Month: February 2022

Vladimir Putin just gave a rambling unhinged speech today that essentially declared everything since the Communist revolution as illegitimate and that a renewed Greater Russia is on the table. He stopped just short of declaring himself Czar:

Here’s a thread translating Putin’s speech.

1. He’s completely lost his mind

2. It’s clear he’s not just talking about Donbas

3. I wouldn’t be surprised if they attack tonight https://t.co/lBNvyX4zKi

— Angry Staffer 🌻 (@Angry_Staffer) February 21, 2022

If you’re wondering why Putin would use this address to go on for so long about the history of another country, the answer is simple – he doesn’t think Ukraine is a real country, and has made that pretty clear

“We can’t let these nationalist feelings be the foundation of a state,” Putin says. He’s not even talking about modern Ukraine – we are still in the 1920s

Putin says Ukraine is a geopolitical fiction created by Stalin in the 1920s. “We’re ready to show you what real decommunization is.”

Putin says Russia was “robbed” by the collapse of the USSR.

Putin: “Why did the Bolsheviks need to generously encourage any nationalist ambitions on the imperial periphery? Handing over territories and the population of historical Russia… the nationalists didn’t even dream of this”

Putin now on to modern day: “Ukraine has never had traditions of its own statehood… the Ukrainian state is built on denying everything that invites us, the historical memory of millions of people”

I’ve had a few people around the Kremlin say that Ukraine was downstream from Nato: just an irritant in Russia’s relations with the west. 20 minutes in and Putin hasn’t even mentioned Nato. This is just an enormous rant where he seems to really resent Ukraine for being a country

“Maidan did not bring democracy to Ukraine… after eight years the country is divided, Ukraine is living through a severe economic and social crisis. 15% of the population had to leave the country for work, usually for non-skilled labor”

I’ve had random Russians rant to me about Ukrainian history like this before, but they didn’t control the world’s largest nuclear arsenal

Putin recalls the 2014 Odessa fire in which dozens of pro-Russians died. “The radicals who seized power in Ukraine organized terror and a series of murders went unpunished […] we know the criminals by name and will do everything to punish them.”

Imagine being Macron and sitting through this patiently for six hours while you politely urge Putin not to start a huge war

“Ukraine has been reduced to the level of a colony with a puppet regime,” Putin says.

“The US and Nato have shamelessly turned Ukraine into a theater of potential military action against Russia,” Putin says. “Ukraine’s armed forces may well be commanded directly from Nato HQ.”

Onto the failed attempt to make Ukraine and Georgia in 2008. “The Americans were just using them for their anti-Russian policy,” Putin says.

“I’ve never said this before,” Putin says, then reveals he asked Bill Clinton in Moscow in 2000 whether Russia could ever join Nato. Then he starts accusing the US of supporting terrorists in Chechnya and ignoring Russia’s interests with Nato expansion and missile defense

“Okay, you don’t want us to be your friend. But why make us an enemy? There’s only one answer,” Putin says. “They just don’t want there to be this big, self-sufficient, strong country called Russia. That’s where all of American behavior comes from.”

Obviously I expected Putin to be aggressive and uncompromising, but this is downright scary. This is a war speech.

“Nato admitting Ukraine and putting its weaponry there is a settled question,” he says. “They’re looking at a sudden strike against Russia.”

One reason why the sanctions deterrence hasn’t worked: “the west is blackmailing Russia with sanctions, but they will always find an excuse for them and fake it,” Putin says.

“Russia has done everything to ensure Ukraine retained its territorial integrity,” Putin says, not mentioning that he is personally responsible for it losing about 20% of its territory

A minute later, Putin says he will recognize the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics immediately and ask the Russian parliament to ratify it as soon as possible. So there you have it.

TV then immediately cuts to Putin in the Kremlin signing decrees doing just that, with the separatist leaders in tow. He’s also signing agreements about “friendship and mutual aid” with both republics.

They cut to the signing ceremony so fast I didn’t have time to tweet Putin’s final message – that Ukraine was behind the violence in the Donbas and would be held responsible for “ensuing bloodshed.” This is only the beginning. The speech made it clear: war’s on the table.

A meeting of the Russian Security Council was televised this morning, although it was apparently recorded earlier. ????

Wow. This extraordinary Russian Security Council meeting is absolutely bonkers and does give you the sense Putin’s lost his mind. Seems we’re close to Russia actually recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” as independent and Moscow officially sending troops to help.

Also, recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk as independent here and officially helping militarily will mean the end of the Minsk agreements. The situation on the ground from there can change rapidly and significantly.

Dmitry Medvedev speaking now, says Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” are “territories that Ukraine does not need” and that Zelensky doesn’t want to reintegrate because he would like to be reelected and the voters of Donetsk and Luhansk would not vote for him.

