleged perfidy). And McCarthy and other Republicans want in on this gold rush. This is a reminder that the GOP stands with Trump for the money. The party’s base is an important source of campaign cash, and it has been radicalized over the past few decades and, most recently, Trumpified. 

The GOP establishment cannot break with the Trumpsters. That would be bad for business. For McCarthy, the federal indictment of Trump is not a serious matter to ponder and discuss responsibly. It is a craven opportunity to echo Trump’s disinformation in order to fatten his own campaign’s bank account.

No Labels Is Helping a Firm that Raises Money for Right-Wing Extremists

No Labels is a political outfit that hails political centrism, calls for bipartisanship, and is considering running an independent ticket in the 2024 presidential election that could end up spoiling President Joe Biden’s reelection bid. On its website, the group urges politicians and citizens to eschew the “extremists on the far left and right,” and it asks people who are “fed up with the angriest voices dominating our politics” to sign up as members and donate to the group. But No Labels neglects to inform its online contributors that a cut of their gift goes to a company that aids Republican candidates and far-right organizations that engage in the harsh politics of extremism that No Labels professes to renounce.

Donations to No Labels are handled by an online fundraising platform called Anedot. According to its website, Anedot typically charges political groups a 4 percent fee plus 30 cents per transaction. Under that formula, when an online contributor sends No Labels $100, Anedot pockets $4.30. That money bolsters Anedot’s mission to raise funds for the right and the GOP.

Anedot was founded in 2010 by Paul Dietzel, the grandson of a legendary Louisiana State University football coach. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican in 2014. In 2019, he created a small-donor online platform called Give.GOP, just as the Republican Party was launching a rival site called WinRed. The National Republican Committee did not take kindly to Dietzel’s project and fired off a cease-and-desist letter to him, accusing Dietzel of using the committee’s trademark and logo without permission. The GOP’s opposition doomed this Dietzel venture. 

But Anedot, according to Dietzel, thrived. In 2020, he told a conservative news site, “Anedot currently serves more than 1,500 Republican candidates and elected officials, and is the only privacy-focused payment processor built and owned by conservatives.” He added, “Anedot has more Republican customers than all other platforms combined—nearly all of whom support [Donald Trump].” 

Anedot’s website boasts that it has processed billions of dollars in contributions since it started, and the groups it cites as key clients are conservative and religious organizations: Focus on the Family, the Susan B. Anthony List (a prominent foe of reproductive rights), the Thomas More Society (a conservative Catholic group that supported Trump’s election deniers), the Reformed Theological Seminary (which is “committed to the Bible as God’s inerrant Word”), and the International Alliance for Christian Education.

On Dietzel’s Twitter feed, he has supported James O’Keefe, the infamous right-wing provocateur who mounts sting operations against media and liberal figures, and he has amplified criticism of the supposed “woke mind virus.” In February Dietzel retweeted a tweet from a conservative activist named Seth Weathers who asserted, “I’m increasingly convinced the majority of problems are due to the lack of testosterone in men.”

Anedot describes itself as nonpartisan. But it has a distinct ideological bent and seeks to boost Republicans and conservative causes. In January, Dietzel announced Anedot Direct, a method for donors to contribute directly to campaigns and causes, bypassing middlemen. Anedot pledges that it does not share the data of these donors. (A contributor to a political campaign or ideological organization can end up on mailing lists and be endlessly solicited by other outfits.) Anedot charges what it calls a “small processing fee” for these donations.

On its Anedot Direct page, the firm promotes a “Conservative List” of organizations and candidates who can receive contributions directly through this service. The roster includes 205 entities, including 46 state GOP committees, Sen. Tim Scott’s and Nikki Haley’s presidential campaigns, 109 House Republican members (including Reps. Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz), 37 GOP senators (including Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul), and 11 organizations (including Turning Point USA, Moms for America, the National Association for Gun Rights, and the National Republican Congressional Committee).

There is no listing of liberal and centrist groups on the Anedot Direct page. This service seems designed to boost GOP and archly conservative establishments, including organizations that promoted Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, such as Turning Point USA, which is headed by Charlie Kirk, a prominent proponent of the baseless charge that the election was stolen from Trump. 

Anedot and Dietzel did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

For months, No Labels has been getting on the ballot in states across the country, in possible preparation to run what it calls a “unity ticket” in the 2024 presidential race. The most discussed potential candidate for No Labels has been West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, who has said nothing definitive about whether he would participate in this effort. Democratic strategists and activists eye this project with much suspicion. (The Maine secretary of state recently accused No Labels of possibly misleading voters in the state into signing a form that changed their party affiliation to No Labels—a charge the organization denied.) Last week, prominent Democratic strategists and Never-Trump Republicans met privately in Washington, DC, to discuss how best to counter a No Labels presidential campaign. 

No Labels, whose co-founders include former Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Democrat turned independent, does not disclose its funders, but news stories have revealed that it has received large donations from right-wing billionaires, such as Harlan Crow (most infamous for being a Nazi-memorabilia-collecting benefactor of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas). Its CEO, Nancy Jacobson, a former Democratic fundraiser, is married to Mark Penn, the former Clinton political adviser who distanced himself from the Democratic Party and who occasionally met with Trump in the White House. No Labels insists Penn is not involved with the group. But the organization has hired HarrisX to conduct polls, and Penn oversees that firm’s corporate parent.

No Labels did not respond to several inquiries. When a Mother Jones reporter called the organization, the woman who answered the phone said he would have to direct questions to Maryanne Martini, the communications deputy for No Labels. But she refused to provide Martini’s email address. 

Critics of No Labels point to past donations from right-wing funders and the proximity of Penn to the group to raise questions about its agenda and spur speculation about its intentions. With No Labels a dark-money group, much key information about it remains unknown. Might its efforts end up hurting Biden and helping Trump? That’s not yet clear. But one thing is: Whenever a supporter heeds the outfit’s call for bipartisanship and moderation and clicks on its “donate” button, he or she is putting money in the pocket of a conservative tech firm that’s advancing far-right extremism. 

