The 2016 Election Interference for Dummies Like 🐍 Tulsi Gabbard 🐍

The DNI is a liar: “Russiagate” was not a hoax.

President Donald Trump is desperate to “change the subject” from reminders that his name is in the so-called “Epstein files“ and, no matter how he tries to “juke the stats,” his economy is “crashed out.” Nobody is fooled—newspapers and podcasts have identified as distractions Mr. Trump’s attempts to “play the hits” with complaints about Rosie O’Donnell, former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former FBI Director James Comey.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—though most Democrats type 🐍—inexplicably announced Mr. Obama was “referred to the Justice Department“ for a “treasonous conspiracy” she considered “proved” by a review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election.” The White House followed up by casting aside the last shred of the nation’s dignity and spamming AI slop of America’s first Black president in an orange jumpsuit. (Fact check: of the two men, only Mr. Trump is a convict.)

A shame Ms. Gabbard became so vile—I remember her, when she was a Democrat, naming Mr. Trump “Saudi Arabia’s bitch,” accusing him of “gut[ting] social safety nets and dump[ing] money into the swamp,” calling his travel bans “arbitrary and useless,” his trade wars “a disaster,” and claiming he was “foment[ing] religious bigotry,” and “pushing us closer & closer to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.” Perhaps she finds none of that disqualifying.

The Oversight Investigation & Referral document from 2020 that Ms. Gabbard declassified states, essentially, that while there was no disagreement in the ICA that Russia undertook a series of actions in the 2016 election which helped Republicans, the conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “preference” was for Mr. Trump was insufficiently, perhaps improperly, evidenced. The distinction it asks was whether Mr. Putin helped the orange dotard for the sake of helping him, or only to cause discord and hurt Ms. Clinton. Whether the goal was “chaos” or “favoring Trump,” Russia systematically smeared Ms. Clinton and advantaged her opponent.

Ms. Gabbard nonsensically theorizes that because the intelligence community might not have known the ultimate intention of Russia’s election interference, it follows any investigation was illegitimate—though if the goal were learning what was inside Mr. Putin’s heart, the options are to either investigate or guess. She thinks additionally—incoherently—that somehow implied as also illegitimate were Mr. Trump’s impeachment over withholding weapons from Ukraine (for which the 🐍 voted “present” but insisted he be censured) and his 2023 arrest for the alleged theft (dubbed “mishandling”) of classified documents.

I think, in this jumble of ex post facto bullshit, she means to make actually a very emotional argument on her boss’s behalf—that by scrutinizing and investigating criminal conduct associated with the president, he was made to feel illegitimate. And that “impression” made people treat him with less grace than he felt he deserved, and that if perhaps that initial “cloud“ had not darkened his relationship with the nation, he would be so well-loved nobody would want to punish him for any of his bad behavior. In other words, scrutinizing Mr. Trump caused him grievous narcissistic injury.

This has the logic of a man saying, “I think I was overcharged for car insurance, though I will never know for sure—perhaps that’s why my wife left me.”

Ms. Gabbard has some personal animus here. She is so beloved that Russian state television celebrates her as “[their] girlfriend,” and she has needed to beat back allegations that she was a foreign asset herself, mainly because she spent years encouraging the U.S. to enter into an alliance with Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to defeat ISIS—a common opinion among those “on the take” from the Kremlin. So perhaps she is eager to get some stink off herself.

I doubt Ms. Gabbard will still be serving as DNI in 2028 or even 2026—she is destined to be “thrown under the bus,” but if she has read this document closely—which I doubt, or she would not claim it means so much—does anybody believe she would follow its recommendations? For example: “Require Political Appointees to Recuse Themselves from Management of Controversial Assessments During the Presidential Transition.” No chance in hell she would skip an opportunity to stick it to her haters.

“Russiagate” was not a hoax, but as we move further away from 2016, America has forgotten the basic “shape” of the story. Luckily, I was traumatized by the 2016 election and can refer back to my flashbacks. I had purchased a bottle of Kirkland champagne to crack open and celebrate what I expected would be Ms. Clinton’s resounding landslide victory. When the results showed otherwise, I ended up drinking Fireball whiskey underneath Route 66 in the rain. Sometimes, I feel like I never left that underpass.