Medvedev also reminds Putin of Georgia in 2008 and recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia when he was Russian president. See where this is going?

Medvedev says Russian people support recognition of DNR and LNR, including the military component. “These are not only Russian speakers, these are Russian citizens,” he says.

Matvienko: Ukraine is just territory, to Russia it’s our people. Ukrainians have become hostage to the West’s anti-Russian project. Biden snapped his fingers and Shokin was fired. So if the US wanted to solve the question in Ukraine they could.

Russian FSB director Patrushev says Russia can only negotiate with the US about Ukraine. Everyone else will fall in line. He adds that US’s ultimate goal is to destroy Russia.

Originally tweeted by Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) on February 21, 2022.

More:

Putin speaking to his security council now and rattling off the history of the Ukraine conflict from Moscow’s perspective. None of them – and these are all Russia’s most senior officials – are allowed within 20 yards of him.

Putin on remarks by Scholz and others that Ukraine isn’t going to join Nato any time soon because it’s not ready. “This isn’t a concession. This is part of your plan!”

He says Macron said the US position had changed but couldn’t explain how.

If anyone has any doubts, this ends with Russia recognizing the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. It’s a matter of time.

Putin used to sit officials around a table and at least act like there was a discussion – now they just look like schoolkids reporting to the principal.

Dmitry Kozak, Putin’s top official for the Minsk talks, say they have been going nowhere since they were agreed in 2015.

“Neither the west, nor Ukraine need Donbas,” he says. “They want to put the brakes on the situation.”

Alexander Bortnikov, head of the FSB, now talking about accused Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory. He claims they have captured a Ukrainian soldier.

This is just utterly surreal

Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister, now talking about more alleged Ukrainian attacks on Donetsk.

Neither he nor Kozak look particularly thrilled about this.

This obviously has implications for much more than the Donbas – Shoigu says Ukraine could get nuclear weapons and pose more of a threat than Iran or North Korea, due to their Soviet-era knowledge.

Putin asks if they should recognize DNR and LNR. Medvedev – remember that guy? – says it’s clear Ukraine doesn’t want them and won’t fulfill the Minsk agreements under any circumstances.

“These aren’t just Russian speakers, these are citizens of the Russian Federation,” Medvedev says. “If things continue this way, the only way out is to recognize the sovereignty of these territories.”

He says the Russian people will support it.

Nikolai Patrushev, head of the security council and probably the most hawkish of Putin’s confidants, is speaking. “We need negotiations, but only with the US. Everyone else will do what they tell them.”

“They are hiding their true goal – to destroy the Russian Federation.”

Sergei Naryshkin, head of foreign intelligence, suggests using potential DNR/LNR recognition as a threat to make Ukraine fulfill the Minsk agreements.

Then it gets astonishing.
Putin: speak clearly, do you support recognition?
Naryshkin: I will
Putin: You will or you do?
Naryshkin: I support bringing them into Russia.
Putin: That’s not what we are discussing! Do you support recognizing independence?
Naryshkin, flustered: Yes

I just can’t believe I’m watching this. You half expected Putin to feed Naryshkin and Mishustin to the sharks when they tried avoiding saying they supported recognizing the DNR

A long line of officials – some enthusiastically, some looking terrified – urge Putin to recognize the DNR.

Putin says, “A decision will be taken today.”

Then the TV cuts out. It’s like the finale of the Sopranos.

What the hell did I just watch????

Originally tweeted by max seddon (@maxseddon) on February 21, 2022.

That. Was. Nuts.

Ukraine’s foreign minister responds.

No, Ukraine did NOT:

❌Attack Donetsk or Luhansk
❌Send saboteurs or APCs over the Russian border
❌Shell Russian territory
❌Shell Russian border crossing
❌Conduct acts of sabotage

Ukraine also does NOT plan any such actions.

Russia, stop your fake-producing factory now.

— Dmytro Kuleba (@DmytroKuleba) February 21, 2022

This is surreal to say the least. I don’t know what to say to that except “stay tuned.”

Classy and smart

Happy Presidents’ Day! pic.twitter.com/8lanpKXO10

— GOP (@GOP) February 21, 2022

I guess they have to say Trump. He’s running again. But Coolidge? Nixon???

They really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

Because I heard an alternate explanation yesterday for this phenomenon in Johann Hari’s “Stolen Focus,” a story about ADHD at Salon caught my attention:

Longstanding stigma against mental illness permeates American culture, especially when it comes to cognitive functioning. Nevertheless, ADHD diagnoses have consistently increased since the 1990s. Roughly one out of every 10 children and adolescents between the ages of 3 and 17 living in the US have a current ADHD diagnosis. That number stands to grow further after many parents witnessed firsthand how their children struggled to stay attentive in remote classes. 