The Trump Indictment: Another Sign the GOP Is Addicted to Trump

How long is this going to last?

The Republican Party just cannot stop excusing Donald Trump’s wrongdoing. It happens again and again. Trump engages in serious misconduct, and the base of the GOP and most of its prominent leaders accept or ignore the transgression. Or issue an indefensible defense. Even if they recognize a particular act as a misdeed, they don’t renounce him or demand accountability. Sometimes they even celebrate it. They let Trump be Trump. In the history of the republic, no elected leader has gotten away with so much. The recent federal indictment of Trump for allegedly retaining classified documents, obstructing justice, and lying to the investigators hasn’t altered this dynamic. It has only reinforced the unhealthy co-dependent relationship between Trump and the party of Abraham Lincoln. Perversely, GOP voters say they support him more following his latest indictment.

After seven years of Trump’s sleaze infecting the American political system, it’s easy to lose track of all the infractions. He pushed a racist conspiracy theory about Barack Obama that falsely claimed the 44th president was born in Kenya. And Republican politicians and voters embraced Trump. (It made him a hero at CPAC, and during the 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney enthusiastically welcomed Trump’s endorsement.) During the 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly made racist statements and encouraged violence and hatred. And the GOP ended up rallying around him at the conclusion of the primary contest. When Trump assailed a federal judge of Mexican heritage as biased, then-Speaker Paul Ryan, the most senior Republican, called Trump’s remark “racist”—yet he continued to back Trump. 

Trump has debased democracy. He has debased politics. He has debased the nation. Yet the Republican Party cannot quit him.

Republicans stood by Trump when he insulted a Gold Star family, when he falsely declared that Russia was not attacking the 2016 election (a move that aided and abetted Vladimir Putin’s assault on American democracy), and when the Access Hollywood grab-’em-by-the-pussy video emerged. 

Nothing mattered. He literally could do no wrong, as far as the Republican Party was concerned. He could lie. He could spread prejudice. He could engage in brazen misogyny. Trump never tested his assertion that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and “wouldn’t lose any voters.” But it was not an outlandish observation—at least regarding Republican voters. These Americans relished Trump mirroring racial and cultural resentments, and that compelled prominent Republicans to go deaf, dumb, and blind whenever Trump did something terribly wrong. Trump controlled the base, and the base controlled them. For the GOP, there was the Trump way or the highway.

The pattern continued through his White House years. Trump continued to deny the Russian attack and branded the scandal a “hoax,” and Republicans served as an amen choir for him, distracting from this serious matter with Deep State nonsense. When Trump was caught muscling Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy as would a mob boss—open an investigation on Joe Biden and confirm the crazy conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the Democrats in 2016 or no weapons for you!—the Republicans rushed to his defense. During the proceedings for Impeachment No. 1, House Republicans served up a mess of conspiracy theories to deflect from Trump’s malfeasance. 

Thanks to Trump, Republicans lost the 2018 midterm elections. Republicans didn’t say boo. He lost 2020, and they largely stood by and joined in, as Trump promoted the big lie that the election had been rigged against him. Some even conspired with Trump to overturn the election results. (Paging Rep. Jim Jordan.) Certainly, a few Republicans noted that Trump was perpetrating a huge fraud and threatening the constitutional order to retain power. But a whopping majority of House Republicans and a significant number of GOP senators endorsed Trump’s falsehoods by voting against certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory. And Trump’s voters saw his falsehoods as a holy writ.

Then came the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the aftermath, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy did lash out at Trump for inciting the insurrectionist violence. But as soon as it became clear that the Republican base remained enamored with Trump, they shelved their criticisms of Dear Leader. McConnell cooked up a torturous legal argument to vote against Impeachment No. 2. McCarthy scurried down to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee and be photographed with the failed coup leader.

Nothing, nothing, nothing could break the bond. Trump embraced the lunatic QAnon conspiracy theory that holds that Democrats are part of a secret global cabal of pedophiles and baby-eaters. His son-in-law cut a questions-raising $2 billion deal with the Saudis, as Trump also banked a bundle via a Saudi-backed golf league. Trump supped with a white nationalist Hitler fanboy (Nick Fuentes) and an antisemitic rapper (Kanye West). He called for ripping up particular provisions of the Constitution so he could be reinstated in the White House. He absolved the violent marauders of January 6 and said he would pardon them, should he return to the White House. He was indicted in New York City for a shady caper that involved a pay-off to a porn star. A jury in a civil lawsuit found that he was responsible for sexually assaulting a woman and defaming her. He still led in the GOP polls. 

Trump has debased democracy. He has debased politics. He has debased the nation. Yet the Republican Party cannot quit him. There are GOP politicians challenging him for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. But the only ones directly assailing him are the long shots, such as former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie (who once was one of Trump’s loudest cheerleaders). Others—including Sen. Tim Scott and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley—proclaim it is time to move on, without detailing what must be left behind. (Haley this week slammed the FBI and the justice system for unfairly pursuing Trump, but simultaneously noted that the indictment, if true, showed Trump was “incredibly reckless with out national security.”) And Florida governor Ron DeSantis only pokes gently at Trump, while making sure to condemn the libs and the prosecutors for persecuting the guy.

Trump’s recent indictment demonstrates that most Republicans and right-wingers cannot acknowledge any wrongdoing on his part. Speaker Kevin McCarthy absurdly stated that the bathroom in which Trump had secreted the pilfered papers had a lock on the door. Jordan huffed that the indictment showed that “federal agencies have been turned on the American people” (yes, all those Americans who pinch classified documents from the White House), and he exclaimed Trump could keep “declassified” information wherever he wants, even a bathroom. (Bathroom Republicans—is that now a thing?) On Fox News and throughout conservative media, conservative partisans refuse to address the specifics of the charges. They bray continuously about Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton, and ceaselessly moan about the supposed “weaponization” of the justice system. They mischaracterize the specifics of the case. They concoct phony defenses. Trump did something wrong? They are like children clamping hands on ears and shouting, “I can’t hear you.”