A “Russiagate” Primer: What Happened

In March 2016, the chairman of Ms. Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, John Podesta, received a spear-phishing e-mail directing him to click a suspicious link. He properly contacted the Democratic National Committee’s IT department, but tragically, instead of advising him the link was “illegitimate,” they inadequately proofread their response and told him it was “legitimate.” So much was in that balance, but they could not be bothered to read over the e-mail once more before pressing send. Mr. Podesta clicked that link, his e-mails were hacked, and the cyberattacker was able to use his newfound access to exfiltrate files from the DNC and DCCC’s systems as well.

The hacker Guccifer 2.0, who has since been identified as a Russian state operative, transmitted those e-mails to WikiLeaks, who published them on a timetable meant to cause maximal political damage. For example, one tranche of correspondence went public at the start of the Democratic National Convention, when Ms. Clinton was nominated, and another hours after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, wherein Mr. Trump was heard advising former President George W. Bush’s cousin Billy Bush how to “walk up to [women],” “start kissing them,” and that “when you are a star, they let you… grab them by the pussy.”

Now, the MAGA conspiracy theorist narrative was that there was no hack—even though the spear-phishing e-mail was included in the published materials—and actually, the files were stolen by a DNC staffer named Seth Rich, who was murdered by shadowy Deep State assassins on a dark DC street. Mr. Rich’s grieving parents have begged for their dead child to be left out of this bullshit. An “alternative origin” for the Podesta e-mails is critical to MAGA narratives because Republicans recognize that this “original sin” of using stolen materials necessarily affiliates them with the thieves.

After the first set of e-mail leaks, Mr. Trump “sarcastically” called on “Russia, if [they are] listening” to hack Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, too. This was taken by some to be encouragement for the foreign government to hack Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. After the second, the orange clown said he “loved WikiLeaks” and cited the contents of the document dump more than a hundred times in advertisements, campaign rallies, press events, on Twitter, and in debates.

So, the chair of the Clinton campaign was targeted and hacked by a foreign power, and Mr. Trump benefited. Lucky coincidence? No. On June 9, 2016, his second campaign manager, Paul Manafort, son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and namesake, Donald Trump Jr., met in Trump Tower with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, described by Russian journalist Oleg Kashin as a Moscow “mover and shaker with a reputation as a ‘fixer.’” The meeting was arranged by British publicist and music promoter Rob Goldstone, who claimed the Russian government was offering to share “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary” as part of “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Mr. Manafort’s eventual replacement, the Trump campaign’s third manager and podcaster Steve Bannon, called this meeting “treasonous… unpatriotic… bad shit,” and said that they “should have called the FBI.”

Mr. Manafort, who was made a millionaire with money from Russian oligarchs, shared internal polling and strategy with Konstantin Kilimnik, a known Russian Intelligence Services agent, and discussed a Ukraine “peace plan” aligned with Kremlin interests. The Republican National Committee’s platform was subsequently altered to soften its Ukraine policy. It may sound far-fetched now that the Right has been slobbing Mr. Putin’s knob for a decade, but this was really weird at the time, when the Republican Party was notoriously more hawkish on Russia.

These contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives created what I would consider a very reasonable suspicion that, if Mr. Trump’s organization was talking to people who were doing things that helped him, perhaps they talked about or agreed to do things that helped him.

I would frame it: If your house were robbed and later, I strutted uptown wearing your stolen leather jacket (which I received as a gift from a professional burglar), you might wonder if I was complicit or merely a beneficiary. Either could be true! But you would be suspicious if you noticed my friends, coworkers, and family visiting with ruffians at the local thieves’ den. That is what was meant by “Russian collusion.”

Incidentally, after a meeting in 2016 with former Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, who The Washington Post said had “described a Kremlin tactic of financing populist politicians to undercut Eastern European democratic institutions,” then-House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (who Mr. Trump calls “My Kevin”) told the conference that, “Swear to God,” he suspected “Putin pays… Trump.” Even the orange clown’s allies were “just asking questions!”

Before Mr. Trump started ranting about “fake news,” meaning factual stories he disliked, the term described foreign-run propaganda sites or social media handles made to appear like legitimate news content, such as “Atlanta_Online” or “KansasDailyNews.” These were an ugly fixture of the 2016 social media landscape, and preyed on the credulous. The Facebook group, Bernie Sanders’ Dank Meme Stash, was riddled with that activity, and I fear many of its members were permanently brainwashed.