The unanswered question is whether the condition is being under- or over-diagnosed.

When school moved online, Dr. Jonathan Cartsonis saw his 13-year-old son disengage from his studies. As an educator, Dr. Cartsonis understands the importance of experiential components of learning. Specializing in rural healthcare, he emphasizes individualized learning strategies and community engagement with his own medical students. Then the diagnosis came. It was for ADHD, but after in-person learning resumed Dr. Cartsonis thought otherwise.

“It was a byproduct of too many hours sitting at the computer, too much homework, not enough social engagement, and not enough exercise,” he wrote to Salon. “The supposed ADHD symptoms evaporated when he was back in person, in school.”

But that’s anecdotal. Was it really too much screen time and not enough social engagement or, in some cases, was it something else?

California’s first surgeon general, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, saw a radical spike in ADHD diagnoses when she worked in a clinic in San Francisco’s low-income Bayview-Hunter’s Point. As Hari reports, kids saw friends killed, some women reported sleeping in their bathtubs for fear of being killed in their beds by stray bullets.

Harris saw a connection:

A study on youth trauma, known as Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACES, was a landmark when it was published in 1998 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente. The study specified 10 categories of stressful or traumatic childhood events, including abuse, parental incarceration, and divorce or parental separation; its research showed that sustained stress caused biochemical changes in the brain and body and drastically increased the risk of developing mental illness and health problems.

“One thing that tipped me off was the number of kids being sent to me by schools — principals, teachers and administrators — with ADHD,” she said, referring to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). “What I found was that many of the kids were experiencing signs of adversity, and there seemed to be a strong association between adversity and the trauma they experienced and school functioning.”

This finding spurred her to review the health records of over 700 of her patients. Her research team found that patients who had experienced severe trauma were 32 times more likely to be diagnosed with learning and behavioral problems than kids who had not.

Trauma in general leads to a surge in stress hormones. When this trauma goes unchecked and is sustained, it can disrupt a child’s brain development, interfering with functions children depend on in school such as memory recall, focus and impulse control.

Stress hormones released while being stuck inside for months with parents because of a deadly global pandemic, perhaps? Symptoms that subside when normal returns?

The typical diagnosis was ADHD and a Ritalin prescription for what Harris saw as a normal adaptive response — hypervigilence, the elevated state of constantly assessing potential threats around you — similar to behavior of people living in a war zone. It’s hard to focus on your sums, Hari observes, when you have to worry about going home to sexual abuse from your mother’s boyfriend.

One size does not fit all. It’s not that all ADHD can be chalked up to childhood trauma, but that some of it can. But rather than address the social stress systemic in how Americans live their lives, society tends to individualize our problems, Hari writes, rather than probe deeper questions about the structures and instabilities we’ve built into our culture. It’s rugged individualism gone bererk.

Hari told Vox in March 2020:

I’m very frustrated that whenever I turn on the news and they’re talking about what people should do about anxiety and depression, you have these mental health professionals who exclusively say things like “meditate” and “turn off the news.”

Now, that’s all fine — I’m doing that stuff. But the single biggest thing that will affect people’s anxiety is not knowing if you’re going to be thrown out of your home next month or how you’re going to feed your children. And I think there’s an element of cruel optimism in telling a country of people living paycheck to paycheck that they should be responding to the anxiety they’re experiencing this moment primarily by meditating and switching off the news. That’s not going to solve the problem. The single most important thing that has to be done to deal with people’s depression and anxiety is to deal with the financial insecurity they’re facing.

[…]

We need to radically expand our idea of what an antidepressant is. Anything that reduces depression and anxiety should be regarded as an antidepressant. For some people, that includes chemical antidepressants, but we need to radically expand that menu. I would argue that a high minimum wage is an antidepressant. A universal basic income (UBI) is an antidepressant. In one of the first UBI experiments ever in Dauphin, Canada, you saw an 8.5 percent decrease in hospitalizations due to mental health issues over three years — you won’t find any drug with that kind of effect.

Professionals examined children with attention issues in Bayview, precribed Ritalin, and moved on without probing deeper. Few, especially those in government, want to question the deeper premises behind the form of capitalism that’s created the world we struggle to live in. Stressed out and sick? Must be a personal problem.

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

Press attention is so scattershot lately that a Democratic message for 2022 (if any) is nowhere to be found. There are the recurrent warnings that inflation will be their doom. There is the emerging counternarrative Democrats have yet to exploit that large corporations are banking record revenue while gouging consumers because they can. With understandable focus on Ukraine and Russia (some of it possibly U.S. propaganda) and amidst the daily trickle of bad legal news for former president Donald Trump, there is little evidence of Democrats selling themselves. Meanwhile, we wait for Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine and for a U.S. prosecutor with enough guts to indict his poodle.