A party and an ideological movement that once collectively shouted “lock her up” and contended that Clinton was unfit for office because she used a private server for her emails when she was secretary of state now does not give a damn about Trump’s purposeful mishandling of classified material. Whether or not the legal case against Trump is strong, his defenders throughout the GOP and the right-wing media echo chamber don’t bother to discuss the evidence or the specific acts cited in the indictment. Instead, they assail the Justice Department and insist Trump is being picked on. (Bill Barr, Trump’s former attorney general, has been a notable exception. He proclaimed that the indictment was chockfull of damaging allegations and that Trump could be “toast.” He noted Trump was not a victim of a “witch hunt.” Yet Barr, when he served Trump, did much to bolster Trump’s witch-hunt narrative, particularly by undermining special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings and launching special counsel John Durham’s misguided crusade to discredit the Trump-Russia investigation.)

The recent years have shown that the GOP is addicted to Trump. And this indictment is another shot of junk for the Trump-dopeheads of the right, pushing them toward greater heights of irrationality and desperation. The indictment presents a stress test for the nation. Can the judicial system handle such a politically loaded case? But for the Republican Party and the conservative movement, there’s not much of a question how they will fare on this exam. There is no rehab in the offing. They are hooked on Trump, and they just can’t say no. 

Left Out of Pat Robertson’s Obits: His Crazy, Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory

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 of Our Land here. Please check it out.

On Thursday, Pat Robertson, the television preacher and founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, died at the age of 93. The obituaries duly noted that he transformed Christian fundamentalism into a potent political force with the Christian Coalition that he founded in 1990 and that became an influential component of the Republican Party. They also included an array of outrageous and absurd remarks he had made over the years. He blamed natural disasters on feminists and LGBTQ people. He called Black Lives Matter activists anti-Christian. He said a devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti occurred because Haitians had made a “pact with the devil” to win their freedom from France. He prayed for the deaths of liberal Supreme Court justices. He insisted the 9/11 attacks happened because liberals, feminists, and gay rights advocates had angered God. He claimed Kenyans could get AIDS via towels. He insisted Christians were more patriotic than non-Christians. He purported to have prayed away a hurricane from striking Virginia Beach. (The storm hit elsewhere.)

Yet left out of the accounts of Robertson’s life was a basic fact: He was an antisemitic conspiracy theory nutter.

In 1991, Robertson published a book called The New World Order. As I noted in my recent book, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, it was a pile of paranoia that amassed assorted conspiracy theories of the ages. He melded together unfounded tales of secret societies, such as the Illuminati and the Masons, and claimed they and their secret partners—communists, elites, and, yes, occultists—had for centuries plotted to imprison the entire world in a godless, collectivist dictatorship. The list of colluders was mind-blowingly long: the Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Ford Foundation, the J.P. Morgan bank, the United Nations, the Rockefellers, Henry Kissinger, and many others. (Okay, maybe he was correct about Kissinger.) Also in on it were “European bankers,” including the Rothschild family, long a target of antisemitic conspiracy theories that Robertson echoed.

In the book, he called the Rothschilds possibly “the missing link between the occult and the world of high finance.” He asserted that Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush had “unwittingly” carried out “the mission” and mouthed “the phrases of a tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and his followers.”

Robertson was saying that the first President Bush was a Satanic dupe and fronting for a nefarious global elite that was in league with Beelzebub. What was his evidence for this? Bush had repeatedly in speeches referred to the “new world order.” Now that’s some high-powered logic.

The Christian leader—who was fervently courted by Republican politicians who yearned for campaign cash, volunteers, and votes from the Christian Coalition—offered an apocalyptic view of the future. Looking at the US military action Bush had launched earlier that year that had repelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait and interpreting it according to the Book of Revelation, Robertson maintained that the Persian Gulf War was a sign that “demonic spirits” would soon unleash a “world horror” that would kill 2 billion people. (You might recall that did not happen.)

His The New World Order transmitted classic antisemitic garbage and the swill of conspiracism, within an end-is-near biblical narrative. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies and became a bestseller. The Wall Street Journal described the work as a “compendium of the lunatic fringe’s greatest hits.” Robertson was pushing a narrative that had been adopted by the right over the previous decades: Democrats and liberals (and even some numbskull Republicans) were not just wrong on issues; they were a Devil-driven clandestine operation seeking to annihilate the United States and Christianity. They were pure evil.

On his television show, Robertson repeatedly served up this dark message for the faithful. During one broadcast, he exclaimed, “Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is doing to evangelical Christians. It’s no different…It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-biased media, and the homosexuals who want to destroy all Christians.” This was a foul and hysterical comparison: Democrats were the equivalent of Hitler and committing genocide against Christians. Robertson begged viewers to donate $20 a month: “Send me money today or these liberals will be putting Christians like you and me in concentration camps.”

Yet the Republican Party welcomed Robertson, who had mounted a failed campaign for the GOP presidential nomination in 1988, into its tent. Top Republicans trekked to Christian Coalition conferences to kiss his ring. In search of political support and money, they validated an antisemitic and paranoid zealot and signaled to his followers and the world that he was worth heeding and that his dangerous and tribalist propaganda ought to be believed.

In 1992, Bush addressed the Christian Coalition’s second annual conference. He hailed Robertson for “all the work you’re doing to restore the spiritual foundation of this nation.” He then attended a private reception with major contributors to the coalition in the rose garden of Robertson’s estate. Black swans swam in a pond, a harpist played, and Bush warmly greeted members of the televangelist’s inner circle. Presumably, Bush’s alliance with Satan was not mentioned.

