Russiagate Retrospective: Of Course Malcolm Nance is a Grifter

Editor's note: this article is a revised version of a lengthy Mastodon thread I originally posted on the morning December 4th, 2019; you can find additional sourcing for this piece by clicking through to the thread and scrolling to the bottom.  

Readers searching for recent examples of my regular writing are encouraged to check out my recent review of David Neiwert’s “Alt-America: the Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump” over on my image/book blog at Can't You Read.

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As those of you who've been reading my writing for a few years are no doubt aware, I was among the earliest and most vociferous skeptics of the "Russiagate" conspiracy narrative pushed in mainstream liberal media; primarily to ensure that nobody got fired for punting a highly winnable election against a reality TV show fascist billionaire whose catch phrase is, I kid you not, "you're fired."

Furthermore, I feel it’s fair to say that my ongoing analysis of the "Russiagate" saga has, in the light of history, proven to be among the most accurate available online; specifically because I never argued that Trump wasn't a crook, didn't take bribes and wasn't actively attempting to obstruct investigations into his administration - just that he wasn't a Russian asset, hadn't committed treason and that Vladimir Putin hadn't rigged (or significantly influenced) the 2016 election.

As you can likely imagine if you were online during the height of the "walls are closing in" phase of the neoliberal fever dream that is Russiagate, as a result of expressing these opinions (even on my tiny little website) I was attacked, smeared and repeatedly gaslit by a fairly broad cross section of the "Russiagate Conspiracy Complex" community online - of which one of the most prominent members was former US Naval cryptologist and frequent MSNBC guest Malcom Nance; a man who I had the misfortune of interacting with several times online between late 2016 & 2018.

 

I don't want to spend too much time going over old flame wars with a trash-fire propagandist like Nance but just to give you an idea of the measure of the man we’re talking about here; I will mention that during our argument I referred to him as a "spook" in reference to his career as a naval intelligence officer. Astoundingly, Nance responded by feigning obliviousness and pretending I had called him a racial slur; even though the context was obvious and the actual onboard nickname for Cryptologic Technicians in the Navy is "spook."

In light of this prior incident and others like it, I couldn't help but crack a few broad smiles when I read this November 24th, 2019 interview-cum-evisceration of Nance by the New Yorker's resident interrogation specialist Isaac Chotiner - deliciously titled "Malcolm Nance on the Danger of Conspiracy Theories" of all things:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/malcolm-nance-on-the-danger-of-conspiracy-theories

The interview/interrogation itself is a marvelous read in which Chotiner carefully reels the openly defensive Nance in with a few softball questions, before trapping him inside his own prior statements and exposing the NatSec grifter's constantly shifting definitions of intelligence terminology and moving the goalposts that frame his often completely absurd and wholly fabricated accusations. The whole thing is in a word, delightful and I strongly encourage interest observers to read all of it. As such I'm not going to waste a lot of energy reviewing every single thrust and parry in the interview, but I would like to zero in on a few answers Nance gives that line up with arguments I made back in early 2017; mostly because at the time of course I was called a crypto-fascist, a liar and literally a Russian agent by #TheResistance (including Nance himself as I recall) for making these same arguments - my how things change in the light of time and evidence, don't they?

First up, in response to a question about whether or not Nance is arguing that Donald Trump is an actual agent of the Russian state, our intrepid intelligence analyst flatly says "no." This is interesting to us because as Chotiner points out, Nance has repeatedly called Trump a “witting asset" of the Russian government, Russian intelligence or Russian President Vladimir Putin. At this point Nance desperately sputters into a long and complicated equivocation on the difference between a "witting asset" and an "agent" in spook-speak, but absolutely none of it is convincing whatsoever and it’s very clear he’s splitting hairs to cover his own backside in this situation.

This of course repeats a long pattern of New Cold War conspiracy liberals constantly moving the goalposts further and further away from their initial claims that launched the neoliberal fever dream we now know as "Russiagate." The accusation spread across virtually every major news network and periodical was that Trump is a Russian agent, a willing Manchurian candidate and literally working for Putin to undermine America, weaken Pig Empire hegemony and punish Hillary Clinton - and it's an accusation Nance clearly made a lot of money pushing, at least if his book sales are any indication.