It is not that Republicans are getting good press. They have defined their deviancy down so far it is hardly news when these rebels without a cause beyond themselves go even lower.

On that, at least, The Week‘s Joel Mathis offers a few thoughts. How did seemingly normal(ish), educated Republicans go full Trumpist? What happened to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.),  Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), J.D. Vance, Ohio U.S. Senate candidate, and his rival Josh Mandel?

It’s a reasonable question. Mandel leads the pack of Republicans seeking the party’s nomination for the open U.S. Senate seat from Ohio, and he’s achieved that rank with a series of ever-more-outrageous stances apparently designed to ensure no human being alive can flank him from the right. He’s suggested closing public schools and leaving public education to churches and synagogues. He’s declared that the “separation of church and state is a myth.” And, of course, he’s embraced the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. It’s not been so long since a politician with Mandel’s profile would’ve been consigned to the party’s fringes. Now he’s the man to beat.

Naturally, journalists are trying to figure the guy out. “Josh Mandel could be Ohio’s next senator. So what does he believe?” Politico asked last week in a profile. The New York Times offered a similar take: “The Senate candidate was a rising Republican when he abandoned his moderate roots. Now, those who have watched his transformation wonder if his rhetoric reflects who he really is.” Both stories echoed last November’s conclusions from The Atlantic, which examined the question and labeled Mandel a “genuine phony.”

That applies to the others listed above, especially Kennedy (who Mathis does not mention).

As for Mandel, Mathis agrees he is no mystery, “He’s an ambitious guy who has decided that becoming fully Trumpist is his best route to power. That’s it. End of story. Everything else is just commentary.”

But there is lots of it. Earned media, as campaign vets know. Buying name recognition is costly. Outragousness gets a candidate cost-free coverage.

The simplest answer to why such men of ambition debase themselves before Trump’s base is likely the correct one: they’ll do anything for power.

The Founders knew a little something about ambitious men. While they drafted the Constitution — and as they explained themselves in The Federalist Papers — they obsessed over how to contain those ambitions and make sure the new nation’s institutions could withstand demagoguery and corruption. Thus the whole checks-and-balances thing. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” they wrote. For more than 200 years it worked, more or less. 

These days, not so much. American democracy is fragile at the moment, thanks largely to Trump, an ambitious man who cannot tolerate being counteracted — not by other ambitious people, and certainly not by a majority of voters. Now other Republicans are taking his cue. Ambition is amplifying ambition, not counteracting it. We’re all worse off as a result.

Over the weekend, reporting revealed that some forensic linguists had identified the men behind the mysterious “Q” of the conspiracy movement. Outing them, even an admission by them, is not likely to alter the minds already committed to the conspiracy. Someone noted that that horse has already left the barn. The same may be true of Trumpism. Whether Trump is convicted of crimes or dies in his sleep, his followers have drunk the blood of it and will be with us for some time. As Mathis writes, we’re all worse off as a result.

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

And yes, I know I’m whining about the whining but this is really too much. Big, strong tough guy Donald Trump sounds like a five year old at least 90% of the time. Now he’s whining about “racist” prosecutors like he’s Rosa Parks.

His accounting firm is desperately trying to save its reputation. It is represented by competent lawyers. They aren’t trembling — this is a civil case. They won’t be thrown into solitary and forced to live on bread and water. They got into bed with Donald Trump and that’s a big risk. I hope it was worth the money. I’m sure it wasn’t worth the aggravation.

Here’s a little primer on what’s got him whining today from George Conway:

On Thursday, a judge in New York ordered Trump, along with his daughter Ivanka and his son Donald Jr., to testify within 21 days at civil depositions in the New York attorney general’s investigation of potential fraud at the Trump Organization. The judge’s opinion brutally rejected Trump’s arguments for blocking the depositions: It would have been “blatant dereliction of duty” for the attorney general not to take the testimony, the judge explained, because prosecutors have unearthed “copious evidence of possible financial fraud” in Trump’s business.

That evidence includes a letter that might turn out to be, as a practical matter, the biggest blow Trump has ever suffered, even bigger than his six corporate bankruptcies and two presidential impeachments. A blow dealt not by prosecutors, plaintiffs, politicos or the press — but by his own longtime accountants.0:38 / 3:47SettingsThe Post’s Jonathan O’Connell explains what happens next for the Trump family in the New York Attorney General Letitia James’s civil investigation. (Mahlia Posey/The Washington Post)

As the judge noted, and as revealed in court papers filed on Monday by the attorney general, Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars, sent a letter on Feb. 9 to the Trump Organization terminating its relationship with Trump. The letter was astounding in many respects.

