Trump Apocalypse Hysteria Is Spiraling Into Madness

Do you think they really believe this stuff?

Biden's Parole Abuse Driving the Border Crisis

With one weird trick, a million people have been allowed into the country.

Biden at 500 Days

Joe Biden at about 500 days in office is testing the limits of those who claimed 501 days ago that “anybody” would be better than Donald Trump. With the threat of nuclear war now well alive, Biden presides over the highest gas prices, the worst inflation, and the saddest stock market in generations. It is not morning in America anymore. It’s late on Sunday afternoon, and it’s raining.

Start with his record-breaking vacation time. It became a meme during the Trump years to criticize him for weekends at Mar-a-Lago, and to point out how much the Secret Service paid him for their accommodations. Yet as he marks Day 500, Biden is preparing for another weekend scram, and is on track to take more vacation than any of his predecessors. Since taking office, Biden has spent 191 days away from the White House vacationing in either of his two Delaware properties, at Camp David, or on Nantucket. Trump spent 381 days away from the White House over four years.

And as for those Secret Service room bills, the Service pays them for every president. Members of the Service are prohibited from accepting “gifts,” even the free accommodations necessary to protect the president. At Biden’s home in Delaware he charged the Secret Service $2,200 a month in rent for a cottage on his property when he was vice president. He made $66,000 in total off of the Service in 2013, and while contemporary figures are not available, they are certainly tallying up as they did under Trump and the others. Hillary bought a second house in upstate New York just for the Secret Service, anticipating her victory in 2016.

But what of the time Joe Biden has spent actually in the White House? How have the 500 days gone so far? Biden succeeded primarily in engineering a new form of war in Ukraine—not quite cold and not quite hot. American special forces may soon be on the ground in Kiev and American ships in the Black Sea. The Ukrainians have boasted how American intelligence and targeting information have been used to kill Russian ships, tanks, and generals. With no regard for what leakage into the global black-arms market might mean, Biden is sending billions of top-notch weapons into the nation with the avowed aim of bleeding out Russia. When something like this was tried in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the U.S. had the common courtesy to do it through the CIA and keep at least some of it secret. No more.

Vladimir Putin in return has reminded the world several times that he has nuclear weapons he is not all that opposed to using. Joe Biden has succeeded where presidents since 1989 have failed: He sends Americans to bed at night worrying about nuclear holocaust. That is his greatest foreign-policy accomplishment absent the disastrous evacuation from Afghanistan and a soon-to-really-happen trip to forgive the Saudis for their sins and become the first president since the 1970s to overtly beg for more oil.

For the record, Trump was the only president in some 20 years who did not start a new war during his term and the only one in that same period who made an effort to seek peace with North Korea, a country Joe Biden continues to ignore as official policy. When asked in Seoul if he had a message for Kim Jong Un, Biden said, “Hello. Period.”

In other Leader of the Free World accomplishments, Biden has been snubbed by Mexico, which refused to attend the Summit of the Americas because Biden would not also invite Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, all Cold War hissy-fits Joe is keeping alive for a new millennium. “There cannot be a summit if all countries are not invited,” Mexico’s president said at a press conference. “Or there can be one but that is to continue with all politics of interventionism.” It really is 1980 again.

Additional leadership has been shown in Europe, where Germany and France agreed to U.S. demands to stop buying Russian energy—but just not for a couple more months, okay? They have stopped buying energy delivered by ship as a face-saving gesture, just as they keep lapping up the massive pipeline-delivered materials. But Biden did travel twice to Europe and declared “America is back,” so there’s that.

As for domestic achievements, everyone in America knows about Joe’s gas pains. Biden apparently sees no connection between his restrictions on domestic production and sanctions against Russian energy, cutting supply at a time when demand is rising, and inflationary prices. The good news is, we imposed sanctions on Russia—well, no, it’s not good news; Russia is still fighting away in Ukraine, which means the sanctions have failed in their primary function. Biden will give them more time, apparently, as the U.S. is not seeking negotiations to otherwise curtail or end the fight.

