J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
State Department Inspector General Steve Linick leaves the Capitol, October 2, 2019.
If you still believe the far right is a fringe movement, look again. It’s not on the outer edge; it’s now at the heart of power.
When Steve Linick, inspector general of the Department of State, sent word to Capitol Hill that he had an “urgent” matter to discuss with members of the House committees currently investigating President Donald Trump’s engagement of foreign leaders in maiming his domestic political rivals, buzz was that Linick would bring evidence of the intimidation of career employees of the department by Trump’s political appointees. Instead, Linick brought a folder of documents suggesting attempts to advance, within the State Department, conspiracy theories from the right-wing fever swamp.
With Congress currently in recess, Linick met with staff members of eight committees and one lawmaker, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who seemed a bit bewildered when he emerged from the meeting.
“We are now in possession of this packet of propaganda and disinformation,” Raskin told reporters. “The real question is: Where did it come from and how did it end up in our lap?”
Within hours, Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, claimed credit for some of the contents, which appear to be some work product of the Ukraine project he’s been working on for Trump, trying to prove that it was Ukraine and not Russia that interfered in the 2016 presidential election, and that the former did so on behalf of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. And of course, the packet includes documents referring to the conspiracy theory at the root of the “favor” Trump asked of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the July call described in a whistleblower’s complaint—that Zelensky “investigate” the role played by Joe Biden during his tenure as vice president in the firing of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in 2016. (Trump alleges, with no proof, that Shokin’s firing was an attempt to protect Biden’s son, Hunter, who was on the board of Ukrainian gas company that Trump partisans like to pretend was the subject of robust investigation by Shokin, who had actually left that investigation to go dormant.)
As word of the packet’s contents dribbled out within the Beltway, there was a fair amount of bemused head-scratching. Expectations for the Linick file were for, perhaps, some formal intelligence report; instead the committees received the intellectual equivalent of a schoolchild’s rantings, simple sentences scrawled in crayon.
The provenance of the envelope of propaganda that wound up on the desk of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appears to be none other than 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In a statement, Representatives Adam Schiff, Elijah Cummings and Eliot Engel—chairmen, respectively, of the House Committees on Intelligence, Government Oversight and Reform, and Foreign Affairs—described it this way:
The documents provided by the Inspector General included a package of disinformation, debunked conspiracy theories, and baseless allegations in an envelope marked ‘White House’ and containing folders labeled ‘Trump Hotel.’ These documents also reinforce concern that the President and his allies sought to use the machinery of the State Department to further the President’s personal political interests.
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Reuters reporters Jonathan Landay and Mark Hosenball saw photographs of the documents, writing that these “included what appeared to be a cover sheet addressed to Pompeo on White House stationery.”
There were also curious items that ultimately blamed George Soros, the billionaire donor to liberal causes and civil society organizations, for the administration’s lack of trust in Masha Yovanovich, who was the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine at the time these documents were created. Soros, of course, is a favorite bogeyman of the right, and a frequent subject of mockery with a distinctly anti-Semitic tinge.
Enclosed among the treasures was a draft of an article by fever-swamp “journalist” John Solomon, which the author sent by email to the legal team of Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, also personal lawyers of the president’s. (Erin Banco of The Daily Beast obtained an image of the printed-out email.) At the time, Solomon was writing for The Hill—where he serves as executive vice president—bringing the imaginings found on internet message boards to the website of a once reputable publication, apparently coordinating with the president’s fixers before sending his final draft up to his editor. For good measure, Solomon’s “reporting” was also fed to Trump via appearances on one of the president’s favorite programs: “Hannity.”
Solomon’s draft told a tale of how the ambassador purportedly kept a “do not prosecute” list, which included an anti-corruption group that reportedly receives funding from Soros. Reuters reported that Yovanovich was described in another document “whose source was not disclosed” as having been installed in her position by Soros. “Until she is removed,” the document reads,“Soros has as much, or more, power over Yovanovitch as the President and the Secretary of State.”
In May, Ambassador Yovanovich was abruptly recalled to Washington. Last week, the State Department tried to prevent her and other department employees from testifying before Congress about the whole affair. (She has since been scheduled to appear next week before the House Intelligence Committee.)
In the memorandum of Trump’s July 24 telephone conversation with Zelensky, Trump disparages Yovanovich as “really bad,” adding that “she’s going to go through some things.” Pretty much everyone who’s worked with her describes her as the consummate professional with an ethical commitment to rooting out corruption—a commitment that might be troublesome to a U.S. president who was leaning on the Ukrainian president to concoct evidence for another conspiracy theory, one that would splash mud on the Democratic Party’s front-runner.
At Right Wing Watch, I spend my days slogging through the whole phantasmagoric range of paranoid conspiracy theories exchanged between occupants of far-right internet portals—from QAnon to “false-flag” allegations, charges of blood-drinking liberals and cheers for Trump as God’s anointed. These tales are so absurd that you’ve got to chuckle. But they’re also deadly.
As ridiculous as these theories are, it doesn’t matter that you know better than to believe them. When effectively employed by agents of the president of the United States and the president himself, the effect is disorienting to the whole of the body politic. Gaslighting is a classic tactic of authoritarian leaders.
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Followers of the cult of personality will never stray, and often express their unquestioning belief in the fearless leader quite noisily. They are easily dismissed by people who see the absurdity in the theorists’ claims.
But when those theories are coming out of the mouth of the ostensible leader of the free world, that’s destabilizing to the whole of the body politic. The breaking of norms inherent in that circumstance leaves reporters and political leaders at a loss as to how to respond.
The significance of the Linick file is not that it provides evidence of a crime—there appears to be evidence of that in other gleanings from the House impeachment inquiry. Rather, it lifts a curtain on the way in which Trump is manipulated by the likes of Giuliani and Solomon, who injected the conspiracy narrative into president’s brain and the operations of the State Department.
And that’s nothing to laugh about.