Mazars said that 10 years of Trump’s financial statements, from 2011 to 2020, “should no longer be relied upon,” and that Trump should tell that to the people he gave them to. The accountants explained that they reached this conclusion based upon court filings previously made by the New York attorney general, as well as the accountants’ own investigation and other sources.

And then they quit. Under the “totality of the circumstances,” Mazars wrote, “we have also reached the point such that there is a non-waivable conflict of interest with the Trump Organization. As a result, we are not able to provide any new work product to the Trump Organization.” Oh, and by the way, Donald and Melania’s tax returns are due in four business days — but, hey, we promise “to facilitate a smooth transition to your new tax preparers.” Best regards, Mazars.

Translated from legal-accountingese, the letter was an unmitigated disaster for Trump, far beyond his possibly having to file late returns. By saying the statements “should no longer be relied upon,” the accountants effectively announced, You misled us. By “totality of the circumstances,” they likely meant, The prosecutors investigating you, and the case they’re making, are serious.

By pronouncing “a non-waivable conflict of interest,” they were all but saying, We’re on team A.G. — or we might have to join someday soon. And by saying no “new work product” and quitting, they essentially declared, We don’t trust you — and we’re certainly not going to jail for you.

All this could threaten Trump’s livelihood — his all-important mogulhood — in a way no setback ever has before. Even a guilty verdict in a Senate impeachment trial would have affected only his entitlement to temporary government housing. And when he ran into financial trouble in the 1980s and ’90s, he had legions of lawyers and accountants to help him work things out with the banks and the courts.

Now the man who longhas had trouble finding decent legal representation might find it all but impossible to find new auditors and tax preparers. It’s hard to imagine that any reputable accounting firm will touch his tax returns, let alone fix and bless his financials for a decade or more.

Even if lenders don’t exercise any rights they might have to call in their loans, Trump apparently still needs to refinance hundreds of millions’ worth of them soon. As Trump biographer Timothy L. O’Brien of Bloomberg Opinion puts it, “Good luck refinancing your debt when the accountants” — who have just declared a decade of your financials utterly worthless — have “just walked out the door.”

He does seem disturbed by this chain of events. His next tantrum will be to hold his breath until he turns blue. Let him.

Fiona Hill on the Ukraine situation:

“There’s no Team America for Trump,” Hill recalled. “Not once did I see him do anything to put America first. Not once. Not for a single second.”

It showed in Trump’s praise for the authoritarian leader of Russia, an American adversary that had boosted his finances as a business executive. It showed in his reluctance to embrace America’s mutual defense commitments to European allies, which for decades have constrained Russian behavior; instead, Trump treated NATO as what Hill called a “protection racket.”

Most notoriously, it showed in Trump’s attempt to squeeze Ukraine’s President for manufactured dirt on Biden to help his 2020 election campaign. He held up American military aid as a political lever as Ukraine faced the long-running Russian military threat that now has the entire world on edge.

“All this did was say to Russia that Ukraine was a playground,” Hill said.

At home, Trump softened Republicans’ once-hawkish approach to Russia. Today, the leading Fox News hosts and other conservative voices — “the ultimate stooges,” as Hill calls them — buttress Russian arguments as armed conflict looms.

Yet even friendly foreign counterparts found limitations in Trump’s scattershot style, which for Hill evokes the old saw about “playing chess with a pigeon.” Russia’s bid to upend the post-Cold War security order in Europe, beginning in 2008 with its invasion of Georgia and continuing with its 2014 seizure of Crimea — requires a steadier negotiating partner.

“Ultimately Putin wants some kind of deal,” Hill said. “They think Biden is the kind of president who could actually make a deal. Trump never could.”

So far, Biden has held NATO allies together in rejecting Russia’s core demands, bolstering their forces in Europe and threatening punishing sanctions even though they guarantee domestic economic blowback. Steeped in decades of bipartisan foreign policy consensus, the Democratic President has also drawn support from top Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who have shunned Trump’s embrace of Putin.

That demonstration of resolve has at minimum made Putin stop and think. Biden has warned for weeks that Russia could launch a new invasion of Ukraine at any time. It hasn’t yet.

“They might have thought we were going to crumble, and we didn’t,” said Hill, who became an American citizen twenty years ago. “It might have deterred a full-scale invasion. Now (Putin) is basically recalibrating, recalculating.”

But durable success for Biden and European allies will depend on staying power. Even if Russian tanks don’t roll across the border, Hill envisions an extended “boa constrictor” siege in which Putin applies escalating pressure in hopes of bending Ukraine to Russia’s will.”The real challenge is keeping everyone together for a considerable period,” Hill concluded. “It’s going to go on a long time.”