Of course, Joe did finally pass a $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending bill, which in no way could have contributed to inflation by dumping money into an economy still chasing goods scarce from supply-chain issues. He also signed that $1.9 trillion Covid-relief bill which also could not have contributed to inflation by dumping money into an economy still chasing goods scarce from supply-chain issues. At least wages are up, which pours more money into an already inflationary economy.

The media actually listed Joe’s Biggest Achievements for us in case they were hard to pick, including appointing a boatload of judges, 80 percent of whom are women and 53 percent are people of color (“judges that reflect our nation”).

Biden has also strategically secured America by overturning the Trump ban on transgender people serving in the military.

In fact, the White House brags it has the first majority non-white Cabinet in history, with the most women of any Cabinet, including the first woman Treasury Secretary, the first LGBTQ and Native American Cabinet officials, and the first woman Director of National Intelligence.

But it is always best to go to the source, and the White House has kept its own list of “record firsts” in Joe’s presidency. You can read them yourself, but you’ll run into the same problem everyone else does: it is all boasting with no links, sources, or details attached. So we hear, for instance, that Joe was the “most significant by economic impact of any first-year president,” but nothing more. Um, okay.

A lot of the rest of the stuff—e.g., unemployment and child poverty—really did get better by the numbers, but there is not a word about how anything Joe did caused those things to improve. It is kind of like taking credit for a comet that passed overhead on your watch, especially given how much “not our fault” garbage this administration tosses around when someone brings up a topic like inflation.

As for issues important to Democrats like gun control, abortion, and climate change, Biden rates a zero. The EPA continues to recommend Flint, Michigan, residents use filters in their homes to remove lead from public water. Joe has driven home the idea that unless a president has a super-majority in both houses and the Supreme Court, you better not expect much from him. Indeed, Biden can’t even wrangle his own party, with two key Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, stymieing much of his legislative agenda.

On the other side of the aisle, Biden predicted that Republicans would have an “epiphany” after Trump left office, but that has not yet materialized. The Democratic midterm loss scheduled for November 2022 will not help. And we haven’t even talked about Biden’s dead-man-walking lifestyle and walk-it-back gaffes.

So it has only been 500 days. There’s plenty of time still left.

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

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January 6 Was Not a Coup

Was there a coup attempt on January 6? For the answer to be “yes,” there had to have been a realistic path by which some action on that day could have resulted in Donald Trump remaining president of the United States.

Watching the show trial on television, you could believe it might have been possible. The special committee’s TV show is dedicated to convincing a lay audience the Trump administration came “that close” to tossing away our democracy, with some mechanism almost clicking into place that would have left Trump in power.

It would be easier to take the Democrats seriously if they would coolly outline just how Trump could have stayed in office without the military, who were clearly not taking a partisan stance on January 6. Absent that, you had political theater and a riot, not a coup attempt. Think back to the 1960s and ask yourself if occupying the administration building on campus would have stopped the Vietnam War in its tracks. This is politically much ado about not much, except Democratic Party 2024 electioneering.

To stage a coup, you need tanks on the White House lawn. Instead, America transitioned peacefully from one administration to another. That hard reality is wholly missing from the Democrats’ January 6 committee hearings and all the frou-frou that accompanies them.

Could Trump have used the Capitol riot to declare martial law and stay in power? No. The president cannot use the military domestically in a way Congress does not agree with. The “web of laws” Congress enacted to govern the domestic activities of the armed forces—including the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of federal troops to execute the law without express congressional authorization—would stop Trump cold.

According to well-settled principles of constitutional practice, the president cannot act in a way Congress has forbidden unless the Constitution gives the president “conclusive and preclusive” power over the issue in dispute. Martial law has been declared nine times since World War II, five of which were to counter resistance to desegregation in the South. Although an uneasy climate of mutual aid has always existed between the military and civilian law enforcement, Department of Defense personnel are limited in what they can do to enforce civil law. They can’t extend a presidential term. That business of tanks on the White House lawn? Someone has already thought it through.