Robertson got away with being a crazy antisemite because Republicans needed him and his following. His Christian Coalition aided a great many GOP politicians in getting elected. This included George W. Bush, the son of that Satanic tool. In 2000, the younger Bush called on the Christian Coalition to help him win the crucial South Carolina primary and beat back the threat of Sen. John McCain. In one of the nastiest political battles in modern history, Robertson’s troops rallied, and Bush’s presidential prospects were saved.

Robertson had inherited the religious right from Jerry Falwell, who had created the Moral Majority in the late 1970s, and he further—and perhaps more effectively—injected Christian fundamentalism into electoral politics. His grand view was demented and detrimental to a diverse and democratic society. It paved the way to the divisive politics of Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, the tea party, and, yes, Donald Trump.

And he was bonkers.

Yet because this antisemite was embraced and enabled by the GOP, he had a tremendous impact on the political life of the United States. Reflecting on Robertson’s death, historian Rick Perlstein told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, “The idea that God’s law trumps man’s law absolutely saturates [Robertson’s] world. Along with Falwell, he’s most responsible for turning Christianity into Christian nationalism and Christian nationalism into insurrectionism.”

Given all the damage Robertson did and all the hatred he spread, it’s hard to wish him a peaceful rest in eternity.

The Federal Indictment of Donald J. Trump: Historic…and Wild

The federal indictment of Donald Trump and his valet Waltine Nauta on 38 counts of retaining and withholding national security information, conspiring to obstruct justice, and lying to the FBI that was unsealed today is historic…and wild. It shows Trump at his Trumpiest, scheming to cheat, evading responsibility and accountability, lying, and apparently breaking the law. Of course, just allegedly. Since nothing has been proven, and he’s presumed innocent until there is a verdict. But overall, the indictment depicts Trump as a conniver who acts like a mob boss—perhaps a sloppy mob boss. He orders an underling to move boxes containing classified records so his lawyer won’t find the secret documents when he reviews Trump’s stash. He parks his booty in a shower stall in a bathroom. When an initial review uncovers several dozen classified documents, Trump signals to his lawyer—with a “plucking motion”—that this attorney should remove some of these documents from the folder they are in and make them disappear. 

It’s all a bit comical but certainly damn serious. You have to wonder what Roy Cohn, the sleazy layer for Mafia bosses and other crooks who was something of a mentor for Trump, would say, were he still alive. Surely, there must have been a smarter way to steal and conceal government secrets. Would Cohn be disappointed with Trump’s carelessness in pulling off this caper?

The case against Trump looks strong. But it’s special counsel Jack Smith’s job to present a good first impression with the indictment. No doubt, there will be much shouting and many complications ahead in this case. Yet what has been revealed today is pure Trump. Here are some highlights—or lowlights—that caught my eye as I read the document.

Yeah, this is just fine, right? pic.twitter.com/hVtgKOJmlc

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) June 9, 2023

This doesn't sound like Trump at all! pic.twitter.com/4IEgoaYw9g

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) June 9, 2023

That was then…. pic.twitter.com/QZpJeZFWD8

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) June 9, 2023

This was no accident. pic.twitter.com/Q2C3CDW1mx

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) June 9, 2023

Trump really treated this classified material as sacred. pic.twitter.com/3wviOSDeHV

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) June 9, 2023

There is some trolling in the indictment of Trump. pic.twitter.com/gY7lvM2OB5

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) June 9, 2023

Hard to imagine Trump trying to cheat, right? pic.twitter.com/5wg4BlGsiK

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) June 9, 2023

Wow. They have Trump nailed on this point. After he was subpoenaed for classified docs, one of his lawyers arranged with him to go through all the boxes to look for classified docs. Before that review, Trump ordered Nauta to remove about 64 boxes so his lawyer could not vet them. pic.twitter.com/glJIdUSuiv

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) June 9, 2023

Trump as mob boss. pic.twitter.com/N3wMbvYNIZ

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) June 9, 2023

George Santos’ Lawyer Was Part of the January 6 Mob

George Santos, the lying and indicted GOP congressman from Queens, New York, has steadfastly refused to say where he was on January 6, 2021, while pro-Trump rioters were attacking the US Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory. He was filmed that day in the VIP section for the Donald Trump rally at the Ellipse that preceded the assault, but his post-rally whereabouts remain a mystery. Yet newly uncovered photos and video footage of January 6 show that his attorney, Joseph Murray, was in the angry pro-Trump mob that trespassed on Capitol grounds.

Archived footage obtained by Mother Jones from that day traces the movements of Murray and Angela Ng, who is identified on the website of Murray’s law firm as its office manager, as they marched from the Ellipse to the Capitol. Both Murray and Ng are retired New York police officers. Ng is also currently listed as working for Santos in his Queens district office as a constituent services representative, according to LegiStorm. Part of the throng of irate Trump loyalists, Murray and Ng passed downed barricades, entered restricted grounds, and made their way up the steps of the north side of the building. There they watched and Murray filmed, as hundreds of rioters nearby broke doors of the Capitol and poured into the building.

Joseph Murray and Angela Ng at the Trump rally that preceded the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Murray has represented Santos, ever since Santos’ surprise election to Congress last year triggered an avalanche of controversies and probes. When Santos appeared in federal court on Long Island on May 10 and pleaded not guilty to 13 counts of money laundering, wire fraud, and stealing public funds, Murray was next to him. Murray has regularly showed up in news reports declining to comment on the latest Santos revelations.

Murray, who was arrested for felony assault in 1993 for breaking the jaw of a fellow cop but later not indicted by a Manhattan grand jury, ran for Queens district attorney in 2019 as a pro-Trump law-and-order Republican. During that campaign, Murray often told the tale of his arrest and his subsequent legal battles. He lost to Democrat Melinda Katz by 79,000 votes. He and Santos have been political allies since at least late 2019, appearing together on podcasts and at Queens Republican events, according to multiple Republican sources from New York. 