The “Internet Research Agency” (IRA), a Kremlin-linked “troll farm,” ran such campaigns on Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, and Twitter impersonating news pages, Black activists, Bernie Sanders superfans, MAGA goons, et cetera to depress Democratic enthusiasm, boost Mr. Trump’s narratives, and complain about Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Online spaces have been miserable since. Anywhere you could put words in a text box and hit Enter, some asshole would appear to frustrate and insult you.

In 1993, Peter Steiner published a cartoon in The New Yorker which showed two dogs sitting at a computer, with one saying to the other, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” In 2016, nobody could know if you were real at all. Much has been written about the need for Americans to “get out of their echo chambers” and “talk to each other,” but in trying, you could very well spend hours in a heated dialogue with somebody paid in rubles to piss you off and waste your time.

At this time, I was threatened by some digital goon whose whole Internet footprint was attacking Democrats and backing Messrs. Trump, al-Assad, and Putin. I received several messages telling me to “shut up” and to “meet [him] on the streets” of DC. I gave him a time and place and hid inside legendary District diner Ollie’s Trolley (RIP) to see who that thug really was. Nobody showed, which was great because Boris would have assuredly kicked my ass.

Russian actors did attempt to penetrate election infrastructure in at least twenty-one states, but no votes were changed. These data breaches had the potential to be significant—I imagine the attempts to “hack” the voting machines indicate that they would have if they could have—but it has always been the “bad faith” interpretation of the investigation to suggest that Democrats accused Mr. Putin of changing the results.

Now, Ms. Gabbard knows this—or she used to know this. She cited these attempts by Russian agents to hack into U.S. voting systems to promote her Securing America’s Elections Act, legislation that “make[s] sure every single state either uses paper ballots, or has a voter-verified paper backup so that we in this country have an auditable paper trail to protect our democracy.” She told Joe Rogan in 2018 that the interference was “wrong,” and that “Russia’s not the only one… the United States has been doing this for a very long time… around the world” and that it “goes both ways.” Whataboutism aside, she knew it was real and had opinions about it.

Like the post-Endgame Marvel Cinematic Universe, the story of Russiagate starts to sprawl out here in less coherent directions. You had former British intelligence officials alleging there existed a pee tape, FBI agents were sexting on government phones, there were repeated attempts to obstruct the probe and lie under oath by Trump officials, Mr. Trump fired FBI Director James Comey and then later former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to stop the investigation, and eventually and ultimately America was left with an anticlimactic finding by Special Counsel Robert Mueller that yes, Russia did crimes but the mystery of whether Mr. Trump “colluded” will never be solved: “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion,” but “[t]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” and later, “[i]f we had had confidence that the president clearly didn’t commit a crime, we would have said so. We didn’t, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.”

The above-described actions are not the sum of the “election meddling,” but present a broad portrait of what happened. In all honesty, I think everybody was so disappointed by the lack of an action movie ending that it felt the whole storyline was not worth the headache or investment of time following it, so the public gave the president the grace of moving on. Unfortunately, we have a very out-of-sight, out-of-mind electorate, and because there was not a stunning conclusion, it seems as if people just kind of forgot about all the very real events chronicled during the whole affair.

Back to the Present Bullshit

A decade later, the persistent denial and counter-narratives pushed by Mr. Trump’s political allies are sus as fuck. Why imply no interference took place or that concern about interference was illegitimate? Unless, of course, one is trying to protect that conspiracy, or reward it. I do not doubt that the president was so incurious because he also viewed the efforts as helping him.

The president has referred to the Russia investigation as something he and his buddy Vlad “went through together,” as if both men were trauma-bonded over being unfairly tarred. (“We had to go through the Russian hoax together. That was not a good thing. It’s not fair. That was a rigged deal and had nothing to do with Russia. It was a rigged deal with inside the country. And they had to put up with that, too, they had to put up with a lot. It wasn’t just us. They had to put up with it with a phony story that was made up.”) What “phony story”? John Podesta’s e-mail was hacked, and that had plenty to do with Russia. Did the president forget those WikiLeaks he “loved”? If the Trump campaign was merely the beneficiary of the crimes and not a participant—which I do not concede—Mr. Putin does not become innocent.

