Tag: conspiracy theory
Tulsi Gabbard's 'Russiagate' Conspiracy Crumbles In Fox Interview

Tulsi Gabbard's 'Russiagate' Conspiracy Crumbles In Fox Interview

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s claim that former President Barack Obama directed a “treasonous conspiracy” against President Donald Trump took a hit on Tuesday night when she was asked the most straightforward question possible about her allegations during a Fox News interview. Her response demonstrates how painfully little she’s actually found — and how far over their skis the MAGAverse and Trump administration have gotten in response to her absurd charges.

In mid-July, as Trump sought to defuse a right-wing revolt over his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, Gabbard claimed to have uncovered and referred to the Justice Department documents which she said showed that at the end of Obama’s second term, his administration attempted “to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup.” Her ridiculous and revisionist claims were widely touted by Fox stars and other MAGA propagandists eager to help Trump change the story from his former friend, the deceased sex offender Epstein.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has reportedly ordered federal prosecutors to launch a grand jury probe in response to Gabbard’s referral. Responding to that news on Monday night, Fox host Sean Hannity suggested that the probe’s targets could include Obama, former FBI Director James Comey, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former special counsel Jack Smith. Fox legal analyst Gregg Jarrett replied that “those are appropriate names,” adding that “dozens, I think, could be charged as co-conspirators,” including former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

But a “telling exchange” on Tuesday night between Gabbard and Fox’s Laura Ingraham, first flagged by CNN’s Aaron Blake, shows that what Gabbard considers the most damning revelations of Obama’s malfeasance were actually reviewed years ago by the GOP-led Senate Select Intelligence Committee, whose membership at the time included current Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Ingraham asked Gabbard: “Now, director, you said there was irrefutable evidence that Obama was the mastermind of this intelligence manipulation and the perpetuation of the Russia hoax. What is that irrefutable evidence for our viewers tonight?”

Gabbard replied that the documents she had uncovered showed “how President Obama directed that a National Security Council meeting be called to talk about Russia, that the report that came out of that meeting was filled with tasks that were delivered by James Clapper's assistant to John Brennan and to other elements of the intelligence community — John Brennan was the head of the CIA at the time — all saying per the president's direction, per the president's order.”

She continued:

TULSI GABBARD: And very specifically, they were tasked to create an intelligence assessment that detailed how Moscow tried to influence the election. Not “if,” but “how.” And this was the beginning of this manufactured intelligence assessment where they knowingly wrote things in this assessment that were false, and they knew they were false. They knew that they were basing it on discredited intelligence or documents like the Steele dossier that was politically motivated and that they knew was false, and this was how they came up with — with the Russia hoax that was then weaponized and used to try to delegitimize the president, President Trump, and to try to ultimately enact this years-long coup throughout his entire four years of his first administration.

But Gabbard’s discoveries aren’t sinister — they aren’t even new.

The 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that Obama ordered is the subject of the fourth volume of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s bipartisan Russia investigation, a 158-page document published in April 2020.

That report states that at a December 6, 2016, meeting of the National Security Council, “President Obama instructed Director Clapper to have the Intelligence Community prepare a comprehensive report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.” This was apparently such a banal request that it drew no commentary from the report’s authors.

The committee also reviewed the assessment itself and concluded that, far from some sort of malicious attack on Trump, it was “coherent and well-constructed,” featuring “proper analytic tradecraft,” and its authors experienced “no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.” From the report:

From a report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, "Russian active Measures and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, Volume 4: Review of the Intelligence Community Assessment"

Then-committee Chair Richard Burr (R-NC) issued a statement alongside the report in which he said, “The ICA reflects strong tradecraft, sound analytical reasoning, and proper justification of disagreement in the one analytical line where it occurred,” adding, “The Committee found no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community’s conclusions.”

Gabbard’s position appears to be that asking for and receiving intelligence showing that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s behalf is an attack on Trump by definition — one that Bondi now seeks to criminalize. But the Justice Department and the Senate Select Intelligence Committee under Rubio’s leadership came to the same conclusion.