In the available photos and footage of January 6, Murray and Ng are not seen committing any acts of violence at the Capitol or entering the building. Murray watched as the doors on the northwest wing of the Capitol were breached by an angry crowd at 2:42 p.m. Around this time, he was standing beside former Michigan gubernatorial candidate Ryan Kelley, who was later charged for his role in the riot, while someone yelled, “We are coming for you, Nancy.” (Kelley is scheduled to go on trial July 31.) 

Earlier, as Murray and Ng marched toward the Capitol, Murray seemingly spoke with an unidentified rioter dubbed “Insider2330” by the group of independent researchers known as the Sedition Hunters, who have been studying video and photos of the rioters to identify the marauders. Insider2330 was one of the first people to enter the Capitol, according to a member of the Sedition Hunters group. He and Murray apparently talked after Insider2330 had left the Capitol building. The Sedition Hunters, who have shared their research with reporters and the FBI, provided some of the footage of Murray to Mother Jones.

Murray and Ng did not respond to multiple emails, text messages, and phone calls requesting comment. Santos’ office did not respond to inquiries about Murray’s and Ng’s participation in the January 6 protest on the Capitol grounds or Ng’s employment at Santos’ district office. 

Queens Republican district leader Philip Grillo, who was arrested in February 2021 and accused of entering the Capitol through a broken window, tells Mother Jones that he saw Murray on January 6: “He was leading the charge up the hill. He was urging us on, waving us to follow him.”

Grillo says he lost track of Murray after seeing him on the Capitol lawn. Grillo admitted to the FBI he entered the Capitol, according to a search warrant application first obtained by the Daily Beast, but he claimed he was drunk and didn’t realize his actions were illegal. (Grillo is awaiting trial.) A photograph that the Sedition Hunters helped Mother Jones obtain shows the two Queens men talking at the entrance to the Capitol grounds before Murray headed toward the building at approximately 2:30 p.m. (Last month, Grillo announced his intention to challenge Santos for the GOP nomination in the 3rd Congressional District in 2024. He says he still supports Santos but doesn’t believe Santos can collect enough signatures to secure a spot on the ballot.)

Though Santos has declined to disclose where he was while the Capitol was stormed, Grillo says that Santos later told him he had been in a hotel room during the riot. The day before January 6, Santos spoke at a pre-rally event and declared that his 2020 congressional election, which he lost by 46,000 votes, was also stolen. In a 2022 video of Santos at a Long Island GOP event first obtained by Newsday, Santos boasted that he “wrote a nice check to a law firm to see if we can help” accused January 6 insurrectionists. No evidence of this legal donation could be located by Mother Jones. 

Santos’ office did not answer inquiries from Mother Jones regarding this check or his whereabouts on January 6. 

A former acquaintance of Murray, who asked not to be identified for fear of career retribution, says that on January 6 Murray texted people pictures of the scenes that day, showing rioters climbing the walls of the Capitol from a vantage point on the lawn. “I remember thinking, what was Murray doing?” this person said.

Murray, who became a criminal defense attorney after leaving the police force in 2002, was a registered Democrat who began supporting Trump before his run for Queens district attorney in 2019, he said in multiple interviews during that election. In a 2019 interview with the Queens Eagle, he declared, “We need law and order. In a civilized society, you have a problem with the police, you hire a lawyer. You fight the police there. Not in the streets.”

Murray tweeted prolifically in the run-up to January 6, once amplifying the slogan “fight for Trump.” In a tweet sent out on December 26, 2020, which was accessed via the Internet Archive, he said, “We will be gathered outside our Nation’s Capitol bldg on Jan 6th waiting and watching to see who has the courage to stand up for our republic and who the cowards are. Those who do not stand up for our republic will be voted out of office!” He added three American flag emojis to the tweet. In another tweet that day, he told a critic of the pro-Trump protests, “Do us all a favor and just stay out of the way on January 6th. There’re already enough cowards in Congress that will be there.”

Earlier that month, Murray tweeted, “I am going to ask President Trump to appoint me as Attorney General or US Attorney and I will clean up all of this corruption in government that is destroying our republic!” Murray deleted his Twitter account after Twitter banned Trump from the site on January 8, 2021.

On July 25, 2021, Murray spoke at a “Justice 4 January 6th” event held in Foley Square in downtown Manhattan. The flier for the rally referred to the January rioters as “political prisoners” who were being “tortured” by the US government. Murray was introduced as “one of the attorneys that’s going to be helping” to defend the accused January 6 rioters. He called himself a “fighter” who “will fight to the end.” He did not mention his own presence in the January 6 mob. 

How the Media Aid and Abet GOP Hostage-Takers

Editor’s note: The below article is a preview of the lead item in the next edition of  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 of Our Land here. Please check it out.

Imagine I come home and find a crazy man in my house. He is holding a full gas can and a lit match. “If you don’t sign over the deed to your house,” he screams, “I will burn this place down.” I refuse, and we enter a standoff for days. Neighbors gather around my home. The police arrive. It is a major scene. The media show up. The newspaper and TV reporters see this as a big story and slap it on the front page and lead the evening news with it: “Two local residents caught in fierce negotiations. If their talks don’t succeed, a house will go up in flames.”

That seems to be the general media framing of the debt ceiling debate in Washington, DC. In horse-race style, much of the press has covered this episode as a political battle of two opposing forces: President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. And there’s been much breathless and up-to-the-minute reporting of the ins-and-outs of the deliberations between the White House and the House Republicans, with each side treated as equal partners in this tale of high-stakes politics.