I have a sneaking suspicion that Fiona Hill might be right and the Russians will just continue to squeeze Ukraine and keep the situation at a simmer for a long time. It could blow up, of course. This is a volatile situation and anything can happen. But if Putin can keep control of events this may be his plan.

Apparently, Marie Bartiromo shared that map with her audience this morning. I don’t know what that’s all about but this is what I had understood to be happening. It’s from Fox News so I would assume they are informed:

Taking a cue from truckers bordering America’s north, a political action committee will partner with truck convoys to protest what it deems as overreaching government COVID-19 restrictions and mandates.

The Great American Patriot Project on Wednesday asked volunteers to contribute, join or support a convoy of truckers slated to travel to Washington D.C. next month. 

Routes for the convoys will start in Cleveland, Columbus, Ohio and Fresno, California and will end on March 6 in Washington. They will be met by a congressional welcome committee to discuss policy changes, organizers said.  

I wonder if they’re actually going to pull this off. Maybe. They have big money backing them and Trump has invited them to take over DC so …

BTW: Why do they always dress in these stupid getups? What is that?

In case you were wondering how the right wing managed to gin up his ridiculous notion that Hillary Clinton spied on Trump while he was in the White House, Eric Wemple of the Washington Post analyzed how it all unfolded.

On Feb. 7, former Trump administration aide Kash Patel aired an interview with his former boss on Epoch Times TV. Former president Donald Trump predicted there would be “a lot coming” from special counsel John Durham and that Durham would “fully expose” Democratic efforts to tie his campaign to Russia.

“All of the things they said about me and Russia — it was them and Russia,” Trump said. “It was them and Russia, they worked with Russia.”

Four days later, in a filing that appeared in electronic federal court records shortly before midnight, Durham made new claims about the case that exploded across right-leaning media during the weekend.

I don’t know about you but I find that to be very, very curious. Sure it might be coincidence. But it also might be that someone on the Durham team is feeding information to Trump. Let’s just say I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true. Anyway:

Coincidentally or not, the filing highlighted something that Patel knew in great detail — a February 2017 meeting between the CIA and former prosecutor Michael Sussmann, who is in Durham’s crosshairs. Patel in 2017 was a Republican Hill aide charged with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. During a 2017 interview with Sussman, Patel indicated he knew about Sussmann’s meeting with the CIA and questioned him closely about it.

Patel did not respond to a request for comment. The deep-in-the-weeds connection between his 2017 inquiries and the Durham probe reflects the unusual web of Durham-focused influencers that helped drive the narrative that the latest Durham filing was a monumental bombshell.

The group includes anonymous Twitter accounts, such as one called “Techno Fog,” conservative journalists, such reporters for the Epoch Times and Red State, and former administration officials such as Patel. Fox News and Newsmax then led the charge on conservative television, often in misleading ways.

Because the Durham filing was made late on Friday, the narrative pushed by this group was largely unchallenged over the weekend. Not until Monday did mainstream journalists begin to look into the filing, adding context and reporting, including responses from Sussmann and other players supposedly implicated. The Sussmann legal team accused Durham of making “prejudicial — and false — allegations that are irrelevant to his Motion and to the charged offense, and are plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage, and taint the jury pool.”

But by then the horse was out of the barn.

Durham’s 13-page document was ostensibly about a conflict-of-interest issue regarding Sussmann’s counsel Latham & Watkins. Durham in September charged Sussmann with lying to the FBI during a meeting in 2016. The indictment alleged that he told the FBI he was not acting on behalf of clients when in fact, the indictment said, he was secretly acting on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s political team and others. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have denied he ever said he had no clients.

But as part of the document, Durham listed “factual background” that included a series of new, but uncharged allegations. (We created a guide to the allegations earlier this week.)

Marcy Wheeler, a national security reporter who has written skeptically about the Durham probe, said she received a copy of the filing through PACER at 11:33 p.m. Eastern time on Friday. Within an hour, an anonymous Twitter account called “Whispers of Dementia” had tweeted about the filing but only focused on the conflict-of-interest issue.

Early Saturday morning, the gaggle of Durham followers on the right sprang into action and shaped the news coverage that followed.

Hans Mahncke, an Epoch Times reporter and host on Epoch TV, at 9:25 a.m. tweeted: “Holy moly! New Durham filing. Rodney Joffe and his buddies at Georgia Tech monitored Trump’s Internet traffic *while* he was President of the United States.”

His tweet included a screenshot from paragraph five of the filing that highlighted in red the phrase “Executive Office of the President of the United States.”

In many ways, this framing formed the core of the conservative news coverage that followed — a claim that Democrats had spied on Trump, even when he was president. But Durham’s filing, which is written in turgid and confusing prose, did not actually say that Trump’s Internet traffic had been monitored during his presidency.