We’ve seen all this before. Fox — and Hannity in particular — spent years promising viewers that investigations into the Russia probe were about to finally send all their political enemies to prison, only for those efforts to come up short or fall apart.

Unfortunately, Trump’s second-term appointees to top law enforcement and intelligence leadership are people like Gabbard — conspiracy theorists who are in positions of power because they’ve demonstrated to the president, through myriad Fox News appearances, their willingness to put his desires above all else.

So here we are, doing it all over again.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Smearing The Innocent, Trump Gets Caught In His Own Conspiracy Trap

Smearing The Innocent, Trump Gets Caught In His Own Conspiracy Trap

A new poll, on a matter that adamantly should not be decided by untutored public opinion, finds that 79 percent of Americans believe all of the documents relating to the Epstein case should be disclosed. A shocking result? Not quite. Ask Americans, who've been hearing wall-to-wall accusations about secret sex abuse cabals, celebrity client lists and government cover-ups whether they want to know the full story and — whaddaya know — they say yes.

They're wrong, and I'll come back to that. But first, there is someone who is less enthusiastic about disclosing all available records, and that person is President Donald Trump. Asked last April whether he would release whatever information the government has about a number of A-list conspiracy theories, Trump was unequivocal ... until it came to Epstein.

Q: Would you declassify the JFK files?

A: Yeah. I did a lot of it.

Q: Would you declassify the 9/11 files?

A: Yes.

Q: Would you declassify the Epstein files?

A: Yeah, yeah, I would.

Q: All right.

A: I guess I would. I think that less so because you don't want to affect people's lives if it's phony stuff in there, because it's a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would, or at least —

Q: You think that would restore trust, help restore trust?

A: I don't know about Epstein so much as I do the others, certainly about the way he died. ... But I'd go a long way toward that one. ...

On the matter of releasing the results of investigations, the man is right.

There's a reason we have a tradition in this country (formerly a nation of laws) that strongly discourages the government from releasing the results of investigations that do not result in a criminal charge — precisely because these investigations unearth unsubstantiated gossip, bad faith accusations and other potentially damaging information — and if there is no criminal procedure, the citizen will be denied an opportunity to rebut the charges. So Trump is correct that a responsible government should tread carefully before releasing the results of criminal investigations or other inquiries, taking care to redact names or other identifying information about innocent people.

Now let's come back to the world we actually inhabit. That's not Trump's motivation. Trump has done more than anyone to demolish the laws, traditions and basic decency that should govern in these matters. He has himself spewed the kind of incendiary accusations about people (of treason, of vote stealing, even of murder) that undermine faith in the system. Even on the topic of Epstein, Trump was happy to pile on with MAGA forces in stoking suspicion. In 2019, he retweeted a post suggesting that Bill Clinton might have been involved with Epstein. Asked to elaborate, he resorted to the "just asking questions" dodge: "So you have to ask: Did Bill Clinton go to the island? That's the question. If you find that out, you're going to know a lot."

He and the forces he unleashed have destroyed the norms and rules that protect innocent people from unjust accusations and flagrant incitement. He cannot hide behind those destroyed norms now. They're gone. MAGA influencers have stoked the Epstein conspiracy theories and countless other lies and calumnies with Trump's blessing for years. In 2023, Kash Patel confidently explained why the Biden administration hadn't released the Epstein files: "Simple, because of who's on that list." Talk show host Dan Bongino, now deputy director of the FBI, repeatedly demanded to know "what the hell they were hiding."

Epstein was an adjudicated pedophile. But that was just the springboard to suggest a far more comprehensive corruption deforming elites in America. MAGA foot soldiers like Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson and Benny Johnson piled on, encouraging their audiences to believe that Jeffrey Epstein was a deep state operative who ran a pedophile ring that serviced every liberal or Democrat MAGA despised.

Trump has never shown anything like concern for the innocent — just the opposite. If the innocent are in his way, he will mow them down without a backward glance. If you're a law-abiding, legal immigrant unjustly detained or even deported to a foreign prison by ICE, don't expect this president to pause for a moment. If you are a legal permanent resident wrongfully detained by immigration authorities for exercising your First Amendment right to speak, don't turn to this president for relief. If you've been defamed or targeted or even had a violent mob sent after you shouting "Hang Mike Pence," don't expect concern for your innocence to cross Trump's mind.