Earlier this week, the New York Times front-paged a report on how McCarthy was “attempting a difficult balancing act” in the negotiations, trying to cobble together a budget deal that would win enough Republicans without alienating the most extremist members of his caucus, who—thanks to the agreement that landed McCarthy in the top House post—could easily boot him out of the speakership. Meanwhile, Politico focused on Biden’s negotiating stance, noting he has “prioritized deal-making through much of the debt ceiling talks, laboring to work across the aisle even at the risk of alienating the liberal wing of his own party.”

There was nothing wrong with these stories in and of themselves, but this coverage underplayed the core element of the story: GOP radicals, by refusing to sign off on raising the debt ceiling so the US government could pay bills already accrued (many of which were the results of what Congress voted for), were threatening to trigger a financial crisis and blow up the US economy.

The lead of the Politico article did convey the danger at hand: “The nation stands on the precipice of an unprecedented financial calamity, testing whether the president’s theory of governance can continue to work.” But it did not attribute responsibility for this potential crisis. And it seemed to suggest that Biden would be to blame for this catastrophe—if his theory were crap.

Much of the media has dutifully reported on the disasters likely to occur if the US government defaults on its debt. NPR noted the S&P could plummet by 20 percent, interest rates could soar, and a recession could strike. CBS News reported that financial markets could be in chaos, Social Security checks delayed, Medicaid and Medicare disrupted, and the housing market frozen. The Economist pointed out that “a surge in unemployment” and “panic throughout the global economy” were possible. The New York Times published an explainer that detailed a variety of catastrophes that could ensue.

But none of these stories highlighted the culprit responsible for the doomcasting: the House Republicans. They described the horrific consequences of a default as one would those of a hurricane or some other natural disaster. Yet in this case, the potential destruction is clearly human-made—and teed up by a particular set of humans.

Both-sidesism is deeply ingrained within political journalism. Though Donald Trump has pushed mainstream outlets to reconsider this approach—after all, only one side attempted to overturn an election and incite a violent insurrectionist assault on the US Congress—it remains the default position. (Pun intended.) Consequently, the to-default-or-not-default drama is depicted as a face-off between two political factions, not as an act of political terrorism mounted by a band of extremists. Where is CNN’s Countdown to the Disastrous GOP Default Clock? (The network is certainly not going to do that these days, now that it has pivoted toward a more chummy relationship with the Rs.)

Earlier this week, Jonathan Weisman, a savvy political reporter for the New York Times, tweeted, “From my experience w/ past debt limits, @SpeakerMcCarthy’s problem & the nation’s is a huge chunk of the GOP doesn’t believe a default will cause any problems. They think it’s all liberal claptrap. They want their cuts & they don’t care about consequences.”

That’s true. But shouldn’t that be the dominant story of the moment? Ignorant and cavalier Republicans threaten to cause economic meltdown. And does this problem arise in part because this crisis is mostly presented as two-sided budget negotiations and not as the (nightmare) tale of one extremist party playing chicken with the economy? The Republicans even admit that’s their game. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has openly described the GOP strategy as hostage-taking. Proclaiming support for the GOP measure that tied raising the debt ceiling to spending cuts that would hurt low-income Americans, he said, “I think my conservative colleagues for the most part support Limit, Save, Grow, and they don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage.”

Of course, it’s not entirely the media’s fault. The Biden White House tried and failed to establish GOP recklessness as the dominant narrative. President Biden initially declared he would not negotiate with these terrorists. But then he did, and the White House messaging operation failed in pinning the blame for the crisis squarely on the Republicans. Should the sh*t hit the fan, there was no telling who would be seen as more at fault by the public—Biden or the Republicans. This open question and Biden’s sense of responsibility brought him to the negotiating table.

As of Friday morning, it seemed a deal to avert a default might be within reach. It could well entail budget cuts that impact government programs for middle- and low-income Americans. The GOP position literally was this: We will allow the US government to pay its bills—which includes those run up by the Trump administration and a Republican Congress—and avoid an economic calamity, if you stick it to Americans who need help.

Yet whatever the outcome, the point remains: The Republican assault on rational governance—and the party’s penchant for chaos and destruction—was not sufficiently emphasized within the political media. This strengthened the hand of the hostage-takers in this episode and showed them that they can engage in political terrorism with little cost. What might that mean for the future?

Henry Kissinger at 100: Still a War Criminal

Henry Kissinger is turning 100 this week, and his centennial is prompting assorted hosannas about perhaps the most influential American foreign policymaker of the 20th century. The Economist observed that “his ideas have been circling back into relevancy for the last quarter century.” The Times of London ran an appreciation: “Henry Kissinger at 100: What He Can Tell Us About the World.” Policy shops and think tanks have held conferences to mark this milestone. CBS News aired a mostly fawning interview veteran journalist Ted Koppel conducted with Kissinger that included merely a glancing reference to the ignoble and bloody episodes of his career. Kissinger is indeed a monumental figure who shaped much of the past 50 years. He brokered the US opening to China and pursued detente with the Soviet Union during his stints as President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state. Yet it is an insult to history that he is not equally known and regarded for his many acts of treachery—secret bombings, coup-plotting, supporting military juntas—that resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands. 

Kissinger’s diplomatic conniving led to or enabled slaughters around the globe. As he blows out all those candles, let’s call the roll.

Cambodia: In early 1969, shortly after Nixon moved into the White House and inherited the Vietnam War, he, Kissinger, and others cooked up a plan to secretly bomb Cambodia, in pursuit of enemy camps. With the perversely-named “Operation Breakfast” launched, White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman wrote in his diary, Kissinger and Nixon were “really excited.” The action, though, was of dubious legality; the United States was not at war with Cambodia and Congress had not authorized the carpet-bombing, which Nixon tried to keep a secret. The US military dropped 540,000 tons of bombs. They didn’t just hit enemy outposts. The estimates of Cambodian civilians killed range between 150,000 and 500,000.

President Richard Nixon sits at his White House office desk where he announced on April 30, 1970 that American ground forces are fighting in Cambodia.

