'Useful idiots' are mainstreaming political poison into the bloodstream of democracy

“Useful idiots” doesn’t begin to describe the treason weasel twins, Comer and Jordan, who are enthusiastically promoting zombie lies Russia came up with in 2016 to help Trump win the White House.

They’re mainstreaming political poison directly into the bloodstream of our body politic. Purely for political profit.

Vladimir Putin always knew he couldn’t beat America militarily, so his next best option was to infiltrate our political systems and seize control of the GOP. It increasingly looks like he’s pulled it off, right down to blocking US aid to Ukraine for over a year.

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Jim Jordan and James Comey — Jeff Tiedrich calls them “the two Jimmies” — are apparently determined to continue carrying water for Vladimir Putin. Now that they know for certain that their source for phony claims that Joe Biden took a $5 million bribe was an agent of Russian oligarchs tied to Putin, both nonetheless insist they’re going to continue with their witch hunt against Biden.

In this, they’re going along with a Russian intelligence operation explicitly designed to make Donald Trump president and thus crush American democracy and the threat we represent to Russian expansionism.

Back in 2016, heading into that year’s presidential election, Russia apparently had its guy buried deeply within the FBI: his name was Charles McGonigal. He ran the Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section in Washington, getting direct reports from FBI agents who were monitoring Russian espionage activities in the US.

He’d spent the previous decade steadily climbing within the FBI’s counter-espionage operations. In 2002, McGonigal was made a field supervisor for the FBI’s Counter-Espionage Section at FBI Headquarters; in 2006 he became field supervisor for a counter-espionage squad operating out of the Washington, DC field office. In 2010 he was involved in the investigation of Chelsea Manning’s collaboration with Wikileaks.

In the year of the 2016 election, he discovered that the FBI had been monitoring contacts between the Trump campaign, Trump family members, Russian intelligence, and several Russian oligarchs, particularly Oleg Deripaska. The monitoring operation was called Operation Crossfire Hurricane and had been kicked off when a Trump campaign aide told the Australian ambassador that Russia was helping Trump to win the election.

McGonigal quickly inserted himself into the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, supervising the investigation of Deripaska, the billionaire Russian oligarch who’d paid millions to Paul Manafort in 2010 to install Viktor Yanukovych as Putin’s puppet in Ukraine. Six years later, to repay a multi-million-dollar debt to Deripaska and Putin, Manafort came back to the US and ran Trump’s presidential campaign for free.

During that 2016 election campaign, Manafort stole confidential RNC polling and supporter information for the Internet Research Agency (Putin’s troll farm) to use to target American voters on social media to help Trump win. In exchange for that information being passed along to the IRA branch of Russian intelligence, Deripaska reportedly forgave the millions that Manafort owed him.

(Manifort was later convicted of money laundering and other crimes connected to Deripaska and Russia. He was then pardoned by Trump, who was the beneficiary of Manafort’s subterfuge.)

McGonigal was also close to Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump, having known them since the 90s; he appears to be the person who leaked information about Anthony Weiner’s laptop to Giuliani, who then blurted it out on Fox “News.”

That, in turn, put the pressure on FBI Director James Comey to call a press conference just 11 days before the 2016 election to announce a new investigation into Hillary’s emails.

Exactly as Russian intelligence wanted. Polling shows that press conference handed the election to Putin’s boy Trump, even though Hillary got 3 million more votes nationwide.

After the election, McGonigal was arrested and charged with multiple crimes on behalf of Russia, including a money laundering charge involving Deripaska. It’s still unknown how long he was working for Deripaska/Putin or how much damage he did to US national security, but he sure managed to sabotage Operation Crossfire Hurricane’s investigation of Trump and the Trump campaign.

So, in 2016 an American FBI agent was apparently working with a Russian oligarch to get Trump elected, and, after Comey’s press conference, the plan worked. They popped champagne in Russia at the news that Trump had won.

Now comes another FBI asset, Alexander Smirnov, who’s also been working with Russian intelligence to disrupt American politics to the benefit of Donald Trump.

During the last year of the Trump administration, Attorney General Bill Barr brought Smirnov into the agency to repeat stories he’d told in 2017 about Joe Biden taking bribes from the Ukrainian government.

Those stories had been first intended to help Trump win the 2016 election, but never caught any traction in the media. When Barr brought him in, though, he told FBI agents that he’d been told by the president of Burisma about the bribes; the agents dutifully wrote it all down in a 1023 raw interview form.

Somehow (wink wink, nod nod), Congressman James Comer learned about the 1023 form and began waving it around, suggesting it was “proof” that Biden was corrupt and should be impeached. That led to three years of GOP hysteria, multiple congressional hearings, over 2,000 reports on Fox “News,” and near-daily coverage on rightwing hate radio.

And now Smirnov, like McGonigal before him, has been outed as a facilitator of Russian intelligence to benefit Trump. The rumor he was promoting was supposed to get Donald elected in 2016, and then was unsuccessfully reprized in 2020: it now features front-and-center in the Two Jimmie’s effort to smear Biden and his son, Hunter, in this 2024 election year.

As far as anybody can tell, Smirnov’s testimony is the only “evidence” anybody has that Joe Biden ever took a bribe. And that “evidence” was hatched in 2016 by the Russian intelligence services to help Trump win that election, according to the FBI today.

Nonetheless, Comer and Jordan say they’re going to press on with the Biden bribery investigation. As The Washington Post reported last week:

“In a written statement, Comer stood by his role in the Smirnov affair, saying ‘the FBI’s actions in this matter are very concerning.” Comer also criticized the FBI…’”

Now, Republican Congressman Ken Buck, a former prosecutor who’s retiring from the House this year, has outed Comer and Jordan for not only using Russian propaganda to smear a sitting American president, but, even worse, for having known all along that the story was a Russian intelligence op.

“Obviously, this witness — and we were warned at the time that we received the document outlining this witness’s testimony — we were warned that the credibility of this statement was not known,” Buck told CNN’s Kaitlin Collins.
He added, “[A]s a prosecutor for 25 years, Kaitlan, I never went to the public until I could prove the reliability of a statement.”

Congressman Dan Goldman, who worked for the January 6th Committee, was even more blunt, saying:

“DOJ must investigate whether and when Grassley, Comer, or Jordan knew that Smirnov was spreading Russian disinformation. But now that it’s public, Comer and Jordan clearly will be conspiring with Putin to interfere in the election if they continue with this bogus impeachment.”

Truth and facts, however, don’t seem to matter to the Two Jimmies. When a reporter asked Jordan where they were going to go with their investigation, Gym replied:

“It doesn’t change the fundamental facts.”

Boggled, the reporter said:

“It doesn’t change the facts? It does change the facts, because they’re no longer facts!”

But these two treason weasels don’t care about facts.

They don’t care about what’s best for America or the American people.

They don’t care that Putin has been running their Republican Party by remote control via Trump for almost a decade.

They don’t care that democracy, here and around the world, is hanging by a thread.

All they care about is preening for their next hit on Fox “News” and their ability to “own the libs.”

As Congressman Goldman said:

“To the extent that they continue to push forward with it, they are now doing it with a knowing asset of Russian intelligence.
“It is one thing to lead an investigation where you fail to find evidence to support unfounded conclusions. It is altogether something else when you are acting as an agent of Vladimir Putin.”

Abraham Lincoln, America’s first Republican president (and, for his time, a progressive), is rolling over in his grave.

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