The Insurrection Act of 1807 is the one statutory exception to the Posse Comitatus Act that does allow the president to deploy the military domestically, but, by precedent, the armed forces can only be used to suppress armed insurrections or to execute the laws when local or state authorities are unable or unwilling to do so. The military’s role under this law is limited, and the existence of the Insurrection Act in no way puts the military “in charge” and does not suspend the normal functions and authorities of Congress, state legislatures, or the courts.

More importantly, troops in the streets have nothing to do with votes that are already in ballot boxes. Same for seizing voting machines or ballots, which were already counted by January 6.

Anything Trump might have tried to do on January 6 would have required the military to play along, which there is no evidence the military did. Just the opposite, in fact. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, took a number of steps to ensure any dramatic orders out of the White House would be confirmed, checked, and likely delayed, perhaps indefinitely. While some of Milley’s actions raise constitutional issues of their own, particularly his interference with the nuclear chain of command, clearly Milley was in no way priming his forces to participate in any sort of executive coup.

It is critical to point out how deeply the idea of civilian control of the military, and the separation of powers, is drummed into America’s officer corps. It’s like a religion. Unlike many countries in the developing world, America has a professional corps well-removed from politics, which sits atop an organization built from the ground up to respond to legal, civilian orders. If Trump had ordered the 82nd Airborne into the streets, their officers would have almost certainly said no.

With martial options well off the board, a coup would have had to rely on some sort of legalistic maneuver to exploit America’s complex electoral system. The biggest issue there is the 20th Amendment, which states unambiguously that a president’s term ends after four years. If Trump had somehow succeeded in preventing Joe Biden from being inaugurated, he still would have ceased to be president at noon on January 20, and Nancy Pelosi, as Speaker of the House, would have become president. There was no mechanism to stop that succession, ironic as it would have been.

The most quoted Trump plan ran something like this: “Somehow,” even though the Electoral College had met on December 14 and decided Biden was to be president, Republican-friendly legislatures in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would “ignore” the popular vote in their states and appoint their own pro-Trump electors. The law (the 19th-century Electoral Count Act) does allow legislatures to do this in the never-seen, highly unlikely event that a state fails to make a choice by the day the Electoral College meets, which, in this case, had passed before January 6.

Never mind the details; the idea, for Trump, was to introduce enough chaos into the system to force everyone in the United States to believe the only solution was to force the election, two months after voting, into Congress, where Vice President Pence himself would break the tie after every Republican agreed to play along with the scheme and choose Trump for another term.

In addition to every other problem with that scenario, Pence had no intention of doing any such thing. Trump maintained “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors,” when in fact, Pence’s January 6 role was entirely ceremonial, presiding as electoral votes, conveyed by the states, were counted and certified, and then announcing the outcome.

The location of the riots did not matter. Although the riots slightly delayed the final announcement of the results, which still occurred at the Capitol, there is nothing in the Constitution that requires the receipt and certification to take place in the Capitol. Pence could have met with Congress at a truck stop outside Philadelphia and wrapped up business there. Pence, in a 2022 speech, said “I had no right to overturn the election. Frankly, there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”

To imagine a dystopian fiction where one state legislature blows past the vote to choose pro-Trump electors is difficult. To imagine several doing so simultaneously to gin up enough Trump electors, and then to imagine the Electoral College changing its mind, is impossible.

There was no indication Republicans in these important states considered going along with this anyway. Pennsylvania’s top state GOP official indicated his party would follow the law and award electors to the winner of the popular vote. He stated the state legislature “does not have and will not have a hand in choosing the state’s presidential electors or in deciding the outcome of the presidential election.” Besides, the borderline states all had Democratic governors who would have refused to approve after-the-fact Trump electors.

Such goofy schemes were also in the wind in 2016, when both Trump and many progressives looked to little-known electoral law for some sort of failsafe. They failed, too. Despite the many claims about how close we came to democracy failing, in reality, our complex system proved at least twice in recent years to be made of stiffer stuff.

What is missing most of all from the January 6 Democratic telethon is any acknowledgment that the system worked. The Constitution held. Officials from Vice President Pence on down did their jobs.