AP

Bangladesh: In 1970, a political party advocating autonomy for East Pakistan won legislative elections. The military dictator ruling Pakistan, Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, arrested the leader of that party and ordered his army to crush the Bengalis. At the time, Yaha, a US ally, was helping Kissinger and Nixon establish ties with China, and they didn’t want to get in his way. The top US diplomat in East Pakistan sent in a cable detailing and decrying the atrocities committed by Yaha’s troops and reported they were committing “genocide.” Yet Nixon and Kissinger declined to criticize Yaha or take action to end the barbarous assault. (This became known as “the tilt” toward Pakistan.) Kissinger and Nixon turned a blind eye to—arguably, they tacitly approved—Pakistan’s genocidal slaughter of 300,000 Bengalis, most of them Hindus.

Chile: Nixon and Kissinger plotted to covertly thwart the democratic election of socialist president Salvador Allende in 1970. This included Kissinger supervising clandestine operations aimed at destabilizing Chile and triggering a military coup. This scheming yielded the assassination of Chile’s commander-in-chief of the Army. Eventually, a military junta led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power, killed thousands of Chileans, and implemented a dictatorship, Following the coup, Kissinger backed Pinochet to the hilt. During a private conversation with the Chilean tyrant in 1976, he told Pinochet, “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going communist.”

U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger shakes hands with Chile’s Foreign Minister, Ismale Huerta Diaz, during a Latin Foreign Ministers Conference in Mexico City, February 22, 1974.

Ed Kolenovsky/AP

East Timor: In December 1975, President Suharto of Indonesia was contemplating an invasion of East Timor, which had recently been a Portuguese colony and was moving toward independence. On December 6, President Gerald Ford and Kissinger, then Ford’s secretary of state, en route from a visit to Beijing, stopped in Jakarta to meet with Suharto, who headed the nation’s military regime. Suharto signaled he intended to send troops into East Timor and integrate the territory into Indonesia. Ford and Kissinger did not object. Ford told Suharto, “We will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem and the intentions you have.” Kissinger added, “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly.” He pointed out that Suharto would be wise to wait until Ford and Kissinger returned to the United States, where they “would be able to influence the reaction in America.” The invasion began the next day. Here was a “green light” from Kissinger (and Ford). Suharto’s brutal invasion of East Timor resulted in 200,000 deaths.

Argentina: In March 1976, a neofascist military junta overthrew President Isabel Perón and launched what would be called the Dirty War, torturing, disappearing, and killing political opponents it branded as terrorists. Once again, Kissinger provided a “green light,” this time to a campaign of terror and murder. He did so during a private meeting in June 1976 with the junta’s foreign minister, Cesar Augusto Guzzetti. At that sit-down, according to a memo obtained in 2004 by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit organization, Guzzetti told Kissinger, “our main problem in Argentina is terrorism.” Kissinger replied, “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.” In other words, go ahead with your savage crusade against the leftists. The Dirty War would claim the lives of an estimated 30,000 Argentine civilians.

Throughout his career in government and politics, Kissinger was an unprincipled schemer who engaged in multiple acts of skullduggery. During the 1968 presidential campaign, while he advised the Johnson administration’s team at the Paris peace talks, which were aimed at ending the Vietnam War, he underhandedly passed information on the talks to Nixon’s camp, which was plotting to sabotage the negotiations, out of fear that success at the talks would boost the prospects of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Nixon’s opponent in the race. After the secret bombing in Cambodia was revealed by the New York Times, Kissinger, acting at Nixon’s request, urged FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap his own aides and journalists to discover who was leaking. This operation failed to uncover who had outed the covert bombing, but, as historian Garrett Graff noted in his recent book, Watergate: A New History, this effort seeded “the administration’s taste for spying on its enemies—real or imagined.” 

In 1976, Kissinger was briefed on Operation Condor, a secret program created by the intelligence services of the military dictatorships of South America to assassinate their political foes inside and outside their countries. He then blocked a State Department effort to warn these military juntas not to proceed with international assassinations. As the National Security Archive points out in a dossier it is releasing this week on various Kissinger controversies, “Five days later, Condor’s boldest and most infamous terrorist attack took place in downtown Washington D.C. when a car-bomb, planted by Pinochet’s agents, killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his young colleague, Ronni Moffitt.”

It’s easy to cast Kissinger as a master geostrategist, an expert player in the game of nations. But do the math. Hundreds of thousands of dead in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and East Timor, perhaps a million in total. Tens of thousands dead in Argentina’s Dirty War. Thousands killed and tens of thousands tortured by the Chilean military dictatorship, and a democracy destroyed. His hands are drenched in blood. 

President Bush signed legislation on November 27, 2002, creating an independent commission to investigate the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and named former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, left, to lead the panel.

MCT/TNS/Zuma

Kissinger is routinely lambasted by his critics as a “war criminal,” though has never been held accountable for his misdeeds. He has made millions as a consultant, author, and commentator in the decades since he left government. I once heard of a Manhattan cocktail reception where he scoffed at the “war criminal” label and referred to it almost as a badge of honor. (“Bill Clinton does not have the spine to be a war criminal,” he joshed.) Kissinger has expressed few, if any, regrets about the cruel and deadly results of his moves on the global chessboard. When Koppel gently nudged him about the secret bombing in Cambodia, Kissinger took enormous umbrage and shot back: “This program you’re doing because I’m going to be 100 years old. And you are picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago? You have to know it was a necessary step.” As for those who still protest him for that and other acts, he huffed, “Now the younger generation feels if they can raise their emotions, they don’t have to think.”

As he enters his second century, there will be no apologies coming from Kissinger. But the rest of us will owe history—and the thousands dead because of his gamesmanship—an apology, if we do not consider the man in full. Whatever his accomplishments, his legacy includes an enormous pile of corpses. This is a birthday that warrants no celebration.