It really doesn't matter what professional American spies understand "witting asset" to mean; the fact is Nance knew what calling Trump a puppet of the Russian government was going to imply to the American public and he said it anyway, repeatedly - his complicity in spreading the conspiracy theory and his efforts to profit from public interested in that conspiracy theory, could not be more apparent; and as you'll see below, this is not the only way he pushed the lie that is the "Russia" part of "Russiagate."

After a long interval where Nance hides behind his former profession as an intelligence office, babbles about “sourcing” and insists that he's not responsible for the analysis he gives on TV (only that found in his books) Nance responds to a question about whether or not Donald Trump committed treason with Russia by once again admitting "no" and providing the exact same legal justification I've been giving for three years. Namely, you can't have a legal charge of treason as defined under the US Constitution without the nation being at war because “aiding and comforting an enemy” is not a mere expression of speech; we don’t have “enemies” because we're not at war – with Russia or anyone else for that matter.

This is of course all well and good for Nance to admit now, after his #TheResistance friends gaslit numerous left wing media observers (like myself) for... reading the US Constitution, but the simple truth is that Nance is once again playing word games here to avoid accountability for his wild accusations and fear mongering. He has absolutely used the specific word treason (despite clearly knowing how the law works in this area, as the writing in his books indicates) and literally on the day the Mueller report was to be released, Malcolm said that it would reveal treason exceeding that of Benedict Arnold - you don't bring up Benedict Arnold, the most infamous traitor in American history, if you're not talking about REAL treason for f*ck’s sake.

Nance then goes on to falsely deny claiming that Wikileaks was working with Russia to rig the 2016 election, and to equivocate about his claims that homophobic blog posts by Joy Ann Reid (herself a member of the Russiagate conspiracy brigade) were a result of Russian hacking, before finally exposing himself completely as a liar when his infamous "black propaganda" tweet, designed to discredit the completely, 100% authentic Podesta emails, finally comes up. At this point Nance tries to escape this jam by once again pretending "black propaganda" is a term of art in the intelligence community that somehow random civilians are supposed to know already, and then purposely conflates the Podesta leaks with an unrelated hoax post on Twitter (about Hillary Clinton's Goldman Sach's speeches) that had nothing whatsoever to do with the again, 100% real leaked emails in the Wikileaks Podesta dump. Even though Choitner doesn’t bother to press the advantage, the metaphorical drawing of blood is unmistakable - clearly Nance was lying then and clearly despite his excuses today, he's still lying now.

In summation I think it’s fair to say that if you can read the whole interview without realizing how completely full of sh*t Nance is, I've got some swampland in Florida to sell you real cheap; the obvious level of open mendacity behind this sociopath's now full-time grift is simply staggering – nobody in America should take Malcolm Nance seriously ever again. And how did Nance himself respond to this scathing critique in the normally benign interview column of the New Yorker? By attempting to loosely connect Chotiner to Russia, through Glenn Greenwald and suspected (by Nance) Russian spy, NSA leaker and American hero Edward Snowden of course:

https://twitter.com/MalcolmNance/status/1199027909073260546

While I certainly won't deny I found a certain joyful vindication in reading Chotiner's evisceration, the simple truth is that this article itself is far too little and far too late.  Over the past three years, millions of people have read Nance's outrageous claims and due to the author’s former work in U.S. Intelligence and National Security, believed them. By contrast, perhaps at best a few thousand people will read this article exposing Malcolm Nance as a dishonest grifter and an unrepentant fabricator; and even fewer of those readers will actually remember or care.

This too will be a familiar pattern to those who've spent any amount of time tracking the ongoing unraveling of Russiagate - from more than fifty mainstream media stories that eventually turned out to be lies, to a Mueller investigation that found precisely none of the treason the mad Bircher fools who sold this lie promised, to even Rachel Maddow's recent admission in court that using the words "really literally is paid Russian propaganda" to attack a conservative think tank was just hyperbole – this is all pretty much par for the course in the American public discourse. In the end it’s hard to ignore the fact that Russiagate has long since accomplished all of the goals its architects hatched it to achieve - defense spending is up as the West adopts a perpetual war footing with Russia, mainstream media has garnered billions of dollars worth of consumer interest tracking this daft spy novel and absolutely nobody who was ultimately responsible for punting a winnable election to a moron fascist who literally hung out with a teen sex slaver for years, lost their job or was held accountable at all. 

Truly then it can be said that at least in this instance "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” - the same as it ever was.

- nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

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