All the fear mongering, all the what-ifs Democrats now hope will distract Americans from their party’s failures of governance—war, inflation, gas prices, gun violence—miss the most important point of all. There was no attempted coup. That the committee does not plan to send a referral to the Justice Department is proof enough.

Democrats can’t win in 2024 on what they have to offer. With all the efforts to prosecute Donald Trump for something (including January 6) having failed, their sole strategy is to make people believe Trump tried to overturn the last election, and, upon failing to do so, chose t0 re-embrace the electoral process. This is little more than Trump’s third impeachment, televised.

If you are about preserving the rule of law, judgment for Trump’s actions must not come from a kangaroo court. The real message echoing from January 6? The system works. We were never even close to losing our democracy.

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

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Wish List of a Swing Voter

Being raised in 1970s Ohio meant I was raised Democrat. In my northern industrial area, Republicans were old people, or those three good-natured guys from the Jaycees who always joked about “next year” at the get-out-the-vote rallies.

It’s true. I used to write for the Nation, even a couple of articles for the New York Times. I didn’t change much, but my party did, and one day a few years ago I woke up being yelled at by women in pink hats clamoring that I was a racist—if not an outright Nazi—for supporting the free expression they called “hate speech.”

I didn’t leave the Democratic Party as much as I was abandoned by it. With the midterm crushing of the party coming this autumn, as sure as the good guy wins in professional wrestling (big in Ohio), I can’t say I’m ready to go back. But if Democrats want to lure people like me home, here are some things they will need to do.

Dems, third-trimester abortions, really? And just because I personally support limited abortion rights, you say I also have to buy into a whole full-meal deal of unrelated-to-everyone-but-you LGBETC.? Didn’t you get the memo? Trying to bundle all these things with the Equal Rights Amendment and various other woke measures cost you support, not earned you it. 

Jettison the Blue-Anon rhetoric. I barely made it through four years under Trump, hearing every day that the sky was falling, the walls were closing in, and that damn clock would not stop tick-tocking. It turns out every tweet by Trump was not the end of democracy, fall of the Republic, or wrap party for the rule of law.

When the Supreme Court moves against your wishes, I don’t need to wake up to a headline like “The Supreme Court Is a Tool of Tyrants” or worse, “Time for Canada to Offer Gender Asylum to American Women.” Same for when the Electoral College or the Senate does not bounce your way. These institutions were crafted by the Founders to achieve a balance of power, and they do it fairly well.

Accept that “balance” means occasionally things will go the other way. The same court that rewrote society implementing Roe can do it again taking down Roe. So no more op-eds demanding a packed Court, or a change to equal representation in the Senate, or the end of the Electoral College, or more weight on the popular vote, or any of that. Shut down MSDNC and its hemorrhage of fake news. We’re tired of the media taping the chosen candidate’s latest statement on the national refrigerator door.

The Founders still matter as examples, despite their flaws. Many were only in their 20s as they wrote the code running beneath the United States, kids, who for the first time in history created a nation based on a synthesis of ideas. They risked “Our Lives, Our Fortunes And Our Sacred Honor” to do that, a dandy example for pols today who are unwilling to stand up and offer an opinion without polling advice.

They weren’t perfect, but they are deserving of our respect and admiration. Find something more important to fritter away political capital on. What we see in modern “wokeness” is the difference between a small mind and a great mind, between people who ignore their own flaws to pick at others’ out of time and context. Men like Jefferson were prime movers, men who set in place the thing that led to the next thing. That is worthy of a statue or two.

Parties should be big tents, and that does not mean we all have to give up our seats for the meme-of-the-day. Democrats pandering to one racial group (black lives do not matter more than any other lives, such as my own), or to gay folks—until they got boring and the party switched to the All Trans Network—is tiring.

Stop elevating shallow clowns like AOC and her Squad. They are hypocrites, demanding we not judge by color or gender while shoving white men to the back of the bus. Look back to the 1950s and ’60s Civil Rights movements, which stressed the inclusiveness of human dignity, not special treatment for every high-school kid wanting to annoy his parents by wearing dresses junior year.

