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December 12 - December 26, 2020
Steele told Corn that he was shaken by what he had found, and that he had gone to the FBI with evidence, only to see those members of the FBI turn around and give the information to members of Trump’s inner circle. Later, the founder of the private intelligence firm who hired Steele to compile the dossier, Fusion GPS, stated that the publication of the dossier had led to the sudden death of one dossier source, implying that Steele’s life might also be at risk.9
The editor of The New York Times, Dean Baquet, had ordered the article to be rewritten so that it reflected an alternate and inaccurate narrative—one contradicted by his writers’ own interviews with FBI officials.10
Ellis shocked the country by proclaiming Manafort—now well known by Americans as a crime machine—a man who had led an “otherwise blameless life.” He reduced his sentence to below the recommended guidelines, prompting a series of ethics inquiries that were later dismissed.18 No one followed up on the threats to Ellis—a frightening pattern that played out with many who attempted to hold the Trump team accountable.
Alexandra Chalupa contends today that Manafort was targeting her even from prison, a plausible claim given he was indicted for additional criminal activity behind bars, which he was able to commit after inexplicably being given internet access.
What Americans rejected in 2016 was not trust but discernment. A criminal can bury the truth in a conspiracy because no one will believe it except those accustomed to parsing absurdities, who are then mocked as insane.
The plot of many a thriller.
There remains to this day a publicly available NSA document showing that US voting infrastructure was attacked. It floats around cyberspace like an unheeded warning, attracting no hearings beyond the one that sent Winner to prison.
I urged them to start with Manafort, only to be told by them that Manafort was not a problem. Manafort had been on the Sunday shows, they assured me, and networks don’t put criminals on the Sunday shows.
But the vote audit movement failed. Not only was there no audit, but the call to action was hijacked by Putin gala guest and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who used some of the money panicked citizens had donated to pay her own legal fees.30
At one point, NPR requested an interview with me about rural life, which I declined, explaining that I lived in St. Louis. They said that’s why they asked me, and I then had to explain to them that St. Louis was a metro area of three million people.
remember sitting in the audience reading about the new phenomena of “American exiles”—mostly black immigrants terrified of Trump’s persecutory policies—who had crossed the American-Canadian border into Manitoba.34 Canada was now the new America, taking in our huddled masses yearning to breathe free while the Trump administration condemned the Statue of Liberty.35
When people ask me if they should leave the United States, my answer is always, “And where, exactly, is it safe to go?”
Estonia, which both suffered under and fended off Russian domination and which has some of the smartest cybersecurity measures of any state.
Americans like to romanticize protest. As a scholar of the Andijon massacre in Uzbekistan and a firsthand witness to the brutality of Ferguson, I tend to do the opposite and emphasize that demonstrations rarely achieve an instantaneous result and are often dangerous.
The thrill is in the flaunting, the in-jokes, the admissions so blunt that, perversely, few take them seriously.
As an institutionalist, Mueller seemed only as strong as our institutions, and our institutions had been pushed to the brink of collapse.
Savior syndrome is a mind-set that flourishes during the unstable period of autocratic consolidation, when frightened citizens seek to find meaning in the inexplicable actions of their failed leaders.
Inciting incident idea
(“When you don’t know what to do, push a pawn” could have been the motto of the Mueller probe),
The abdication of the admired is too much for those seeking saviors to process, no matter their political predilection.
That the Mueller report could discuss Trump campaign criminality for over four hundred pages and only scratch the surface of what they’ve done is a denunciation of far more than Mueller. The problem lies less with his report than with the lack of consequences for the criminals he probed.
It is unlikely that Mueller will ever give a straightforward account to the American people, because that would involve Mueller laying himself bare, explaining why he failed to stop a plot against America both during his tenure as FBI director and as special counsel.
Mueller broke his silence during the probe was to condemn a BuzzFeed article claiming that Trump had directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, a report that generated widespread talk of impeachment.51 Mueller spoke out more strongly about that BuzzFeed article—which turned out to be accurate—than he did when Barr released a deceitful memo misrepresenting his two years of investigative work.
“Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.” By 2019, Mueller had become a point in his own triangle.
I want my children to have their own memories of the United States, so that if they’re confronted with a false version years from now, they can say, “No, I saw it. We had that. This was real. That America was real.”
“Why did no one stop people from doing bad things?”
I told them to never consider cruel policies as normal, no matter what politicians and pundits tell them.
