Traitors in the House

A flower and a picture are left as a tribute to Russian politician Alexei Navalny, near to the Russian Embassy in London, Feb. 18, 2024. The U.S. government is hitting Russia with the largest tranche of financial penalties imposed on Moscow since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. They target roughly 600 people and firms from Russia to China to the United Arab Emirates. The sanctions are timed to the second anniversary of the invasion, and in response to the death of Navalny. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, File)

Less than a week after Donald Trump invited Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to America’s NATO allies, Vladimir Putin had Alexei Navalny, his strongest political adversary, murdered in a Siberian prison. 

Navalny’s death was but one among a series of tragic consequences flowing from Trump’s fealty to Putin, mirrored in turn by the GOP’s fealty to Trump. Entering the 2024 campaign season, Trump enablers have elevated Trump’s political interests over U.S. national security, leaving Ukraine and the U.S. border vulnerable to an unhinged candidate’s lust for retribution.

Trump’s embrace of Putin and antipathy toward Volodymyr Zelensky would be tedious if it weren’t so dangerous. After the Senate passed a defense package for Ukraine, House Speaker Mike Johnson — who spearheaded Trump’s 2020 election fraud — sent members home for a two-week recess rather than allow the House to debate it. 

A few days after Johnson called recess, leaving Ukraine twisting in the wind, Zelensky surrendered Ukraine’s city of Avdiivka to Russian forces, citing lack of ammunition and supplies, tragically abandoning hundreds of Ukrainian fighters in the process. Camouflaging their refusal to help Ukraine as “fiscal prudence” — despite accruing an unprecedented $8.4 trillion in debt under Trump — House Republicans delivered Putin his biggest military prize in over nine months of high-casualty fighting.

It’s time for mainstream media to take off the gloves, lose the performative neutrality and call Trump’s pro-Putin supporters what they are: traitors.

 Amplifying the KGB’s cooked intelligence 

While developing the nuclear capacity to wipe out U.S. satellites in space, Putin’s intelligence simultaneously infiltrated the GOP. Either he really is a genius, as Trump insists, or Trump and his supporters are complete morons.  The possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

Putin evidently played MAGA congressmen who have spent the past two years trying to impeach President Joe Biden for a supposed bribery scheme — a scheme manufactured and fed to them by Putin’s own intelligence.

In 2020, informer Alexander Smirnov told investigators that the owner of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, had agreed to pay $5 million in bribes to both Biden and his son, Hunter. Even though Trump Republicans were warned that Smirnov’s intelligence was neither credible nor corroborated and could not be trusted, the GOP amplified it across right wing media anyway. Rep. James Comer (R-KY) appeared on Fox News over 200 times with different iterations of the same theme: Biden was crooked (according to Smirnov) and must be impeached.  

Last week, Smirnov was indicted on charges that he lied to the FBI about the Bidens, and the FBI is still unraveling whether he was Putin’s plant. According to prosecutors, in addition to planting the bribery story, Smirnov was also actively spreading election misinformation to help Trump, after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November. 

It’s highly suspect that the Republican chairmen of the House Oversight Committee and Judiciary Committee could be so easily duped. Anyone involved with security and intelligence knows — or should know — to suspect some level of mendacity from spies and informants, given that misinformation and espionage are the main currency of foreign intelligence. Either Jordan and Comer’s eager reliance on the cooked intel is ignorant and dangerous disregard for truth (on brand for maga), or it’s something more sinister. As Tristan Snell, former New York AG observed, “Jim Jordan, Chuck Grassley, and James Comer were either duped by Smirnov and the Kremlin — or they were in on it.”

Fox News won’t let facts get in the way 

House Republicans have — wittingly or not — served as Russian intelligence assets for Putin. Either they are easy marks for the Kremlin, or they are working with the Kremlin.

It’s equally suspicious that conservative media have barely mentioned Comer and Jordan’s malfeasance, which means 40 percent of the country will continue to believe Biden was bribed.  