How John Durham Succeeded by Failing

John Durham succeeded.

Not in the conventional sense. This special counsel, appointed by then-Attorney General Bill Barr and handed the task of proving Donald Trump’s claim that the FBI’s investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal had been a “hoax” perpetrated by a supposed Deep State cabal, went 0 for 2 in the courtroom with cases he filed against peripheral figures. And the final report he submitted this week contained no new revelations within its 316 pages to back up Trump’s bogus assertions about the FBI’s Russia probe. At the end of the day, the best Durham could manage was to opine that the FBI in 2016 should have opened a preliminary investigation instead of a full investigation. Big whoop. After four years of work that cost $7 million, he uncovered no evidence of any plot—criminal or otherwise—to cook up a phony investigation of Trump. The FBI errors and wrongdoing he cited—which mainly concerned the bureau’s use of the undocumented Steele dossier to obtain a surveillance warrant for a single Trump campaign aide—had been exposed in a prior investigation. Durham’s crusade yielded no new significant disclosures, and it undercut all of Trump’s claptrap about the FBI, the media, and the Democrats conspiring against him in what Trump repeatedly called the “crime of the century.”

Yet Durham did accomplish an important mission. He continued to focus attention on the Great Russian Deflection and provide material for the Trump-Russia denialists who have refused to acknowledge a fundamental reality of the 2016 campaign: Russia attacked the election to help Trump, and Trump and his aides aided and abetted that assault by denying it was happening and by signaling to Moscow they welcomed its effort to undermine American democracy. (See the meeting top Trump aides had in June 2016 with a Kremlin emissary whom they were told was part of a clandestine Russian operation to help Trump.)

Durham generated material (and hope) for the purveyors of the Russia hoax hoax. And his nothing-burger report has done the same.

For seven years, Trump and his minions have tried mightily to redefine the Russia scandal. Instead of addressing the Kremlin’s covert intervention in the 2016 campaign—which was one of several decisive factors in that close contest—or Trump’s complicity in the attack and his exploitation of this underhanded foreign interference, they have relentlessly screamed that the FBI investigation of these matters was a conspiracy mounted to wreck Trump’s candidacy and then, after that failed, to destroy his presidency. Over and over, Trump claimed that he had been wronged—spied on by the Obama administration and victimized by the national security state. His goal was obvious: to steer attention from a painful truth—that he had won the White House in part due to a Russian secret program that he had assisted and encouraged. 

He and his defenders brayed about the faults of the FBI’s Russia investigation to draw attention from what that probe and subsequent investigations unearthed. They shifted the focus from what Russia and Trump did during the 2016 campaign to how all of that was investigated. They fixated on the Steele dossier, as if the inaccurate or unconfirmed allegations within it somehow negated what actually transpired. Trump repeatedly insisted that the FBI’s inquiry had been kicked off by the tarnished Steele material, which was not true—a fact even acknowledged by Durham during one of the trials he lost. 

Durham’s grand task was to prove Trump’s conspiracy theory that the Russia probe was an anti-Trump con job. He could not do so because that allegation advanced by Trump and his lapdog loyalists was not true. But Durham did keep this notion alive for years. Much of the attention that the Trump-Russia scandal has received in recent times was due to Durham’s inquiry. Consequently, the more important subjects of Russia’s skullduggery and Trump’s deceitful (perhaps treasonous) conduct were subsumed by real and spurious questions about the investigation. 

With his investigation of the investigation, Durham provided fodder for Trump and his conservative allies. His work exemplifies the so-called “weaponization of government” that Republicans have bemoaned: Barr unleashed a powerful prosecutor to serve Trump’s political interests. The court filings Durham submitted and the prosecutions he waged (although failed) offered the Trumpists ammunition to keep their crusade of distraction alive. All of this had nothing to do with the Russian assault and Trump’s actions in 2016. But it allowed Trump and the denizens of Foxland to continue to cast the Russia matter as a scandal of investigative abuse, and they ceaselessly predicted that Durham would eventually drop the big one and expose (and indict!) the Deep State evildoers who had manufactured the Russia “hoax.” 

Durham generated material (and hope) for the purveyors of the Russia hoax hoax. And his nothing-burger report has done the same. Trump, Republican officials, and conservatives seized upon it as fuel for their never-ending disinformation campaign. Trump declared that Durham’s report showed that “the FBI should never have launched the Trump-Russia Probe.” No surprise, this was a brazenly false characterization. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) proclaimed that the report proved that the FBI had “manufactured a false conspiracy theory.” That, too, was false. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) chimed in that the Durham report had uncovered “the crime of the century” and assailed the Russia investigation as the “Democrat Hoax.” He said he would call on Durham to testify before Congress. All the usual suspects joined in: the New York Post, the Federalist, commentator Ben Shapiro, GOP Reps. Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert. Durham had supplied sheet music for the chorus of the Trump right to sing a false song in harmony. 

So once again, when the topic of the Russian war on the 2016 election is in the news, the discussion is centered on the question of the FBI’s investigation, not what Moscow and Trump did. Though many news accounts have reliably reported the Durham report is a dud—the New York Times: “After Years of Political Hype, the Durham Inquiry Failed to Deliver”—this latest hullabaloo reinforces the original strategy of the Trump crowd: deny reality and change the subject. If the public discourse concerns the predication for the FBI’s investigation and not how Trump assisted the Russian attack (even if he himself did not directly collude with Moscow), that’s a win for Trump and his backers, even though Durham has struck out in confirming Trump’s false cover story. 

Trump and his cultist defenders do not have to demonstrate that Trump’s accusation of a Deep State plot is true to achieve their ultimate goal of muddying up the waters and smothering the truth of the Trump-Russia scandal. This is a coverup-by-confusion. All they have to do is distract and deflect. Change the channel. Hype a sideshow. To do so, all they need is chaff, and Durham, with this report, has provided plenty.