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:
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:
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
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