My own view is that the “Russian election interference” is a bit like a methamphetamine. It is destructive and will rot you from the inside, but also functions as a performance enhancer, and there will be those tempted to dabble to achieve their objectives. Retweet a bot, or align yourself with a conspiracy that favors you, or make use of hacked materials. Let them do free work, and you reap the benefits. But that eventually lands you before a grand jury explaining why you were taking meetings with foreign agents.

Mr. Trump’s overstatement of his innocence in any matter he might have done wrong—to the point where he denies things that evidently happened—undermines him to the point where he instead seems permanently guilty. I think that is not where he would want to be, when the current cloud hanging above him is whether or not he raped teenagers with Jeffrey Epstein or will pardon Ghislaine Maxwell.

Mr. Obama gave Ms. Gabbard a speaking slot at the 2012 DNC. She owes him much. When she endorsed Mr. Obama in 2012, she called him “the strongest advocate military families could have.” When she endorsed former President Joe Biden in 2020, she said, “Although I may not agree with the Vice President on every issue, I know that he has a good heart, and he’s motivated by his love for our country and the American people. I’m confident that he will lead our country guided by the spirit of aloha, respect, and compassion, and thus help heal the divisiveness that has been tearing our country apart.” When those men had power, she flattered them. Now she condemns them to flatter Mr. Trump. If you take the 🐍 at her word, then each of the three presidents she endorsed sucked.

Why is power so important to Ms. Gabbard that she will supplicate to whoever gets her ahead? She could—and should—quit, and confess that Mr. Trump demanded she say crazy shit to change the subject from his long, intimate friendship with Mr. Epstein. I suppose there are many questions you might want to duck when your “closest friend” is history’s most notorious pedophile.

Shameful to be such a snake and then exhaust your venom so cheaply.

Certainly, this Trump regime could not be so foolish as to try to substitute one long-awaited reckoning with another they cannot deliver. Were they not liars, they would press charges—face Barack Obama in court! Let them just once try and prove something, so the MAGA voters they have routinely gaslit can finally learn how badly they are fooled.

Ms. Gabbard must know her time with this administration is growing short. Mr. Trump has already told the nation he does not trust her advice. She said Iran was not advancing towards a bomb, he said she was wrong, they were, and bombed them, and did not bother to treat her with any respect in front of reporters. Her debasement cannot buy her time because it will not pay off. She once said of the GOP: “They have abdicated their responsibility to exercise legitimate oversight, and instead blindly do the bidding of their party’s leader.” She understands sycophancy—which makes her practice all the more deliberate. Whoever she used to be, the 🐍 now knows her boss is in trouble, and she is ruining herself to protect that man’s reputation. I cannot see her having a political future. Democrats will not take her back, and when Republicans have used her up, they will throw her away—kick her to the curb, like so much trash.

Attorney General Pam Bondi—the same notoriously corrupt bimbo who landed Mr. Trump in his current Epstein fiasco—has asked that a grand jury be empaneled to prosecute Obama-era officials. Good luck with that. I have my doubts that reopening the specifics of the Russia investigation will go the way the president imagines. After all, it was not a hoax. Neither was the Epstein stuff, which was also remembered, not recently discovered.

This is dangerous. The president wants to rewrite history, and people who know better are complicit. His minions will use the “immense power of the state” “to persecute political opponents”—the same “vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department” he cried about in his Inaugural Address. Mr. Trump was arrested for crimes he committed, and investigated because he was the beneficiary of crimes other people had committed. He is, frankly, a through-and-through criminal. All he ever had to do was “stop breaking the fucking law” instead of saying “fuck [the FBI, CIA, Justice Department, Obama, and] the police.”

Personally, I still think he did it.

Oversight Investigation And Referral (tulsi Bullshit)

9.21MB ∙ PDF file

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Senate Intelligence Report On Russian Active Measures Campaigns Ft Lil Marco Rubio

446KB ∙ PDF file

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The Mueller Report

10.9MB ∙ PDF file

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Postscript: For the sake of posterity, I am including the relevant PDFs—the Mueller Report and Senate Intelligence Committee report—below. In light of the recent disappearance of whole clauses of the Constitution on government websites, we should not take for granted that inconvenient files may cease to be hosted.