Many of us currently outside your tent care as much about the First Amendment as any of the above-listed issues. Speech is the fundamental right, the base that supports and drives forward all the others. That beautiful haiku of the First Amendment certainly protects what you call “hate speech,” an idea that, if it started with good intentions, has gone on to suck dirt, and conveniently meaning anything that offends anyone, anytime.

The Supreme Court has found, over and again, that that nasty stuff is protected by the First Amendment. Let them sing, the rude and radical, and get back to fighting bad speech with better speech. Leave Elon alone. Twitter before him sold censorship, the promise to pretty-little-flower people that they would never encounter challenging ideas in their social-media stream, but that is anathema to a democracy that must thrive on the marketplace of ideas.

No more wars. Nobody, after two decades of failures and lies and body bags in the Middle East, voted for Joe Biden to restart the Cold War. The United States, I thought, had learned some sort of lesson in the pathetic finale in Kabul, until Old Joe reminded us it was 1980 again, by his watch. How in the hell did I end up worrying about nuclear war again? Trump (say what you will, I’ll wait) did not restart the Cold War. He did not go to war as you said he would with China, Venezuela, or Iran. He even tried to make peace with North Korea. I want more of that, not this.

Please, Dems, if you want anyone back, really retire Hillary. She represents little beyond corruption, with all those “contributions” to the Clinton Foundation—which dried up alongside her political chances, funny thing—and a near-endless appetite for power.

Spare us “but the other party…” Voters understand nobody is perfect, as is no party. Give it all some thought as you’re licking your wounds over the loss of Roe, and the very likely thumping in the midterms. You have two years to find a real candidate and avoid the easy outs of clones like Harris, Beto, or Buttigieg. It’s a hint that someone does not have what it takes if they’re available to run for the White House because they lost locally and were given a patronage job.

In 2016, Democrats asked for change, and instead watched the party drive Bernie out to the marshes. In 2020, we got the sad skeleton of Joe Biden. No more rigged primaries. No more Hillaries and “debates” with some shmuck playing the Washington Generals. Learn the lesson before 2024 if you would like people like me to be part of the party’s future. Otherwise, we’re going to vote Trump.

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

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The Big Apple’s Rotten Core

I went home to visit New York with that same curiosity that makes you slow down when passing a wreck on the highway. I had read of a city gone feral, zombie homeless armies in Midtown, the deserted office blocks, and crime stepping in for Darwin to take care of what was left. It was morbid, harsh, and cynical curiosity.

The overall feeling one gets in New York is that it is used up, a failed place that somehow is still around, like an abandoned industrial park. The irony; it was Wall Street dealers who helped turn the once-prosperous Midwest into the Rust Belt. Now the brokers are gone, too. 

Just as in Weirton or Gary you drive past empty mills, so you do in Wall Street. There are no trading houses; the last international, Deutsche Bank, left and is leasing space Uptown. I found myself largely alone on the old streets off Wall, the ones that went all the way back, Beaver, Pine, and Stone. Most of the old Gilded-era banks are being converted into condos for people who aren’t here yet and may never come. Recent Census numbers show a 300,000-person drop through last summer. Even now, more people are moving out than in.

At the same New York time-space that you see empty condos you see a fair number of homeless in the shadows. The city commandeered empty hotels in the area for them during the worst of the Covid winters.

And then there is the Stock Exchange, left out of the place it created. The building is still there, but near-zero trades occur in it. Most everything is remote now, a trend started after 9/11 and completed by Covid. On my next visit it wouldn’t surprise me to see the space converted into a Target.

Like some elaborate joke about canaries in the coal mine, the condition of New York’s subways points to the direction the rest of the city is headed. With parts of the system still in use that were built 118 years ago, the thing is a testament to just how far the least amount of maintenance will go. You expect it to be too cold in winter, too hot in summer, that rare mix of urine and street-gravy smell, and layers of filth that may be what is actually holding it all together.

But the purpose of the subway has changed. With fewer people working out of offices, and more of those that do driving private cars in the city (parking is a new thing to complain about, as car theft is up double-digit percent from pre-Covid) the subway is no longer common ground for New Yorkers.

