Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
Former White House national security aide Fiona Hill testifies before the House Intelligence Committee, November 21, 2019.
In his opening statements to each of the public hearings that took place last week in the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment inquiry, ranking member Devin Nunes (R-California) repeatedly put forth a vituperative and unintentionally farcical conspiracy theory. It was Ukraine, not Russia, he alleged, that hacked the email of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Like any red-blooded liberal, I took some pleasure in the pointing and laughing Nunes endured during his bloviations (summed up by this cartoon in particular). However clownish his efforts appear, they are in fact a form of warfare that the Russian Federation is waging against the United States. The conspiracy theory being advanced by Nunes and his coalition of willing Republicans was hatched by the Russian intelligence agency known as the GRU; it’s information warfare designed to aid in the destabilization of U.S. political and governmental institutions. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has explained this to Nunes and comrades, but they don’t care. They prefer Russia’s concocted narrative, despite the risk it poses to their own country.
To many liberals, the preposterousness of the conspiracy theory and the absurd antics of those who advance it suggest that its sheer ridiculousness cancels out any danger it may pose. But we would be mistaken to merely point and laugh at the dangerous claims being made by the right.
Russia is currently waging war on Ukraine, a U.S. ally, with tanks and guns. The impeachment inquiry is, in part, predicated on President Donald J. Trump’s demand that, if the president of Ukraine wished to receive the military aid that Congress had approved and for which the American people had paid, he would have to do the president a very special favor. The favor was designed to cast aspersions on the president’s political opponents. It required that the leader of an allied nation go through the motions of seeking a nonexistent DNC server that the GRU story says is squirrelled away somewhere in Ukraine. Hatched in the Kremlin, the story has bloomed like toxic algae in the fever swamps of the far right, and now in the halls of Congress.
Fiona Hill, the Russia expert and former adviser to the National Security Council who on Thursday testified before the Intelligence Committee, offered a stark warning. “In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests,” she said.
Those “politically driven falsehoods” found their way into the alternate universe of U.S. right-wing social media via a persona called Guccifer 2.0, which the FBI and other analysts concluded was the GRU’s creation. (The Russian intelligence officer who operated the online persona was indicted by Robert Mueller, along with 11 of his colleagues, in the course of the special counsel’s investigation of the Trump campaign.) Among Guccifer’s biggest fans was Roger Stone, the Trump-boosting, self-styled dirty trickster who has long served the interests of the Republican Party. Stone is currently awaiting sentencing for his guilty verdict on seven felonies, including witness-tampering and lying to government investigators.
It was Guccifer with whom Stone claimed to be in contact in the summer of 2016, his conduit to WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange, who would go on to publish the hacked DNC emails on his website. (Stone, in an OK boomer moment, referred to Guccifer 2.0 as “Crucifer Two” during an August 2016 appearance on C-SPAN.)
Perhaps because he is such a ridiculous figure, the political media largely ignored Stone’s big public appearance at an event he co-hosted with InfoWars founder Alex Jones in Cleveland on the eve of the 2016 Republican National Convention. Running an hour late, Stone apologized by saying he had been held up in meetings with the Trump campaign staff—even though he had been “fired” from the campaign by Trump in 2015.
He kicked off his remarks by explaining how campaigns work. “A campaign has two requirements,” Stone told the sparse crowd at the America First for Unity rally, which also featured an appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos, the erstwhile Breitbart News personality. “First you have to qualify your candidate,” Stone said, “and then you have to disqualify the other candidate.”
Overhead there flew a small plane trailing a banner that read, “Hillary for Prison,” sporting the InfoWars URL.
Less than a year later, Stone would join Jones in the InfoWars studios to smear Fiona Hill, a then-little-known adviser on the National Security Council, as “a Soros mole.” The two would also attribute her hiring to H.R. McMaster, Trump’s second national security adviser who is reviled on the far right. In fact, Hill was hired by the right’s beloved operator Michael Flynn, who lasted less than a month in the position, and today awaits sentencing for lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia’s then-ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak.
From Media Matters for America:
Stone added, “Again, we here at Infowars first identified Fiona Hill, the globalist leftist Soros insider who had infiltrated McMaster’s staff.” Jones said, “We broke this word for word, in May 31, 2017, ‘Bombshell: Soros insider infiltrates Trump administration.’ Then it was picked up by NewsMax and then it was hand delivered to the president at Mar-a-Lago, we can now reveal, back in the summer of last year.” Jones described Hill as “this Soros operative lady who is the linchpin to it all,” and Stone later claimed, “We know that the president first took note of Fiona Hill because of our reporting here at InfoWars. Now he’s put two and two together ...”
Ludicrous? Yes. Dangerous? Absolutely.
We live today in a world in which, we’re constantly told, the truth no longer matters. The spinning of multiple conspiracy theories is integral to the Trump formula for holding onto power; advance enough of them, and there’ll be something for everyone who’s got a resentment against some group or person aligned with Trump’s opponents.
Fiona Hill’s testimony will do little to move those who have bought into those theories, the people in the MAGA hats or the far-far-left types who have a thing for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. But with any luck, perhaps it will move political reporters to take seriously the buffoons who carry the water for Russian intelligence operatives in service of the president of the United States.
