Weekly Mind Dump: Time to Call the GOP What It Is: An American Fifth Column
Are congressional Republicans witting agents of the Kremlin or incredibly disingenuous Useful Idiots?
Week of 2/18-2/24, 2024:
I once interviewed a defector from a communist country to ascertain whether he was telling the truth about himself. “Another agency” had deemed him bona fide after questioning and polygraphing him and was preparing to relocate him to the United States. I, however, had doubts based on what I’d read in the debriefs and asked to have a crack at him, speaking with him in his native tongue, no interpreter. Within ten minutes, I concluded the fellow was lying. My detailed write-up led officials in the “other agency” to change their minds, leaving them with egg on their collective faces. They promptly dumped the “defector,” concluding he was a “dangle” — intelese for a phony turncoat sent to probe and test us.
This case from my past came to mind after reading about the arrest last week of an FBI informant caught lying about alleged corruption involving President Biden and his son. The man, Alexander Smirnov, confessed to working on behalf of Russian intelligence to spread lies aimed at undercutting Joe Biden’s re-election prospects. Had the FBI, who had used Smirnov as a confidential informant for ten years, been duped all that time? In any case, next to nothing is publicly known about him other than that he is a dual U.S.-Israeli national with a Russian name and $6 million in the bank he had been concealing from his handlers. The court filing against Smirnov states that “the misinformation he is spreading is not confined to 2020. He is actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November.”
Previously, Rudy Giuliani became the willing dupe of another Russian agent, Andriy Derkach, who fed “America’s Mayor” a steady stream of fabrications about the Bidens being on the take from a Ukrainian energy company. The Treasury Department called Derkach “an active Russian agent for over a decade” and declared he was one of a group of “Russia-linked election interference actors.” Ukrainian prosecutors have charged Derkach and two accomplices with treason, asserting they had colluded with Russian intelligence to support Giuliani’s disinformation ploy. When Giuliani was pushing the Hunter Biden’s-laptop-has-dirt-on-the-Bidens story, 51 former U.S. intelligence officers released an open letter stating it “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation...our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”
And then there are the estimated 140 contacts Donald Trump and his associates had with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, or their intermediaries, during the 2016 campaign and presidential transition. Jared Kushner, moreover, was caught attempting to set up a communications backchannel with the Russian embassy. Among other benefits to Russia of these connections was deletion from the GOP campaign platform of U.S. support for Ukraine.
But what really bothers me about these cases is the way Republican politicians and the right-wing media unabashedly have run with the disinformation spoon-fed to them despite earlier repeated warnings by the intelligence community about Russian disinformation operations in the U.S.
Jim Jordan, Charles Grassley, James Comer and fellow travelers — instead of being embarrassed by their now totally discredited smear campaign against the president, have doubled down, frantically switching gears, but, by doing so, only making themselves look even more stupid than most of us assumed. Incidentally, they based their vacuous impeachment effort on a single piece of raw, unverified FBI debrief reporting — FD-1023 in Bureau parlance.
The same goes for the right-wing propaganda machine: Hannity, Watters, the whole array of Fox & Friends puppetry bullhorning for months on end Smirnov’s fabrications to the unthinking, unblinking MAGA-verse. And then there was Useful Idiot Supreme Tucker Carlson debasing himself even more with his breathless hosannas to Soviet…er…Russian supermarkets and belly-laugh-inducing “interview” with Putin. He makes Fredo Corleone look like a pillar of moral granite by comparison.
Readers of this newsletter well know my view that Trump has been a willing asset of Russian intelligence going back to the 1980s (see, e.g., “Russia, If You’re Listening…”) Moreover, I’m hardly alone. Yale professor Timothy Snyder and Mother Jones’s David Corn, for example, lay out the evidence in considerable detail.
I also like to refer to today’s GOP politicians as “Vichy Republicans” for their craven collaboration with evil (See: “What to Do With Trump and His Vichy GOP”). In my two-and-a-half decades diplomatic career, in which I served mainly in countries with autocratic regimes or wracked by guerrilla warfare, I thought I’d seen it all: murderous dictators, assassinations, coups d’état, Machiavellian plots, subversive propaganda, bribes, physical threats, kangaroo courts, political imprisonments, etc. But there’s one political phenomenon I never encountered first-hand, and only know from history textbooks, and that is a “Fifth Column” — “any group of people who undermine a larger group or nation from within, usually in favor of an enemy group or another nation.” Notorious historical examples include Hitler sympathizers Vidkun Quisling in Norway, Oswald Mosley in Britain, Austrian Nazis and Stalin’s communist agents in Eastern European countries after World War II. In each of these cases, local agitators used subterfuge and violence to overturn governments and align with a foreign dictator.
For the first time, I’m now encountering a Fifth Column movement: the Republican Party.
A sampling of the evidence: Trump consistently doing Putin’s bidding. All of those unexplained contacts between Russian spies and Trump campaign figures. The GOP’s bone-chilling “Project 2025,” a detailed plan to overthrow democracy and replace it with a fascist system. Trump toadies like Elise Stefanik and J.D. Vance unreservedly announcing their intention not to certify a Biden electoral victory. One-hundred-forty-seven members of Congress voting not to certify Biden’s win in 2020; in fact, there is clear evidence that a sizeable contingent of them colluded in Trump’s January 6 putsch. House Republicans obsequiously caving to Trump’s highly suspicious command to deny aid to Ukraine. And last week, Jordan/Comer/Grassley revealed to have actively spread Russian disinformation. Just when were they aware the claims were false and why did they press on in promoting them? Which among these acts would Putin find objectionable? Answer: zero.
Taken together, today’s Republicans are acting as a Fifth Column for the Kremlin, a movement whose clear aim is to destroy democracy. The only question left to be answered is: are they witting agents or incredibly disingenuous Useful Idiots?
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.
Today's New York Times has a story entitled, "Senate Aide Investigated Over Unofficial Actions in Ukraine." It reports on the perhaps over-enthusiastic efforts of a Helsinki Commission member, Ryan Parker, to support Ukraine's war effort by frequent trips to the frontline in uniform, and the provision of $30,000 in sniper equipment to Ukraine. There was even an accusation that he was “wittingly or unwittingly being targeted and exploited by a foreign intelligence service,” citing unspecified “counterintelligence issues” that should be referred to the F.B.I. A Republican House member has called for him to be fired. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/world/europe/ukraine-senate-aide-investigation.html?smid=fb-share&fbclid=IwAR2QMxgq04RXnF8E35FMTnlfcubszXlj38K0gdAoCTU56XJX5uMYAp4NPtk
And yet, there is apparently no counterintelligence investigation of MAGA politicians in the House who, for years, have been undermining U.S. support for Ukraine and the Administration by promoting disinformation that we know has been provided by Russian intelligence services. Maybe a few of them are simple dupes, but they can't all be that stupid.
Double standard?