Vast numbers of visibly mentally ill people inhabit the subway. It is their home, their kitchen, and their toilet. Is that liquid on the floor Gatorade, or…? Did it leak from the guy nearby, a silent poet of this apocalypse, or will it be what consumes him? The almost obscene level of noise from the tired machinery begs you to contemplate these things as a distraction.

The person in Union Square Station pushing a shopping cart and yelling racial slurs may not physically hurt anybody, but he is a symbol of a city that just gave up caring while lying to itself about being compassionate. There is no compassion in allowing thousands of sick people to live like rats inside public infrastructure.

The subway is an angry place; assaults are up 50 percent over last year. And last year, there were more assaults than at any time in the last 25 years, including a Covid-era trend of randomly pushing people into the path of an incoming train just to watch them die. I didn’t see that, but I saw its secondary effects: passengers bunched up like herbivores on the African savanna with their backs against a wall for protection. Fewer people looking at their phones so as to stay more alert. Unlike in any other city in the world, the five subway shootings during my stay were not remarkable, which itself is remarkable.

If you use the subway, you acknowledge that you must share it with the predators, under their rules. Like everywhere in this city, navigating around the mentally ill, the homeless, and the criminal element is just another part of life. People treat each other as threats, and just accept that. To an outsider, it seems a helluva way to live.

A couple of those “only-in-New York places” are holding on, but their ambience is grim, not scrappy. Passing the United Nations compound, you’re left with the memory that in the 1950s, this was once the most powerful city on the globe. Where’s the value now?

My favorite pizzeria, the original Patsy’s at First and 117th in Harlem, is still open and still one of the oldest, the last, and the best—somehow still staffed by old Italian men in an otherwise all-black neighborhood. Nearby Rao’s, an old-school red-sauce joint, is in much the same state, both places in some sort of time-vortex, or the DNA from which someone will someday genetically re-engineer New York for a future museum.

The NYPD has reoccupied Times Square military-style (I’m sure many of the cops are Iraq and Afghan vets). The problem is, Times Square shares a border with the rest of New York, and a block or two away, places like the Port Authority bus terminal are decaying, returning to their primordial state. There are no obvious hookers there like there were in the 1970s, but the girls’ space in the ecosystem is taken by the homeless and those who provide them services, usually quick, sharp black kids selling what the cops told me was fentanyl, N.Y.’s current favorite opioid.

Every measure of Covid was made worse by bad decision-making. Lockdowns decimated whole industries while still leaving New York one of America’s “red zones.” Defanging the police, coupled with no-bail policies, drove the mark of crime deeper into the fabric of neighborhoods. The tax base crumbled. Pre-Covid, the vacating top 1 percent in NYC paid nearly 50 percent of all personal income taxes. Property taxes add in more than a billion dollars a year in revenue, about half of that once generated by office space. Who’ll pay for any comeback? Disney? The Chinese? It won’t be the Russians this time.

Left in New York is the largest homeless population of any American metropolis, including 114,000 children. The number of people living below the poverty line is larger than the population of Philadelphia, and would be the country’s seventh-largest city. More than 400,000 reside in public housing. Another 235,000 take rent assistance. They live in the third world. You look at it and you cannot believe this is the same country in which you live. 

The relief only comes on an individual basis. Doormen keep the riff-raff out (you-betcha residents ponied up for the new contract to avert a strike), giving them money for Uber instead of the subway, money for exclusive clubs and restaurants, money for private security. After all, it is your building’s thugs against theirs.

Yes, I hear your sigh. Yes, I get it. Yes, every generation proclaims New York is dead or dying. Yes, it was better under Giuliani, or Bloomberg, or Bourdain. And sure, some of what you read today is exaggerated, composed by writers unfamiliar with “New York Normal,” the things we—they—take sadly for granted in a city that perpetually has seen better days.