Even after Smirnov was indicted for giving false information to the FBI, Fox News continued to sell the same ‘Biden bribery’ story. On February 21, days after the Russian disinformation scheme was reported by mainstream media, Fox News ran the headline, “James Comer: Biden 'influence peddling scheme' was done with our world adversaries,” which, 1.) Continues the false narrative that Biden engaged in influence peddling, and 2.) Affirms the credibility of Comer, just revealed to be a clown.

Distasteful as it is to agree with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, he’s not wrong about Fox News and right wing media’s collusion to block criticisms of Trump. DeSantis said last week: “(Trump) said at some point he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote… Well, I think he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and the conservative media wouldn’t even report on it.”

What’s motivating Trump?

Trump’s obeisance to Putin has roots. U.S. intelligence assessments from both 2016 and 2020 concluded that Russia engaged in extensive social media and intelligence operations to boost Trump’s electoral chances. Given that Trump rewards loyalty above all else, his reciprocal support for Putin was foreseeable. 

He’s also motivated to hurt Zelensky. Trump, self-proclaimed master of retribution, asked Zelensky to find political “dirt” on Biden in 2019. When Trump’s blackmail attempt backfired, the fallout led to his first impeachment. Seeking revenge against Biden and Zelensky simultaneously, Trump is pushing MAGA Republicans to impeach Biden for something — anything, doesn’t matter what — to equalize Trump’s own impeachments. 

Finally, Trump’s antipathy toward NATO, to the extent he grasps what NATO is about, is foundational. Following the devastation of WWII, NATO allies formed a collective commitment to the rule of law as the best deterrent against dictators with expansionist ambitions. A man trying so hard to dismantle the rule of law would naturally resent NATO’s steadfast commitment to it.  

Containing Russia’s expansion isn’t charity

Trump enablers pretend that withdrawing from NATO, Ukraine and the world will make America safer. Nothing could be more dangerous.  

Even Putin fanboy Tucker Carlson conceded that Putin’s motives for invading Ukraine were not defensive in nature, but were driven by an innate compulsion to restore Russia to its previous glory. Putin sees the fall of the Soviet Union as a catastrophe, the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. His maniacal yearning to reconstitute the Soviets Union means NATO members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, for starters, will be in his sights after Ukraine, with Poland likely to follow. 

Warning about Putin’s “dark obsessions,”Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, recently wrote in The Financial Times: “If the Kremlin believes that no major Western power has the resources and will to fight for minor allies like the Baltic States, it may be tempted to test NATO’s Article 5 commitment to collective defense… Especially when Trump’s rhetoric creates a dangerous illusion that America would not intervene if Putin uses military force to divide NATO.”

Abandoning Ukraine now, after forcing it into a position of weakness by cutting off funding, could be the most expensive military blunder America ever makes.

Talking heads who champion Russian life haven’t lived there 

In the late 1990s, I represented a Chicago beverage manufacturer with heavy exports to Russia. During my first business trip to Moscow, I saw the same beautiful subway Tucker Carlson saw. 

But unlike Carlson, who must’ve been dropped by limo right outside the entrance, I walked several blocks to the Metro from the Radisson Slavyanskaya. On the way to Let-Them-Starve-Stalin’s subway, which is indeed tricked out with chandeliers and oil paintings, I passed hundreds of withered Russian women with watery eyes selling single-serve plastic baggies of soup and vodka. Later that week, a mid-tier adjudicator at Rospatent schooled me on why American clients typically lose in Russian courts: because, under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, they can’t grease a palm, which I took to mean hers.

That trip taught me the connection between official corruption and mass poverty. Many Russians can’t afford to heat their homes, and the standard of living for anyone below apparatchik status is desperate, yet Putin is spending an extraordinary 6% of Russia’s GDP to reduce Ukraine to a pile of rubble. If that doesn’t reveal his ambitions, we aren’t paying attention.

Putin has been pointing his nuclear weapons at the U.S. and NATO since he invaded Ukraine. Tucker Carlson, Trump and the MAGA clowns in the House are playing a dangerous game they don’t and can’t comprehend, and they are playing on Putin’s terms. 

It falls to the Fourth Estate to find the kompromat Putin has on Trump, before the entire free world ends up paying for it.