No, the only person whose privacy and reputation Trump has any concern about is Trump. And that's why his uncharacteristic reticence about releasing the Epstein files is suspicious. He was happy to encourage the most reckless speculation about a deep state pedophile conspiracy while he was running for office, but now that the worm has turned, he's suddenly concerned about "innocent" people being hurt. It is impossible to imagine that his reticence arises from anything other than self-interest. He seems to be running scared.

It's poetic justice.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her latest book is Hard Right: The GOP's Drift Toward Extremism.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Too Little, Too Late: RFK Jr. Suddenly Is Promoting Measles Vaccination

Too Little, Too Late: RFK Jr. Suddenly Is Promoting Measles Vaccination

In the wake of the growing measles outbreak in Texas, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published an op-ed on Fox News’ website over the weekend, urging Americans to … get vaccinated.

With the subhead “MMR vaccine is crucial to avoiding potentially deadly disease,” the infamous anti-vaxxer wrote, “Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.”

Texas Health and Human Services first reported the outbreak in mid-January. The disease rapidly spread, reaching nearly 150 confirmed cases. The majority (if not almost all) of those cases are among children who have not received the MMR vaccine. Texas officials say the outbreak is the worst in almost three decades.

Last week, during Donald Trump’s bizarre Cabinet meeting, Kennedy glibly dismissed a measles-related death of a school-aged child as “not unusual.” It was the first measles fatality recorded in the U.S. in over a decade.

Kennedy has spent much of his career promoting anti-vaccine misinformation, notably amplifying debunked bad science connecting the MMR vaccine to autism rates in children. Kennedy, along with others in the anti-vaxx movement have contributed to declining vaccination rates, resulting in outbreaks like the one in Texas.

The Texas outbreak, which began in Gaines County and has now spread to eight more counties, had alarmingly low vaccination rates among its cases of school-aged children. This is not just by chance; It has been fomented by Mr. Measles and his anti-science allies for decades.

At the same time, the Children's Health Defense, the organization Kennedy founded and previously chaired, continues to promote false information about the Texas outbreak. On February 20, its official social media account blamed the outbreak on the MMR vaccine itself. Their claims have the same amount of evidence they have always had—zero.

Kennedy can write as many toothless op-eds as he likes, but as cases pile up Kennedy’s first order of business at the HHS was to gut the agency tasked with educating the public and preventing outbreaks like this one. Kennedy even abruptly canceled the FDA’s planned meeting for next flu season and paused multimillion-dollar efforts to develop a new COVID-19 vaccine to deal with new strains.

With the Trump administration’s history of mismanaging public health, and Elon Musk’s focus on destroying our government agencies, the future is only going to get more dangerous for Americans.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Dan Bongino

Putting Dan Bongino In Top FBI Post Signals Trump's Real Agenda

The selection of right-wing podcaster Dan Bongino for a senior FBI role hammers home that President Donald Trump is eliminating the guardrails that prevented right-wing conspiracy theories becoming criminal prosecutions during his first term. It also shovels more dirt on the farcical idea that Trump and his allies want depoliticized law enforcement.

A regular pattern played out over Trump’s first term as the president sought to wield federal law enforcement as an extension of his will. Right-wing conspiracy theorists, typically led by Trump adviser and Fox News host Sean Hannity, would offer bogus claims that Trump’s foes had committed crimes. Then Trump, an inveterate Fox viewer, would publicly or privately demand investigations and often get them. But the probes would ultimately fall apart without significant charges after Trump’s own appointees — Republicans who nonetheless evinced some semblance of independence and professionalism — figured out there was nothing to them.

Trump’s second-term selections are intended to eliminate the disruptions caused by appointees with a higher priority than carrying out the president’s whims. They are sycophants who are zealously loyal to the president and some either previously worked as his personal lawyers or have long public records of calling for criminal investigations of his foes.