Why do we live this way? While NYC is worse, “nice” places like Denver and Honolulu suffer from the same ailments, albeit in scaled-down form. Why do we accept that homeless drug users live on our subways, which should serve as the public transport our taxes paid for and our society needs? “Go Green” we’re told, but doing so means risking your life. It isn’t this way in Europe and it isn’t this way in Asia.

Like a last visit to a Covid patient’s bedside, I needed to see it. New York was a good place to live for a while, a kind of an adventure, but its time is over. I said goodbye like an old friend. I hadn’t felt like this in a departing plane since I left Baghdad.

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

 

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Hillary Was In on Russiagate

Hillary Clinton lied about Russiagate. Hillary paid experts to create two data sets, one purportedly showing Russian cellphones accessing Trump Wi-Fi networks, and another allegedly showing a Trump computer pinging an Alfa Bank server in Russia. We’ve seen the lipstick on the collar before, but how do we know this time she was in on it all?

Because former Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias, on May 18, 2022, during the trial of his former partner, Michael Sussmann, swore to it under oath. Special Counsel John Durham brought Sussmann to trial for allegedly lying to the FBI and committing perjury. Sussmann claimed he was not working for a client when he was, in fact, surreptitiously representing the Clinton campaign. Small world: Sussmann previously represented the DNC in litigation surrounding the server break-in.

Elias also admitted to briefing Clinton campaign officials, including Clinton herself, campaign chair John Podesta, spokesperson Jennifer Palmieri, and policy director Jake Sullivan, now Joe Biden’s national-security adviser. Elias also personally briefed campaign manager Robby Mook.

In a bombshell moment in the Sussmann trial, Mook testified that Hillary Clinton signed off on the plan to push out the information about the link between Trump and Alfa Bank despite concerns that the connection was dubious at best. Mook’s testimony is the first confirmation that Clinton was directly involved in the decision to feed the Trump-Alfa story. It explains some of her later actions.

Here’s the new timeline of events, revealing the “why” behind the timing of Russiagate:

On July 5, 2016, FBI Director James Comey issued a statement clearing Hillary Clinton of any wrong doing in connection with her private email server. That removed what was thought to be her last major hurdle to nomination.

Then, Wikileaks released information taken from the DNC servers which showed, inter alia, the Clinton campaign’s efforts to disparage Bernie Sanders. The leaks broke during the Democratic Convention (July 25 to 28) and threatened to split the party. It was crisis time for Democrats.

Concurrent with the Wikileaks disclosure and the sense of panic inside the campaign at the 2016 Democratic National Convention came Clinton’s sign-off to begin the Russiagate dirty tricks campaign (as Mook testified to, Smoking Gun One). That is the specific “why” behind the timing of the Russiagate narrative.

On July 28, 2016, CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s plan to tie candidate Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public (Smoking Gun Two). Why Brennan, from CIA, was briefing Obama on internal Democratic Party strategy is unclear. However, a highly redacted document states, “We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED]. Cite alleged approved by Hillary Clinton on July 26 a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”

The FBI then opened its omnibus investigation into all things Trump-Russia, Crossfire Hurricane, on July 31, 2016, a Sunday, coincidentally only days after Clinton initially approved the dirty-tricks campaign and just as the Democratic convention ended with Clinton’s nomination.

Crossfire Hurricane was opened on the ostensible basis of information about Trump campaign member George Papadopoulos relayed to investigators by an Australian diplomat. Many believe the timing of the investigation suggests it was actually based the Clinton campaign’s disclosures of the Steele dossier to the FBI, not diplomatic gossip about Papadopoulos. Steele himself ran the dossier data to the FBI and media the same way Sussmann ran the Alfa Bank data to the FBI and media, claiming no link to the Clinton campaign.

Brennan may have been personally tipped off by Jake Sullivan, now Joe Biden’s national-security advisor and the most likely “foreign-policy advisor” inside the Clinton campaign to have run the Russiagate caper. As CIA Director, Brennan briefed Obama on Clinton’s July 26 sign-off on the dirty-tricks campaign. His own agency would not come to the same conclusions until September 2016, when it forwarded to the FBI an investigative referral about Hillary Clinton. If not for a tip-off, then how did Brennan, always a public Hillary supporter, know before his agency did?

