‘Spy Traitor Con’
I haven’t taken off my ‘She Persisted’ t-shirt for 72 hours. I’ve shed a lot of tears. I called my daughter to apologize for how long we took. I promised her on November 9, 2016 that we would get the illegitimate president* out of office and the world would know he’s a con. As I told Jeff Sharlet when he popped into RadPod & Chill on Thursday, it’s been a long seven years and four decades.
I am eating too much cake, as I revisit my archives - words that I wrote for my daughter and son - promises made, lessons of a life of activism.
I had investigated Trump throughout my career, and he is a con man. We have allowed a media run by cowards and greed to normalize spies, traitors, and cons.
Recall, Russians in the Oval Office, recall Helsinki, recall Craig Unger and Wayne Barrett’s life’s work reporting on Trump’s Russian ties and money laundering escapades.
What do we call someone whose campaign manager took tens of millions of dollars to install a Putin puppet into the presidency of Ukraine, who then fled to Moscow after fleecing the country and leaving a trail of death. What was Paul Manafort when he worked for ‘free’ on the Trump campaign?
Words matter. Accuracy matters, as Sharlet says.
We have been engaged in a war of words and the words employed by media cowards - ‘meddling and mishandling’ are weak tea - another Sharlet gem.
‘Meddling and mishandling’ are propaganda words to downplay the obvious. We had spies, traitors, and cons in the White House, and the damage is incalculable.
And those same spies, traitors, and cons are still hosting indoctrination events. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat has taught us, the MAGA gang doesn’t do rallies, they host indoctrination events.
Their cult leader - who already incited one violent coup - a gift to Putin, as Timothy Snyder noted - is using increasingly violent language, as are the disgraced Mike Flynn, the loser Kari Lake, and a gaggle of Congressional chaos-agent insurrectionists.
When the US reveals itself to still be a rule of law country, the only choice for spy-traitor-cons is to incite violence, to create chaos and destabilization events, to drop bombs on their own people, to spark wars. I have written volumes on how this is done. Start here:
I have been pouring through my Trump-Russia archives, revisiting the words I used to report these stories. My skill in broadcast news was distilling complex investigations into two teasable words for the promo department, and I deployed that skill for this war. My compilation of my early reporting, “It’s Komprocated” contains a wealth of accurate terms to describe a military attack by the Russians to install a puppet, who is still hurting our country each day.
As ex-fed Martin Sheil noted on these pages yesterday:
Accountability for wrongdoing may actually become fashionable again and the law may actually be applied to the most powerful among us restoring faith in our flawed but still standing system of justice.
Seeing Jack Smith talk to the American public was a moment.
I have never found disparaging Merrick Garland to be good policy. I surrounded myself with legal experts who knew how long investigations of this scale - never seen before in US history - would take. I have always viewed the cottage-industry of Garland disparagement with a jaundiced eye - to me, it sounded the same as the Hillary-Pelosi bashing cabal. Garland told us himself what was happening, as I reported repeatedly when he was asked about the Department of Justice’s J6 investigation:
“We do not do our investigations in public. This is the most wide-ranging investigation and the most important investigation that the Justice Department has ever entered into.”-Merrick Garland
I took him at his word.
As I began reading the indictment last night, I reflected on the cold feelings that washed over me when I was writing the Aldrich Ames report. That part where I reflected on the shocking number of captured, killed, or compromised intelligence agents reported in 2021.
Which spy-traitor-con/s could have had access to the intel…
Here is an excerpt from my Ames report:
I recall writing in 2017 about Trump being the revenge president, after reading about a meeting Richard Branson took with Trump - where Branson said all Trump did was talk about revenge.
A desire to exact revenge was among the qualities Keir Giles ticked off in his epic 84-second explainer about Russian agents. You can read the interview transcripts here.
‘Greed and Folly’
“The reasons I did what I did in April of 1985 were personal and amounted to greed and folly,” Ames said in interview. “Simple as that.”
Ames betrayed upwards of 30 agents. Ten were executed. One committed suicide, and one was smuggled to safety by the British secret service, after escaping house arrest.
“It’s a nasty kind of circle,” Ames said. “With terrible human costs.”
He should know. He is spending his life in prison. I wonder if the ghost of General Polyakov - the most important agent in US history - visits him in his sleep like Jacob Marley in chains.
As I think of a possible future for the spy-traitor-cons who sold out our democracy with terrible human costs, I like to think the haunting has already begun.
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