Joffe, who has not been charged, is an Internet entrepreneur who founded the world’s first commercial Internet hosting company. Statements by a Joffe spokesperson and Sussmann’s legal team insisted that the data, which Sussmann provided to the CIA at the 2017 meeting, pertained to the time before Trump became president — when Barack Obama was still president.

Indeed, 20 minutes later, Wheeler sarcastically tweeted over Mahncke’s tweet: “BREAKING: Cybersecurity of US networks covers cybersecurity of the White House and (as Durham admits) had while Obama was there.” But Wheeler’s corrective tweet made little difference to the emerging slant on the right.

Mahncke’s tweet did not use a key word — spied. But soon an influential Twitter account tipped the soup.

At 10:25 a.m., the anonymous Techno Fog Twitter account, with nearly 350,000 followers, tweeted: “Special Counsel John Durman [sic]: DNC/Perkins Coie allies — Rodney Joffe, et al. — ‘exploited a sensitive US govt arrangement’ to gather intel on the ‘Executive Office of the President of the U.S.’ They spied on Trump.” This tweet also had a screenshot of paragraph five. Before noon, this person had tweeted a substack analysis that emphasized, in bold type, “they essentially spied on President Trump.”‘Tis The Spectacle SeasonAdvertisement By Woodford ReserveWith over 200 flavor notes, Woodford Reserve makes every holiday a #SpectacleForTheSenses.See more

The 10:25 a.m. tweet also raised the possibility that the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee was actually a plot engineered by the Clinton campaign via Sussmann and Joffe. Never mind that the Russian hack has been extensively documented by a Senate bipartisan report and 12 Russians were indicted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III for their roles. For some of the Durham obsessives, this theory is the Holy Grail.

At 11:11 a.m., the House Judiciary GOP account tweeted over the Techno Fog tweet: “We knew they spied. But it was worse than we thought.” That tweet a few hours later received this response from former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe: “And now you’re finding out why … ” He linked to an interview he gave in October saying he had provided 1,000 intelligence community documents to Durham that should support additional charges.

Ratcliffe did not specifically say this spin was true, but he seemed to validate it, giving an important boost to the narrative. By 2:45 p.m. Red State, an influential conservative website, had posted an article, highlighting Techno Fog’s tweets, titled“John Durham Drops a ‘Shock and Awe’ Filing About Spying on Donald Trump.”

Then former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows weighed in, also tweeting over Techno Fog’s 10:25 a.m. tweet: “They didn’t just spy on Donald Trump’s campaign. They spied on Donald Trump as sitting President of the United States. It was all even worse than we thought.”

Finally, Patel issued a lengthy statement via Twitter that claimed “the Hillary Clinton campaign and her lawyers masterminded the most intricate and coordinated conspiracy against Trump when he was both a candidate and later President of the United States.” (Durham’s filing actually did not claim the Clinton campaign directed this.) Patel separately told Fox News “the lawyers worked to ‘infiltrate’ Trump Tower and White House servers.”

Fox News then used Patel’s phrase and, in a headline, made it appear that it came from Durham’s filing: “Clinton campaign paid to ‘infiltrate’ Trump Tower, White House servers to link Trump to Russia, Durham finds.”

Interestingly, Patel’s statement made an odd distinction. Rather than refer to the Executive Office of the President, as was mentioned in the filing, he referred to the hacking of “Trump Tower and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.” That suggested he knew something more than what was in the filing.

Indeed, as Wheeler highlighted in one of the articles she wrote on the Durham filing, during a congressional interview with Sussmann on Dec. 18, 2017, Patel raised whether Sussmann had had any meetings besides one with the FBI — “with any other government agencies in relation to the DNC hack, Russian involvement in the 2016 elections, or anything like that, or any members of any government agencies.” After some back and forth, Patel specifically asked about a possible meeting with the CIA.

Sussmann said he had a CIA meeting in February 2017.

“My contact [with CIA] did not relate to my specific representation of the DNC, or the Clinton campaign, or the Democratic Party,” Sussmann said, adding “the contact [with CIA] was about reporting to them information that was reported to me about possible contacts, covert or at least nonpublic, between Russian entities and various entities in the United States associated with the — or potentially associated with the Trump Organization.” He noted that the meeting “was in large part, in response to President Obama’s post-election IC [intelligence community] review of potential Russian involvement in the election” but it ended up being scheduled after Trump took office.

In other words, the “evidence” in the Durham filing should not have been especially newsworthy to Patel. He’s known about the meeting and Sussmann’s explanation for more than four years. Moreover, the five-year statute of limitations for charging a crime in connection with the CIA meeting had expired two days before Durham filed the document.

The drumbeat of spin continued. Ric Grenell, the former acting director of national intelligence, then appeared on Newsmax at 5:25 p.m. and managed to echo both the “infiltrate” and “spy” narratives.

