Bill Kristol's Money-Grifting Gollum Jonathan V. Last: You Know Who's Really Implicated by The Arrest of Crossfire Hurricane FBI Agent Charles McGonical for Taking Money from a Russian Oligarch?
Donald Trump, That's Who.

Speaking of liberals who lie because their liberal audience pays them to lie: The Dispatch and The Bulwark have made no mention of the exposé about the Hamilton68 lies they promoted. Even Twitter realized that all Hamilton 68 was doing was taking typical Trump/conservative leaning chatter and claiming that "RUSSIAN AGENTS" are behind it all, or at least amplifying it.

Matt Taibbi posted proof that the "RUSSIAN ACCOUNTS" Hamilton 68 claimed proved "RUSSIAN MANIPULATION" are almost all just American, British, and Canadian critics of The Regime.

I expected that.

What I was not expecting was effeminate Regime courtier Jonathan Last to claim that the arrest of the FBI agents who initiated Crossfire Hurricane for taking Russian money was not a black eye for his team of Russiagate Conspiracy Peddlers, but in fact very bad news for Donald Trump, as Charles McGonigal's arrest proves just how deep the Russiagate Conspiracy goes.

How, you might wonder?

Simple: Jonathan V. Last strongly insinuates -- these cowards won't commit themselves to Russiagate Conspiracy Theories because they're tired of having their past statements thrown in their faces, so now they just insinuate so they can say, "I never said that" -- that Charles McGonigal was a RUSSIAN AGENT, sure, but he was a RUSSIAN AGENT paid off to deliberately tank the Trump Russiagate investigation.

That's what he's insinuating. Russiagate was all true and none of us have anything to apologize for for promoting Hillary Clinton Conspiracy Theories for six years; and we'd have the poof of that, except that Oleg Deripaska, who must be some kind of Trump Kremlin Handler, paid off Charles McGonigal to make sure the proof never came to light.

Here are the people who rail against "conspiracy theories in which the absence of evidence is taken to be the final proof of the conspiracy" deciding that the absence of evidence for their Russiagate fantasies just proves the conspiracy is worse than we ever imagined.

1. The Real Deep State

Timothy Snyder's newsletter has become invaluable over the course of the war in Ukraine. But he has insights about American politics, too.

This week he discussed the arrest of FBI agent Charles McGonigal:

On 23 January, we learned that a former FBI special agent, Charles McGonigal, was arrested on charges involving taking money to serve foreign interests. One accusation is that in 2017 he took $225,000 from a foreign actor while in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office. Another charge is that McGonigal took money from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch, after McGonigal's 2018 retirement from the FBI. Deripaska, a hugely wealthy metals tycoon close to the Kremlin, "Putin's favorite industrialist," was a figure in a Russian influence operation that McGonigal had investigated in 2016. Deripaska has been under American sanctions since 2018. Deripaska is also the former employer, and the creditor, of Trump's 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

The reporting on this so far seems to miss the larger implications. . . . In 2016, Trump's campaign manager (Manafort) was a former employee of a Russian oligarch (Deripaska), and owed money to that same Russian oligarch. And the FBI special agent (McGonigal) who was charged with investigating the Trump campaign's Russian connections then went to work (according to the indictment) for that very same Russian oligarch (Deripaska). This is obviously very bad for Trump personally. But it is also very bad for FBI New York, for the FBI generally, and for the United States of America.

In other words, it's bad for Trump that the man who was "fixing" his problems in the FBI has gotten arrested.

Don't worry, it gets even worse, Last says, just loving this latest conspiracy theory.

Don't worry. It gets worse.

The reason I was thinking about Trump and Putin back in 2016 was a pattern that I had noticed in eastern Europe, which is my area of expertise. Between 2010 and 2013, Russia sought to control Ukraine using the same methods which were on display in 2016 in its influence operation in the United States: social media, money, and a pliable candidate for head of state. . . .

Trump and Yanukovych were similar figures: nihilistic, venal, seeking power to make or shield money. This made them vulnerably eager partners for Putin. And they had the same chief advisor: the American political consultant Paul Manafort. . . .

Anne Applebaum once put the question the right way: why didn't the FBI investigate Trump's connections to Putin much earlier? In retrospect, it seems as though the FBI investigation of Trump's campaign and its Russian connections in 2016 was not only late, but weirdly understated.

"We were so right about Russiagate that we didn't even know how right we were!!!"

Read the whole thing.

If the McGonigal allegations are proven, then we have an entirely new set of problems. Not just that one political party was willing to become the cat's paw of a foreign government, but that a key part of America's law enforcement apparatus was in on the game.

Russia bought off the FBI to exonerate Trump you guys. We were always right, but the RUSSIAN AGENTS in the FBI destroyed all the evidence!

The Bulwark is always denying the Deep Staters they play Mob Lawyers for exist, but now, Jonathan Last says, we have proof of an actual Deep State: The one being run by the Kremlin for Trump's benefit.

In other words: An actual Deep State.

As always, projection is the sincerest form of Trumpism.

A member of his political team, Team Crossfire Hurricane 4Ever, got arrested taking money from a Russian oligarch, and it's a black eye for those who said these guys were corrupt, and this just proves that it's the Trumpists who are guilty of "projection."

posted by Ace at 03:20 PM

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