Aiming for an October surprise (a game-changing political event breaking in late October, early enough to influence the election but too late for the opposition to effectively rebut), Sussmann then met with FBI attorney James Baker (now working at Twitter) to lay out the Alfa Bank and smartphone story on September 18, 2016.

The FBI (via fraud) on October 21 obtained the first FISA warrant against a Trump team member. And following a press release by Jake Sullivan, Hillary tweeted on October 31, 2016, that Trump had a secret server communicating with Russia (Smoking Gun Three). She knew her campaign paid to create that information and push it into the public eye via Sussmann and a woman named Laura Seago.

Seago was an analyst at Fusion GPS, the organization that commissioned the infamous Steele dossier on behalf of Clinton. Seago testified at the Sussmann trial that she and others went to journalist Franklin Foer’s house to pitch the story, telling him it had been vetted by “highly credible computer scientists” who “seemed to think these allegations were credible.” Foer ran the story on October 31, 2016, timed with Sullivan’s statement and Hillary’s tweet suggesting the server connecting Trump with Alfa Bank was used as a clandestine-communications tool. The story stated “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.”

Clearer? Comey cleared Clinton of legal trouble over her emails. The last barrier to nomination was thought to have been breached. Then WikiLeaks disclosures threatened to derail the convention. Something else was needed. Hillary signed off on the Russiagate dirty-tricks campaign per Mook and Brennan. Just days later, the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane based on either flimsy foreign gossip or the Clinton paid-for Steele dossier. Hillary and Sullivan timed their disclosures with the media making near-identical claims.

So does all this matter? Yes. “The trial is the vehicle Durham is using to help bring out the truth, to tell a story of a political campaign that in two instances pursued information that was totally fabricated… to mislead the American voter,” said Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former assistant director for intelligence. The Sussmann trial shows that if nothing else, Hillary Clinton herself was personally the start and the end of Russiagate’s false story. As dirty tricks go, this was a helluva tale to sell to a gullible public and a credulous media.

But so what? Politicians approve dirt being spread on their opponents all the time. The short answer? They don’t peddle outright, fabricated lies, which constitutes defamation. And Jake Sullivan, Biden’s active national-security advisor, played a still-hidden role in all of it.

And what kind of president would Hillary have made if she was willing to lie like this to get elected? She is all appetite, still active in her party, and still a dangerous animal. The spiteful Clinton still maintains that Trump has ties to Russia and, through surrogates, kept Russiagate alive to defang the Trump administration even after she lost the election.

The real insurrection—the fact that Russiagate did not end with Trump’s victory—is chilling. Comey and Brennan repurposed the false information from a campaign smear and turned it into bait, which they dangled in front of Robert Mueller for three years in hopes he would stumble on to something illegal once he exercised his powers as special prosecutor. This was a coup attempt against a sitting president.

Meanwhile, Twitter has still not removed the Clinton and Sullivan Russiagate tweets from 2016 nor marked them as “disinformation.” That silence allows the lie a second life, which is important, because Trump is almost certainly going to run for president again, and polls show almost half of Americans still think he colluded with Russia.

It is easy enough to still say “so what?” Most people who did not support Hillary Clinton long ago concluded that she is a liar and untrustworthy. Her supporters know she’ll never run for public office again, hence the sense of anti-climax.

What matters in the end is less the details of Hillary’s lie than that as someone close to being elected as her would lie about such a thing, treason, claiming her opponent was working for Russia against the interests of the United States to which he would soon swear an oath. This week’s revelations and the way they fill in “motive” in the timeline are bombshells, if you blow the smoke away.

No doubt that, in many minds, Clinton’s manipulations are measured alongside Trump’s transgressions, “whataboutism.” Those who think that way may have missed the day in kindergarten when everyone else was taught how two wrongs don’t make a right. Trump did not win to absolve Hillary of her sins.

And those who worry about the 2024 election being stolen over simple vote miscounts are thinking way too small. If you want to really worry, think like a Clinton.

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

 

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