“Durham’s filing makes it clear,” Grenell said, that people paid by the Clinton campaign were “infiltrating the White House, the executive office of the president. They were spying not only on the campaign of Donald Trump but Donald Trump as president.”

Less than two hours later, Trump issued a hyperbolic statement on the filing, saying it “provides indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign.” He said the “scandal” was far bigger than Watergate and “in a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.”

Trump’s statement provided the perfect runway for days of outraged reactions by prominent Republicans, not to mention commentators, following the script originally provided by the mysterious Techno Fog Twitter account.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), just hours after Trump: “Democrats got caught spying, first on candidate Trump and then when he was President IN THE WHITE HOUSE.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), to Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, Feb. 14: “They spied on a presidential campaign. That’s as wrong as it gets. But then we found out from this filing that they actually spied on a sitting president, which is even worse.”

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Feb. 15: “The latest with the Durham report is that the Clinton campaign, the same group that fear-mongered this Russian collusion, actually spied on the president of the United States.”

It no longer mattered whether it was true or even whether Durham’s allegations were disputed. Within the echo chamber, it was believed.

(Note: In a filing late Thursday, Durham distanced himself from the right-wing media furor in response to Sussmann’s demand that the court strike the “factual background” of the original Durham filing that made these allegations: “If third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated, or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the Government’s Motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the Government’s inclusion of this information.” Durham confirmed the data collection in question took place in 2016, not under Trump, and he indicated he might make further filings under seal if, for instance, “the safety of individuals” could be threatened — an apparent reference to Trump’s statement about punishment by death.)

Marcy Wheeler was all over this and I’m glad to see that Wemple gave her credit for her analysis. She knows the public record backwards and forwards on this stuff and she has had Durham’s number from the get go.

I do not believe he didn’t know what he was doing. He almost certainly did, if only as a protective move to keep his loooong probe going. It makes it much harder for the AG to shut him down if the right wing is obsessing over it. Just ask Ken Starr and Robert Ray, both of whom are still out there shilling for wingnuttia.

The ultimate self-own:

On Monday, Trump’s lawyers filed documents alleging that he “denies knowledge”—and doesn’t even know enough “to form a belief”—about the way he allegedly slapped a 30-percent brand premium on some business properties in 2014.

But the very next day, Trump said the complete opposite when he issued a lengthy statement to counter news that his long-time outside accounting firm, Mazars USA, had suddenly ditched him. He took the opportunity to show off his supposed previous net worth of $5.7 billion in 2014—and, more importantly, noted that it didn’t include the typical boost from the “enthusiasm” of the Trump brand.

On Wednesday, prosecutors contended in a letter that Trump can no longer play clueless; he had just revealed that he knows “exactly what OAG is investigating.”

“His answer is more than merely legally deficient: it plainly contradicts his public statements,” they wrote.

That self-own was compounded on Thursday, when a state judge ordered him to turn over evidence about shady real estate values in a case about the Trump Organization’s alleged bank and tax fraud. Trump’s incessant need to boast ended up revealing he had more evidence to turn over.

He said too much—at just the wrong time.

“We’re talking about a guy who’s so in the habit of shooting his mouth off. I think this is quite damaging, and also unusual. Usually people refer everything to their attorney,” said Daniel L. Feldman, a former attorney at the AG’s office who now teaches at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

And now that New York State Judge Arthur F. Engoron issued an order on Thursday compelling Trump to turn over documents, the New York AG’s lawyers can specifically ask for the information they now know exists.

“What they have is a clear path to do is to say, ‘OK, give us the docs that support the statement you just made since you obviously were basing this on something,” Feldman told The Daily Beast.

Ironically, the statement was apparently prepared with the help of Trump’s lawyers which is shocking. He must have used that inexperienced lawyer from Bedminster who argued the case like Joe Pesci in “My Cousin Vinnie” for him the other day:

After news broke on Monday that Mazars dropped him, the former president and his staff were conspicuously silent on the topic. Trump, who usually spouts off as soon as he can, did not release a statement until a full day later—on Tuesday evening—when his spokespeople finally blasted out a typically baffling missive.

According to two people familiar with the matter, lawyers and financial data were consulted and reviewed during a protracted drafting process, with the former president’s staff taking Trump’s dictated message and adorning it with a shred of coherence.

“They took their time on this one. You need to be careful and cautious and thorough. You do not want to give your enemies anything to use against you or your client, and you want to have a clear… strong message,” one of the sources said…

“It seems somebody dropped the ball, though, doesn’t it?” the person familiar with the situation asked, rhetorically.

Yeah. I do wonder if Trump is going to ever suffer any consequences, however. It all seems so impossible. Still, if it hurts his dishonest business it’s all to the good.