Trump said on Sunday that Bongino, who embarked on a career as a right-wing media commentator after serving in the New York Police Department and U.S. Secret Service and losing several congressional campaigns, will serve as deputy director of the FBI. Bongino worked as a Fox contributor and host before leaving in 2023 to focus on his eponymous podcast, which streams on Rumble and airs on Westwood One radio stations.

In announcing Bongino’s new role, Trump said the podcaster would help restore “Fairness” to the justice system. But Bongino is one of the last people you’d select for such a role if your intention was really to run a nonpartisan bureau: He is an inflammatory partisan who has declared that “owning the libs” is “my entire life right now” because they are “pure unadulterated evil" and has fawned over Trump as “an apex predator” and “the lion king.”

Bongino gained influence and an audience during Trump’s first term specifically because of his willingness to issue florid denunciations of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. On his NRATV show and in frequent guest appearances on Fox (particularly on Trump’s beloved Fox & Friends and on Hannity’s show), Bongino described Mueller’s probe as “an obvious frame job and set-up” that is “designed to cover up for the misdeeds of the Obama administration” and called for the special counsel’s firing.

That left him well-positioned to jump to a Fox job in early 2019 amid NRATV’s collapse.

Bongino’s’s views of law enforcement weaponization seem entirely based on who is doing the weaponizing.

“The FBI is lost, it’s broken, irredeemably corrupt at this point,” Bongino said in 2022 after bureau agents executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-A-Lago home. “It’s way past time to clean this FBI house up. They have burned every last shred of faith and trust freedom-loving Americans had in it.”

“It's clear now we're living in the police state,” Bongino said after a federal grand jury handed down an indictment of Trump over his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. “The republic is now officially dead.”

But at the same time, Bongino said there should be “an FBI raid at the White House" to target then-President Joe Biden, whom he described as “the real criminal” based on fictitious right-wing corruption claims.

An inveterate conspiracy theorist, Bongino has also pontificated about the Democrats planning a coup in the lead-up to the 2020 election; said that election was marred by “unbelievably suspect behavior”; and suggested that pipe bombs planted near the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee on January 5, 2021, were an “inside job” and the FBI is withholding the perpetrator because the information would “blow up the entire January 6 insurrection narrative.”

After Trump returned to office in January, Bongino called for an investigation into “special tyrant” Jack Smith and urged the president to “set up a courtroom” in the White House and “start making judicial decisions.” Now he’ll be one of seniormost figures in federal law enforcement with a mandate to carry out such deranged ideas.

It’s unlikely Bongino will be hindered by the higher-ups Trump has installed.

Kash Patel, the Trump-appointed FBI director, said in a 2023 interview that a second Trump term would target “the conspirators, not just in government but in the media” who had “lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” The appendix of Patel’s 2023 book “names more than 50 current or former US officials that he claims are ‘members of the Executive Branch deep state,’ which he describes as a ‘dangerous threat to democracy,’” in what has been frequently referred to as an “enemies list.”

At the Justice Department, Attorney General Pam Bondi previously parlayed frequent Fox appearances defending Trump into a post on his first impeachment legal defense team. Her acting deputy, Emil Bove, previously represented Trump in state and federal prosecutions.

Meanwhile, Ed Martin, who will oversee major cases in the District of Columbia as its acting U.S. attorney, “was an organizer in the ‘Stop The Steal’ movement that falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election was rigged against Trump” and then “worked as a defense attorney for some people charged in the January 6 riot.”

Over the first month of the Trump administration, this new team has proved grim for the rule of law, with January 6 perpetrators pardoned en masse, top prosecutors and FBI leaders purged, and Justice Department lawyers resigning after receiving what they viewed as unacceptably partisan orders to dismiss charges or launch an investigation.

On Sunday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation Agents Association told its members that Patel had committed to selecting as his deputy “an on-board, active Special Agent as has been the case for 117 years” in order to preserve “operational expertise and experience, as well as the trust of our Special Agent population.” But Trump doesn’t care about any of that, and he announced hours later that Patel had picked Bongino, someone who lacks that experience but shares the president’s desire to punish his political enemies. And that means the months ahead will be worse.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

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