No. of Recommendations: 15
Close observers of the White House’s spasmodic attempts to get out from under the Epstein-files controversy will by now have noticed a basic symmetry: The worse the Epstein revelations, the wilder the distractions issued to try to get the MAGA faithful to look literally anywhere else.
Take yesterday afternoon. With the latest Wall Street Journal Epstein-Trump story about to drop, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was summoned to the White House briefing room to give the press corps a po-faced presentation on the supposed low-down dirty 2016 chicanery of Barack Obama and company, which—although Gabbard noted she’s not a lawyer—surely wasn’t not treason, right?
Gabbard and the White House have been beating this drum all week, making chronic use of the rhetoric about “a years-long coup to try to undermine President Trump’s presidency.” The basic gist of the charge is that Obama and his intelligence chiefs knew that their late-2016 intelligence assessment that Vladimir Putin had wanted Donald Trump to win that year was inaccurate. And that Obama understood that the assessment, in Gabbard’s words, “would and could then be used for all of the actions that came after.” In the White House’s logical ordering of things, that makes Obama responsible for every headache Trump suffered in his first term, including—somehow—both his impeachments. (Maybe Trump wouldn’t have tried to steal the 2020 election if they’d let his first term be more fun?)
All this is particularly funny once you realize how fine the hair is that the White House is trying to split. It is simply false, the administration insists, that U.S. intelligence assessed in 2016 that Putin was trying to help Donald Trump’s candidacy. All we know for sure is that he was trying to hurt Hillary Clinton’s.
Even current intelligence analysts have quietly acknowledged that hurting one candidate in a two-person race is tantamount to helping the other. “Most analysts judged that denigrating Clinton equaled supporting Trump,” reads the CIA after-action report on the 2016 intelligence assessment, which was released earlier this month. The report—which, again, was written by analysts this year working under direction of the Trump administration—called that logic train “plausible and sensible,” but argues the assessment should have considered it a strong inference rather than a fact.
But as they scramble to assemble a story compelling enough to distract from Epstein, Gabbard and Co. are increasingly jumping beyond even this rickety line of argument. At the briefing yesterday, Gabbard claimed Russia had tried to “sow discord in the election,” but “showed no preference for or against any singular candidate”—a claim flatly contradicted by the CIA report.
She also found time, amid her lectures about the importance of revealing only the highest-quality intelligence, to chum the waters with some bizarre allegations about Hillary Clinton. Russian intelligence, Gabbard said, had been preparing to release supposed DNC communications revealing Hillary Clinton’s “intensified psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness,” and the supposed “daily regimen of ‘heavy tranquilizers’” she was taking to deal with all this. Did U.S. intelligence have any reason to believe any of that was true, one reporter wondered? “I think the underlying point there is that we understand from intelligence what Russia said that they had,” Gabbard replied. Airtight!
Other ridiculous claims and leaps of logic pile up from there. At the same briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denounced the supposed intelligence narrative “that the president colluded with the Russians, that the president’s son was holding secret meetings with the Russians, all of these lies that were never true.” Maybe there were intelligence assessments that Don Jr. was holding secret meetings with Russians; if so, I don’t remember those assessments coming to light. What I do remember is the New York Times’s bombshell report in July 2017 that Don Jr. did, in fact, take a meeting with a Russian lawyer who had offered him dirt on the Clinton campaign. “If it’s what you say I love it,” Jr. replied by email, “especially later in the summer.” Jr. never denied that meeting had taken place. The elder Trump himself admitted the meeting took place. So much for “all of these lies that were never true.”
It’s all shoddy enough to make you wonder if they’re making it stupid on purpose. The more nonsense they spew, the more tempted guys like me are to spend our time debunking that nonsense instead of focusing on certain other stories in the news. I guess it’s working! Here I am writing about it.
Andrew Egger
No. of Recommendations: 7
It’s all shoddy enough to make you wonder if they’re making it stupid on purpose.
They know their MAGA base and the right wing media will endlessly repeat the lies. WTF is wrong with Gabbard? Talk about a traitor. Par for the course for this administration/
